Ethics in Criminal Procedure

Ethics in Criminal Procedure









Ethics in Criminal Procedure
Eban A. Rolle
CRJ306: Criminal Law & Procedure (BLJ1430A)
Instructor: Martin McAuliffe
Submitted: August 04, 2014










“The United States has a system of law derived from the English system of Common Law. As the original English settlers arrived in the New World, they brought with them a well-developed system of justice. This English system of law was common to all persons and all areas in the English Empire, so it came to be referred to as the Common Law” (Davenport, 2009, p. 4). What was not “common” was a moral compass to accompany this system of law. Laws at their core are nothing but words on paper. In mathematical terms, a law could be seen as A+B=C. Thankfully we live in such an evolved society that through the work of scholars outside the arena of law, a system of ethics was developed. It was this system that helped to develop the spirit of the law in contrast to the letter of the law. There is no cut and dry definition as it pertains to ethics and its context within our system of criminal justice. There is however the ideology that without a defined system of ethics woven into our criminal justice system, the lines between law and real life become skewed, and there would be no safeguards in the criminal procedure to prevent the unequal treatment of all people by the criminal justice system.
Every definition for ethics is based on a combination of variables. The way you define ethics is a function of your own academic discipline that has shaped your individual thinking and any religious or theological influences to your personal belief system (Navran, 2010). For the sake of argument, let’s say the definition of ethics is system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by time tested examples. The very nature of ethics is based entirely on a system of thought. This system of thought focuses establishing moral judgments about what is right and wrong, or what is good and...

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