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Criminal Trial (criminal + trial)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Law and Criminology80%

Selected Abstracts

The Trial on Trial: Volume Three: Towards a Normative Theory of the Criminal Trial by A. Duff, L. Farmer, S. Marshall and V. Tadros (Eds.) and Fair Trials: The European Criminal Procedural Tradition and the European Court of Human Rights by S.J. Summers

THE HOWARD JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, Issue 1 2010
NICOLA PADFIELD
No abstract is available for this article. [source]

Morphine Concentrations in Stomach Contents of Intravenous Opioid Overdose Deaths

JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES, Issue 5 2009
F.R.C.P.A., Johan Duflou M.Med.Path. (Forens.)
Abstract:, Death caused by heroin overdose is almost always the result of intravenous injection of the drug in Australia. We briefly describe a case where a heroin overdose was initially thought to be the result of oral ingestion of the drug, primarily as a result of higher concentrations of morphine in stomach contents than in blood. During the subsequent criminal trial and investigation, however, the issue of the entero-hepatic circulation of morphine was raised as a possible reason for the presence of morphine in the stomach contents. In this study, we report on the distribution of opioids in blood, stomach contents, urine, liver, and bile in 29 deaths caused by intravenous heroin overdose. The mean total and free blood morphine concentrations were 0.60 and 0.32 mg/L, respectively, and the mean stomach contents total morphine concentration was 1.16 mg/kg. All cases had detectable morphine in the stomach contents, and 24 of 29 cases (83%) had higher concentrations of total morphine in stomach contents than in blood. The mean total morphine concentration in bile was c. 100 times that in blood, and the liver total morphine concentration averaged twice that of blood levels. We conclude that the entero-hepatic circulation of morphine and subsequent reflux of duodenal contents back into the stomach can result in the deposition of morphine in gastric contents. Consequently, the relative levels of opioids in blood and stomach contents cannot be used to determine the site of administration of the drug. [source]

Victims' Rights in Criminal Trials: Prospects for Participation

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2005
Jonathan Doak
Victims in common law jurisdictions have traditionally been unable to participate in criminal trials for a number of structural and normative reasons. They are widely perceived as ,private parties' whose role should be confined to that of witnesses, and participatory rights for such third parties are rejected as a threat to the objective and public nature of the criminal justice system. However, recent years have witnessed both a major shift in attitude in relation to the role of victims within the criminal justice system and a breakdown in the public/ private divide in criminal justice discourse. This article considers the standing of the victim within the criminal trial against the backdrop of such changes, and examines the arguments for a more radical course of reform that would allow victims to participate actively in criminal hearings as they are able to do in many European jurisdictions. [source]

The Cultural Defense as Courtroom Drama: The Enactment of Identity, Sameness, and Difference in Criminal Trial Discourse

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 1 2010
Sigurd D'hondt
This article traces cultural defense as a discursive realization-in-context, rather than as a legal-doctrinal figure, in a Belgian real-life criminal trial. In examining the defense plea for a Turkish man accused of battery, three discursive techniques are identified for making Cultural Otherness visible: de-individualization, reporting preparatory meetings with the client, and supplying ethnographic "expert" knowledge that transforms the client into the "object" of discourse. Apart from providing information about the defendant's background, cultural defenses also involve particular modes of behaviorally orienting toward the defendant in the courtroom. Otherness must be enacted in court, and to this end attorneys often actively disaffiliate themselves from their clients, marking them as impenetrable, mute, and unemancipated. In doing so, they draw extensively upon the indexical and iconic modalities of talk, which is convenient because the matrix of sameness and difference on which the cultural defense is founded escapes formal legal definition. [source]

Law and the Image of a Nation: Religious Conflict and Religious Freedom in a Brazilian Criminal Case

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 1 2001
Eric W. Kramer
This article examines a criminal trial in Brazil that touched on the imagined role of religion in public life. The case involved a Protestant minister accused of religious discrimination and of vilipending an image of Nossa Senhora Aparecida, the patron saint of Brazil. The prosecution argued and the court concurred that the minister's iconoclastic verbal and physical gestures endangered the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. Yet the defense claimed that his actions, stemming from his religious convictions, expressed this same principle of freedom. Different visions of religious free-dom are at stake in the case as well as how such freedom relates to the rights and private lives of citizens. Placed in the history of church-state relations in Brazil, the case raises the problem of interpreting concepts of religious pluralism, religious freedom, and freedom of expression in Brazilian law. [source]