A Historical Approach to Criminal Law in the United States The Sources of Criminal Law and the Model Penal Code The Amer

A Historical Approach to Criminal Law in the United States

The Sources of Criminal Law and the Model Penal Code

The American criminal justice system has many authoritative legal foundations from which it draws to create the nation's mode of administering crime and punishment. Statutory law is, at its most fundamental nature, the basis of contemporary criminal legislation, with state legislatures and the federal Congress both making and amending criminal codes. Of particular historical interest is the complete legislative control that represents a radical departure from the beginnings of the American legal system which was very much influenced by English common law traditions. At present all fifty states have extensive penal codes which in a systematic fashion set out criminal offenses and specify appropriate punishments and federal criminal law is circumscribed by constitutional limitations on congressional power. As with any such statutory framework, these are further refined by judicial interpretation and administrative regulation to create a framework that is always changing but with legal permanence.

One of the most influential legal reform documents of American criminal jurisprudence is the Model Penal Code (MPC). The American Law Institute devoted extensive scholarly effort to developing this ambitious project: to bring rationality and consistency to the frequently disjunctive state criminal codes. Although not legally binding, the MPC's detailed treatment of their criminal liability, defenses and sentencing have been widely incorporated in the substantive criminal statutes of most states as a way of updating those statutes. At least since its publication in 1962, the Code's stress on clear statutory language, proportional punishments and systematic organization has shaped revisions to state criminal codes. The crime seems to remain relevant, indicating the legal world's desire to craft equitable and productive criminal laws that reconcile publics security with rights of the people. Continually, since then, the MPC has remained as a reference point for courts and legislatures in solving emerging legal problems in a complex society.

The Adversarial System and Key Legal Roles

Adversarial system stands as a hallmark of American criminal procedure: an adversarial apparatus intended to reveal the truth through procedural contests of evidence testing. As agents of state or federal governments, prosecutors enjoy relatively great discretion over who to charge and at what level of crime. But their ethical duties are at least larger than conviction rates, including a responsibility to do justice which means making available to defense counsel exculpatory evidence. On the one hand, this prosecutorial discretion remains subject to ethically constrained judicial oversight, but the concern that it might be abused still forms a focus of legal and political debate.

Defense attorneys perform the crucial role as the counterpoise to prosecutorial power to protect a citizen's constitutional rights all through a criminal proceeding. In Gideon v. You had Wainwright decision constitutionalize the right to counsel for indigent defendants and therefore fundamentally alter the American justice system. These decision points of modern defense practice are complex strategic decisions that combine challenges to the evidence, examinations of witnesses and negotiations of plea while fighting a virtually unlimited reservoir of prosecutorial resources. Proceedings remain fundamentally fair, however, because while judges continue to wield discretion in evidentiary rulings and sentencing, they do so always as impartial arbiters, subject to a rigid amount of putative checks. Its competing interests, however, form the core of the adversarial process, often at the expense of truth seeking.

Structure of State and Federal Court Systems

The American system of justice has a dual court system which carefully divides jurisdiction between state and federal authorities. For the most part, state court systems are built as a three tiered system composed of trial courts (courts of general jurisdiction which hear serious criminal cases) supported by limited jurisdiction courts (which handle minor offenses and preliminary proceedings). Many states have intermediate appellate courts that handle the first level of review which is legal rather than factual; states supreme courts review important legal questions on discretionary basis and secure nationwide uniformity in the construction of state law.

Similarly, the federal judiciary operates within constitutionally defined jurisdictional limits, but in hierarchy. As federal trial courts, district courts are where criminal cases are tried before juries or judges and whose decisions may be reviewed by the courts of appeal organized geographically. The U.S. Supreme Court is the ultimate repository of federal law; it assumes federal jurisdiction through certiorari jurisdiction and grants certiorari in cases which present a question of filing constitutional import or an intra circuit split. Both the specialized case handling and multiple layers of review that this elaborate judicial architecture provides come at a cost of complexity in both jurisdiction and procedural rules that legal practitioners must be alert in navigating through.

Constitutional Limitations on Criminal Law

Our U.S. Constitution in both its structural provisions and specific individual protections also establishes fundamental constraints on criminal law. As it relates to criminal law, the separation of powers doctrine expends criminal law authority to the legislative branch to define criminal behavior, to the executive branch to enforce this behavior and to the judicial branch to interpret this behavior. This breaks down power over citizens liberty in this way, as it allows for no one government actor to abuse power unchecked. Federalism then breaks this authority down further among national and state governments, leaving states with wide general police power and the federal government with limited (to enumerated areas) jurisdiction over specific crimes such as crimes in interstate commerce and protecting the rights guaranteed to us by the constitution.

Additional substantive limitations are imposed by the Bill of Rights, beyond those imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment such as the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment and the Fourth Amendment's restrictions on searches and seizures. Fair procedures and prohibition of arbitrary government action come from due process requirements embedded in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The constitutional safeguards have given rise to far reaching jurisprudence which has so far delineated their scope and application in an evolving balance between societal safety interests and individual liberties. There is no way to enumerate all of these constitutional limits and who would? It is the Supreme Court's business and prerogative as final interpreter of these constitutional limits to keep equilibrium.

Fundamental Legal Doctrines in Criminal Law

As essential safeguards against arbitrary or oppressive criminal laws the core legal doctrines devote themselves to the legal system's ideal of fairness and predictability and they are also designed to ensure that there is reasonable expectations of the population. The principle of legality is the basic language of this principle by means of Latin maxim 'nullum crimen sine lege.' This is one of such fundamental concepts that prevent retroactive criminalization and the fact that the citizens have a fair notice regarding prohibited behavior. This notice requirement is reinforced via the rule of lenity which requires ambiguous criminal statutes to be construed in favor of…

These principles are given constitutional reinforcement by the void-for-vagueness doctrine — laws offering no guidance to people as to what conduct is prohibited. Aside from due process requirements of finality, stigma, pertinent notice and such, this protection prevents laws that are literally as vague as a statute that 'makes certain conduct criminal and provides no standard to guide those who apply it.' For example, the overbreadth doctrine also prohibits laws aimed at preventing protected activity (such as free speech) that also preclude regulable activity. Taken together, these interrelated doctrines collectively guarantee that criminal laws contain basic standards of clarity, precision and constitutional compliance, but they are often based on difficult, line drawing exercises for courts.

Beyond these early rules, courts have gone about supplementing them with further protections, aimed on that same path, at keeping criminal laws just and fair. The proportionality doctrine would mean that punishments are not so excessive as to shock society's conscience and punishments fit the crime. A bedrock principle is the presumption of innocence, a principle delegating the entire burden of proof to the prosecution which must prove a defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of his or her peers. Also, courts apply the doctrine of fundamental fairness which blocks government from exceeding its own limit, even when the legal formalities have been met.

References

American Law Institute. (1962). Model Penal Code.

Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963).

Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963).

Johnson v. United States, 576 U.S. 591 (2015).

United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460 (2010).