Duty to Understand: What Consequences for Victim Participation? (From Hearing the Victim: Adversarial Justice, Crime Victims and the State, P 17-45, 2010, Anthony Bottoms and Julian V. Roberts, eds. - See NCJ-231063)

• NCJ Number: 231065
• Author(s): Anthony Bottoms
• Date Published: 2010
• Length: 29 pages
• Sale Source: Willan Publishing
• Publication Format: Book Chapter
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom

Annotation

This chapter conducts an analysis of adversarial legal systems in the exploration of one of the duties in the State-led adjudicative processes, the 'duty to understand' and victim participation.

Abstract

Dispute settlement has, historically, taken many different forms, but in the legal systems of modern nation states there is normally a well-established division between adjudicative processes under civil law and adjudicative processes under criminal law. This essay assumes that there is in the case of many disputes, an ethically justifiable case for the use of State-led adjudicative processes or criminal law, and attempts to explore in detail one of the duties that rests upon adjudicative processes, namely the 'duty to understand'. Three different states of the criminal process that had been considered in this essay (trial, sentence, and early release) produce different duties of or requirements for understanding for their respective adjudicative bodies. One of the contentions of this essay is that careful attention to the question of the tribunal duties yields generously by way of victim participation than might initially been thought likely. This path was chosen in an attempt to show that the issue of victim participation in State-led adjudication processes cannot be ignored. Notes and references