THE CONCEPT OF CRIME

Text 6

CRIMINAL LAW

Text 5

Criminal lawis the body of law that defines criminal offenses, regulates the apprehension, charging, and trial of suspected persons, and fixes punishment for convicted offenders. Criminal law defines acts as criminal. In other words, however immoral or unjust an act may be thought to be, it is not a crime unless the law says it is one. A crime is usually defined as a voluntary act or omission, together with a given state of mind. The state of mind involves purpose, awareness, recklessness, or negligence. Acts committed during fits of epilepsy or while sleepwalking are involuntary and thus do not qualify as crimes. Mental disorders are also recognized as limiting or absolving responsibility for acts otherwise regarded as criminal. The law of most countries recognizes that the use of force might be justifiable. The use of force might be justifiable in self-defense, defense of other persons, protection of property, and enforcement of the law. Criminal acts include arson, rape, treason, aggravated assault, theft, burglary, robbery, murder, and conspiracy. [Conspiracy is a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful or illegal.] Criminal law also deals with the preparation of charges and with trial procedures. The latter involves the formation of juries, the guarantee of a public trial, the right to counsel, the presentation of evidence, the establishment of guilt, and sentencing, if guilt has been established. Criminal law is concerned with post-conviction procedures, such as calling for a new trial or challenging a conviction, either in the court where the conviction was declared or in appeal to a higher court.

Crime and punishment – respectively, the intentional commission of an act usually deemed socially .harmful or dangerous and specifically defined, prohibited, and punishable under the criminal law; and the infliction of some kind of pain or loss upon a person found guilty of committing such a misdeed. Crime is whatever conduct the laws of a particular jurisdiction designate as criminal, and there are many differences from one country to another as to what ehavior is prohibited. Conduct that is lawful in one country may be criminal in another, and activity that amounts to a trivial infraction in one country may constitute a serious crime elsewhere. Changing times and social attitudes may lead to changes in the criminal law, so that ehavior that was once criminal becomes lawful. Abortion, once prohibited except in the most unusual circumstances, has become lawful in many countries, as has homosexual ehavior in private between consenting adults, which was once a serious offense. Suicide and attempted suicide, once criminal, have also been removed from the criminal law in many countries. The trend generally is to increase the scope of the criminal law rather than to reduce it. It is more common to find that laws create new criminal offenses than that they abolish old ones. New technologies give rise to new opportunities for their abuse, which in turn give rise to legal restrictions; just as the invention of the motor vehicle led to the creation of new criminal laws designed to regulate its use, so the use of computers has created the need to legislate against new abuses and frauds – or old frauds committed in new ways.