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Essays about australian legal system
Essays about australian legal system
Essays about australian legal system
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PART ONE Outline the issue you have chosen. The issue I have decided to analyse is that concerning the implications of bail and remand. Bail is an option a court must confront when temporarily releasing an accused individual until their expected appearance at an appointed time, before the determination of innocence or guilt is concluded. Several guarantees that secure the person’s appearance at an appointed time include a guarantor, bond assurance paid by a surety holder, summons or court attendance notice. Remand is the refusal of bail, when the accused is to be detained prior to there trial, remanded into custody until the hearing is resumed, or the trial commenced. Remand is given if there is an increased probability of the defendant committing another offense, failing to turn up to court, intimidating someone or obstructing the course of justice. The matter addressing bail and remand is that specific criteria for courts when determining bail is that they need to meet consistently high requirements and is extremely convoluted. The past decade has revealed that the proportion of remandees in NSW has doubled to the aggregated prisoner population, while prisoners remanded into custody has tripled. PART TWO Assess the need for society to respond to this issue. Society, the community, perhaps the largest single factor regarding the decision of bail. An application for bail is essentially a theoretical evaluation between the interests of an individual and a public association. The inculpated on one side are entitled to their own liberty and presumption of innocent until proven guilty, and society on the other side expects to be protected and safe. Practically an evaluation of bail should be determined on the presumption of innocenc... ... middle of paper ... ...tive Assembly yet not yet introduced to the Legislative Council, the Bill passed both houses of Parliament. The new Bill’s intention is to allow provision for bail with connection to criminal and other proceedings and replace the Bail Act 1978. The establishment of a new recently developed, straightforward bail system that espouses a risk management approach when deciding whether the accused is granted bail. Under this new legislation authorities must bear in mind the following when considering to grant an accused bail; Does the person present a risk of endangering the communities safety, committing a serious offence, interfering with witnesses or fail to appear at an appointed time? This system will offer greater uniformity by detaching complexities predominately relating to the resumptions scheme, while taking into great consideration the safety of the community.
The conviction of guilty offenders when adhering to the guidelines of the NSW criminal trial process is not difficult based on the presumption of innocence. However, due to features of the criminal trial process, established by the adversarial system of trial, cases can often involve copious amounts of time and money, particularly evident in the case of R vs Rogerson and McNamara where factors such as time and money are demonstrated to be in excess. In addition, characteristics of the adversarial system such as plea bargaining has the power to hinder convictions due to the accused having the authority to hire experienced and expensive lawyers to argue their case, hence maintaining their innocence.
Legislation Review Committee, Parliament of New South Wales, Law enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Amendment (Arrest without warrant) Bill 2013, Law Review Digest (2013 November)
"Prison Legal News - Legal articles, cases and court decisions." Prison Legal News - Legal articles, cases and court decisions. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 May 2014. .
In this research bulletin commissioned by the Criminology Research Council, Ogloff et al. review the level of screening and the instruments used across jurisdictions to assess mental illness in justice agencies. Ogloff et al. intend to highlight the need and argue for a nationwide system of screening of all accused offenders taken into police custody, in order to identify those who require a comprehensive mental health assessment. The authors based their research on interviews and the examination of secondary documents covering criminal justice agencies in each of the states and territories. From the research findings the authors propose ten recommendations in order to improve the coverage and quality of screening for mental illnesses in the Australian criminal justice system. This article is useful for my research topic as Ogloff et al. outline a fundamental issue that requires further research, this may provide direction to my research question. The main limitation of this bulletin stems from the fact that both of the cost models under consideration rely on the assumption that the rates of mental illness in arrestee populations are constant across jurisdictions and hence their calculations would need to vary should the evidence suggest otherwise. The authors suggest that unless the courts, police, and parole authorities are given training and resources to better meet the needs of the mentally ill nothing will be achieved. The ideas within this research bulletin will form the basis of my researc...
Conclusion: Congress hoped to achieve a greater degree of accuracy in assessing flight and danger of arrestees through establishing the Bail Reform Act of 1984, which set objective guidelines for judicial officers in assessing release conditions including taking into account for the first time the probability an offender will re-offend while on pretrial release. It was also hoped that the Act would bring back the community's trust in bond setting practice. Overall, the benefits of the Bail Reform Act of 1984 do exceed any detriments, but some problems do exist. These problems include the uniformity in the application of the Bail Reform Act of 1984, as well as the interpretation of dangerousness to the community. Through future legislative and executive reform, this Act will go through multiple changes until these issues are addressed.
This is offered to provide an incentive for “good behaviour” and ultimately rehabilitation during a sentence. The granting and restriction of parole is outlined in the Crimes (Sentencing Procedure) Act 1999 (NSW), and allows those with sentences of more than three years to be released after they have served their minimum sentences. The encouragement of rehabilitation upholds the rights of the community and offender, as the offender’s rights are not undermined by through excessively restricting their freedoms and the reintroduction of the rehabilitated offender into society minimises the threat of reoffending. However, the reward of parole for some offenders has resulted in community dissatisfaction. The Age article “Adrian Bayley should not have been on parole” represents a social concern regarding the leniency of parole for violent sexual offenders. The release of the evidently non-rehabilitated offender resulted in a breach of parole and the sexual assault and murder of Jill Meagher, a 29 year old Melbournian woman. As a result of the injustice of the lenient decision and subsequent community retaliation, new parole laws were introduced in Victoria during 2014. This legislation is outlined in the Corrections Amendment (Parole) Act 2014, and the penalty for breaching parole includes up to three months jail and/or a $4200 fine. Thus, there is greater justice for the victim and especially the community through the discouragement of crime for offenders who may not be rehabilitated and are released on
Allerton, M, Butler, T, Champion, U & Kenny, D 2003, 2003 NSW Young People in Custody Health Survey: A Summary of Some Key Findings. Australian Institute of Criminology, [Online]. Available at: http://aic.gov.au/events/aic%20upcoming%20events/2003/~/media/conferences/2003-juvenile/kenny.ashx, [Accessed 14 April 2011].
The principle of bail is basic to our system of justice and its practice as old as English law itself. When the administration of criminal justice was in its infancy, arrest for serious crime meant imprisonment without preliminary hearing and long periods of time could occur between apprehension and the arrival of the King's Justices to hold court. It was therefore a matter of utmost importance to a person under arrest to be able to obtain a provisional release from custody until his case was called. This was also the desideratum of the medieval sheriff, the representative of the Crown in criminal matters,
People detained under this legislation can be forgiven for arguing that they are being punished over and over again for their crimes whilst some offenders get to serve their time and move on with their lives. Unfortunately the very principle of the legislation is to detain offenders until they are no longer a risk, when in reality the risk of re-offending could escalate because of the powerful feeling of injustice created by the legislation.
The criminal trial process is able to reflect the moral and ethical standards of society to a great extent. For the law to be effective, the criminal trial process must reflect what is accepted by society to be a breach of moral and ethical conduct and the extent to which protections are granted to the victims, the offenders and the community. For these reasons, the criminal trial process is effectively able to achieve this in the areas of the adversary system, the system of appeals, legal aid and the jury system.
In the criminal court, you are looked upon differently because of the conviction. Everyday life will be hard because you can get rejected from jobs, loans, licensing, traveling out the country, and even housing (Messina). Bail reform to let people who have a charges that is not violent and a treat to the community go into program like a house arrest is more fair than to have them sit in a jail til who knows when the trial is. Staying a jail only will only expenditure more tax people money. As the court system is increasingly taking longer and longer to discharge cases due to shrinking budgets and a rollback on available resources, the possibility of a lengthy pretrial detention only increases, inviting the risk of detainees losing jobs, missing social and familial obligations and incurring social stigma (Reese).
These studies specify the factors that judges must take into consideration in making decisions regarding pretrial release or detention. These factors are: (1) the nature and circumstances of the offense charged, including whether the offense is a crime of violence or involves a controlled substance; (2) the weight of the evidence against the defendant; (3) the history and characteristics of the defendant; and (4) the nature and seriousness of the danger to any person or the community that would be posed by the defendant’s release. The defendant’s “history and characteristics” include the defendant’s “character, physical and mental condition, family ties, employment, financial resources, length of residence in the community, community ties, past conduct, history relating ...
Criminal justice as a socially constructed theoretical perspective by Kraska (2004) emphasizes the idea of emotions influencing criminal justice. In order to understand law-breaking we have to look at the process of how we defined behaviors as illegal as well as looking at the reactions of the criminal justice system. “It is not the quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an offender” (Kraska, 2004) There are criminal justice actors that influence the definitions of criminal behavior which are police portraying the idea of the impossible mandate of curing crime, criminal statistics, and organizations working to maintain justice.
The Criminal Justice System, a framework the British government set up to manage the treatment of culprits, has three principle objectives to accomplish social request, these are, (1) implementing criminal law, (2) keeping up peace in the general public, and (3) helping casualties. This may appear to be a well-considered framework, yet like some other association, there are blemishes, and one of the real imperfections is separation, and the predisposition that originates from segregation.
This is one of the most important aspects of the criminal investigation process due to the fact that if the proper procedures aren’t followed, the validity of the case will be jeopardized. The Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002 (NSW) outlines the conditions of which a person can be arrested and detained. A key term in the arresting process is ‘suspicion on reasonable grounds’ as this describes the discretion of the police in making arrests. Although for most arrests, a warrant is needed, police can arrest someone if they genuinely believe that the person is guilty of a crime. After a person has been arrested, they will be detained in a police station and this process is also outlined in the Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002 (NSW). The Act outlines the rights a person who has been detained, such as refreshment periods, and the procedures that the police must follow, this is all done to help protect the rights of citizens. If a person is charged with a crime, they will either be put in remand or be allowed to post bail. Bail, also referred to as conditional freedom, allows a person to retain certain rights, such as spend their time awaiting trial in their home, and this is outlined in the Bail Act 1978 (NSW). Bail is a great example in the criminal trial process achieving justice, as the concept of bail seeks to