Abstract
Recent proposals to reform Scottish criminal procedure are motivated by considerations of efficiency and accurate fact-finding, and there is little attempt to offer a normative account. This paper describes these proposals and contends that their emphasis on finding ‘the truth’ is misplaced on two distinct bases: (1) it equates erroneous acquittals to wrongful convictions, thus fails to uphold a fundamental tenet of criminal procedure, namely the particular importance of protecting the innocent against wrongful conviction; and (2) it fails to recognise the importance of non-instrumental process values which are at the heart of the adversarial criminal trial. The paper suggests that it is only by adhering to these process values that the state maintains – and demonstrates that it maintains – its moral authority to condemn and punish offenders.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 167-195 |
| Number of pages | 29 |
| Journal | Bergen Journal of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 12 Jan 2017 |
Keywords
- Return Directive
- entry ban
- illegal migrant
- criminal law sanctions
- crimmigration
- expulsion
Access to Document
- Final Published Version
Copyright (c) 2017 Pamela Ferguson. This is an Open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
