What is the purpose of the criminal justice system in Western nations, = America. - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15019830
This is just my opinion.
The purposes are :
1] And most important, to give the illusion that the criminal has been dealt with or punished.
This replaced the primitive family feud system of hunter-gatherers and early gardeners.
It was necessary to allow people to live on their land and garden it when the tribes grew larger. Look at the highlands on New Guinea. There in the old days, tribes had to be very small. When they grew too big they fractured over some little thing. Every tribe was at war with every neighboring tribe, even when they spoke the same language.

2] Less important, to make an effort to keep the criminal from victimizing another person.
This why the Juvenile system was added to the adult system. The idea was that children can more easily be reformed, which means they don't victimize another person.

3] I do not think the purpose should be to punish the criminal. The aim should be to protect the next victim.

4] You should notice that paying the victim back is not usually part of the punishment.

These are my thoughts that came to mind about a story I saw on another site about a 16 yo boy/man who raped a girl at a party when they were both drunk, filmed it with his phone, bragged about it at school and on social media , and posted the film of the act on social media and bragged again admitting it was "rape" in his own words. The judge refused to move the case to adult court. Then he was over-ruled and it was sent to adult court. I don't know the outcome there.

Quoting the post on the other site, I don't know the source.
The 16-year-old girl was visibly intoxicated, her speech slurred, when a drunk 16-year-old boy sexually assaulted her in a dark basement during an alcohol-fueled pajama party in New Jersey, prosecutors said.

The boy filmed himself penetrating her from behind, her torso exposed, her head hanging down, prosecutors said. He later shared the cellphone video among friends, investigators said, and sent a text that said, “When your first time having sex was rape.”

But a family court judge said it wasn’t rape. Instead, he wondered aloud if it was sexual assault, defining rape as something reserved for an attack at gunpoint by strangers.

He also said the young man came from a good family, attended an excellent school, had terrific grades and was an Eagle scout. Prosecutors, the judge said, should have explained to the girl and her family that pressing charges would destroy the boy’s life.

So he denied prosecutors’ motion to try the 16-year-old as an adult. “He is clearly a candidate for not just college but probably for a good college,” Judge James Troiano of Superior Court said last year in a two-hour decision while sitting in Monmouth County.

Now the judge has been sharply rebuked by an appeals court in a scathing 14-page ruling that warned the judge against showing bias toward privileged teenagers.

In doing so, the appeals court cleared the way for the case to be moved from family court to a grand jury, where the teenager, identified only as G.M.C. in court documents, will be treated as an adult. New Jersey law allows juveniles as young as 15 to be tried as adults when accused of serious crimes, and the grand jury will weigh whether to indict him on the sexual assault accusation.

In recent years, judges across the country have come under fire for the way they have handled sexual abuse cases. One of the most notorious was in 2016, when a judge in California sentenced a Stanford University student to six months in jail after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. After an intense public backlash, California voters recalled the judge.

Judge Troiano, who is roughly 70, was one of two family court judges whom appeals courts in New Jersey have criticized in recent weeks over relatively similar issues.

In the other case, the appellate division reversed another judge’s decision not to try a 16-year-old boy as an adult after he was accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl in 2017.

The second family court judge, Marcia Silva, sitting in Middlesex County, denied a motion to try the teenager as an adult and said that “beyond losing her virginity, the State did not claim that the victim suffered any further injuries, either physical, mental or emotional.”

The appellate judges also upbraided Judge Silva, overturning her decision and noting that the teenager could be culpable because the 12-year-old was not old enough to provide consent in the first place.

The judge in Monmouth County, Mr. Troiano, was scolded by the appellate court, according to the panel’s decision. “That the juvenile came from a good family and had good test scores we assume would not condemn the juveniles who do not come from good families and do not have good test scores from withstanding waiver application,” the panel wrote in its decision.

A spokeswoman for the administrative office of the courts said the judges had no comment on the case. She said Mr. Troiano, a veteran judge who retired several years ago, was asked to occasionally fill vacancies on the bench.

Family court cases are typically closed to the public, but the judges’ comments surfaced in June when the appeals court decisions were made public, joining a series of contentious sexual assault cases that have ignited outrage over a legal system that advocates for victims say is warped by bias and privilege.

In the first case, heard by Judge Troiano, it is unclear from court documents when and specifically where in New Jersey the incident involving the two 16-year-olds took place.

But prosecutors said it occurred during a party packed with 30 other teenagers. The case was highlighted by a New Jersey radio station, 101.5.

The victim was identified only as Mary, an alias to protect her identity.

Before the episode, prosecutors said, both teenagers walked into a darkened area of the basement and Mary stumbled as she walked.

“While on the sofa, a group of boys sprayed Febreze on Mary’s bottom and slapped it with such force that the following day she had hand marks on her buttocks,” according to court documents.

After the assault, prosecutors said, G.M.C. left the room, but some of his concerned friends checked on her. Mary was found on the floor vomiting, and she was driven home by a friend’s mother.

When Mary woke up the following morning, she was confused about her torn clothing and bruises on her body, and told her mother she feared “sexual things had happened at the party” without her consent, court documents said.

Over the next several months, she learned that G.M.C. had shared the video among friends, but, when confronted, he denied recording the encounter and said the friends were lying, according to court documents.

Eventually, Mary learned that the boy had continued to share the video, prompting her mother to contact the authorities and ultimately pursue criminal charges in 2017.

In September 2017, the Monmouth County prosecutor’s office recommended that the case be tried in adult criminal court in part because the boy’s actions were “sophisticated and predatory.”

“At the time he led Mary into the basement gym, she was visibly intoxicated and unable to walk without stumbling,” the prosecutor wrote. “For the duration of the assault, the lights in the gym remained off and the door was barred by a foosball table. Filming a cellphone video while committing the assault was a deliberate act of debasement.”

The prosecutor said that the boy lied to Mary in the following months, while simultaneously sharing the video.

“This was neither a childish misinterpretation of the situation, nor was it a misunderstanding,” the prosecutor wrote. “G.M.C.’s behavior was calculated and cruel.”

In an interview, Christopher J. Gramiccioni, the county prosecutor said, “This is conduct that should be punished in adult court.”

“We subscribe to the idea that the juvenile system is supposed to be rehabilitative,” he said. “But when you’re dealing with charges as serious as these, it’s a whole different ball of wax.”

Mitchell J. Ansell, a lawyer for the teenage boy, did not return requests for comment.

Mr. Gramiccioni said New Jersey has a progressive juvenile system: Juvenile cases are not shown to juries, juvenile records are kept from public view and sentences are typically more lenient than when a person is tried as an adult.

A recent law made it illegal to try defendants younger than 15 as adults.

On July 30, 2018, Judge Troiano denied the waiver to try the teenager as an adult, arguing that prosecutors had abused their discretion.

Judge Troiano said there was a “distinction” between “a sexual assault and a rape.”

He said “the traditional case of rape” generally involved two or more males using a gun or weapon to corner a victim into an abandoned house, shed or shack, “and just simply taking advantage of the person as well as beating the person, threatening the person.”

It was under those egregious circumstances, he said, that the state would try a juvenile in adult court.

He delved into the facts of the case, questioning “whether or not this young lady was intoxicated to the point that she didn’t understand what was going on.”

He said the boy’s actions were not sophisticated or predatory, and dismissed G.M.C.’s text messages as “just a 16-year-old kid saying stupid crap to his friends.”

“This young man comes from a good family who put him into an excellent school where he was doing extremely well,” the judge said. “His scores for college entry were very high.”

The appellate decision criticized the judge, writing that rather than focusing on whether prosecutors met the necessary standards for a waiver, “the judge decided the case for himself.”

The judge overstepped in deconstructing the circumstances of the case, making his own assessment of the boy’s culpability and considering the defendant’s prior good character, the appellate panel said.

“His consideration of these elements, however, sounded as if he had conducted a bench trial on the charges rather than neutrally reviewed the State’s application,” the panel said.

In 2004, Judge Troiano imposed a gag order to prohibit people in a courtroom from discussing the high-profile case of two Montclair High School football players accused of sexually assaulting a schoolmate. The charges were eventually dropped.
#15021155
Civilizations require a religion, in order to create a class system that makes a handful of people richer and prouder than anyone else.

This is highly unnatural, and always leads to the permanent immizeration of large parts of the population.

If these immizerated people are not locked up, they will destroy the system that forced them to lose their dignity in the pyramid scheme of self-esteem that created the oh-so-proud elite.

In other words, just like putting animals in cages, putting humans in cages is one of the final acts of desperation of a ruined social group that lives and dies by exploitation.

We learn (from religions) how important it is to control everything and everyone (exploitation), and then we are all in cages - with some in literal cages, and most in mental cages (exploited and ruined).
#15021162
QatzelOk wrote:Civilizations require a religion, in order to create a class system that makes a handful of people richer and prouder than anyone else.
This is highly unnatural, and always leads to the permanent immizeration of large parts of the population.
If these immizerated people are not locked up, they will destroy the system that forced them to lose their dignity in the pyramid scheme of self-esteem that created the oh-so-proud elite.
In other words, just like putting animals in cages, putting humans in cages is one of the final acts of desperation of a ruined social group that lives and dies by exploitation.
We learn (from religions) how important it is to control everything and everyone (exploitation), and then we are all in cages - with some in literal cages, and most in mental cages (exploited and ruined).

Well, that is not a proper use of the criminal justice system IMHO.

Also, you are saying that civilization is unnatural. This may be so but we are trapped now. The earth can't support more than a few millions of people without civilization.
America didn't do this in the free parts of the nation when I was a kid. It did it in the South before and after the ACW, but that was not the free part of America.

BTW--- I didn't mention "deterrence". Maybe I should have. For the most part most people don't need to be deterred. It might be necessary for those who need to be and can be deterred.

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