In March 1992, Israel underwent a Constitutional Revolution. In March 1992, two new Basic Laws were passed: Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation and Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. Under these new Basic Laws, several human rights — among them Dignity, Liberty, Mobility, Privacy, Property — acquired a constitutional force above the regular statutes. Most of these rights were already protected, prior to the constitutionalization. While a few were protected by the legislator, most were protected by the case law of the Supreme Court, developed by some of our greatest judges since the establishment of the State. The main difference made by the Basic Laws is the strengthening of the normative value of these rights. A regular Knesset (Parliamentary) statute can no longer infringe upon these rights, unless it fulfils the requirements of the Basic Laws (the ‘limitation clause’) namely, it befits the values of the State of Israel, it was passed for a worthy purpose and the harm caused to the constitutional Human Right is proportional to the purpose. Thus, we became a constitutional democracy.

The privilege against self-incrimination has always attracted controversy. Legal historians continue to disagree over its origins, and its justification has been keenly debated ever since Bentham's famous attack on it as a misguided concession to the guilty. This debate has recently entered a new and critical phase as the result of diametrically opposed developments by, on the one hand, the courts and legislature in England and, on the other, by the institutions of the European Convention of Human Rights. These developments can be summarised by saying that whereas the trend in England has been towards attrition and formal restriction of the privilege, the European Court of Human Rights has been reconstituting the privilege as an implicit element of the right to a fair trial under article 6.1 of the European Convention. The European decisions have the potential for significant expansion of the privilege, and they call into question the validity of several of the English developments.

In any rule-of-law system the law of criminal procedure is bound to weigh the intended investigation of the truth against the interest of the person charged with a criminal offence in protecting his privacy. The German law of criminal procedure is a typical example of the permanent struggle with these conflicting demands. While the majority of the courts are making an effort to reinforce the protection provided to the accused, the latest pieces of legislation reveal a tendency of allowing increasingly far-reaching invasion of privacy. I will try to map out the most important aspects of this development.

In doing so I will distinguish between state-enforced, involuntary self-incrimination and the right to privacy. These two problems overlap because enforced self-incrimination will often entail invasion of privacy and, conversely, because an invasion of privacy by the state will often result in involuntary self-incrimination. But although these problems are intertwined I will differentiate between them and I accept that there will be some overlapping. After all, there may be invasions of privacy without self-incrimination and there may be cases of self-incrimination which are not caused by an invasion of privacy.

Why should fairness be a dominant interest of criminal proceedings? Such questions are shocking, and asking them arouses perplexity. Fairness is quite an obvious value, unquestioned in law, criminal proceedings, in human rights and in everyday life.

It is certainly not the purpose of this paper to cast any doubt upon the basic assumption that trials must be fair. However, there is a certain attractiveness in looking for an answer to a question when the answer appears to be obvious. There is also a chance that an analysis of the background of a norm will strengthen that norm and the motivation to respect it. Such a study may even add colour and contour to the norm and assist in its interpretation.

This paper examines the use of juries in criminal cases in Canada and the United States. It is part of a larger study of the administration of criminal justice in Niagara County, Ontario and Niagara County, New York. The basic question examined is why persons accused of serious crimes in the United States usually select a jury, whereas persons in similar circumstances in Canada normally select trial by a judge alone. An investigation of this question will enable us to see some significant differences between the administration of criminal justice in the United States and Canada. It will also show how changes in specific procedural rules may affect other practices. There is a complex interplay between procedural rules. The paper concludes by showing that the widespread use of juries in the United States is consistent with the more populist grass-roots approach in American society which tends to distrust government, compared with the traditional respect for authority, including the authority of judges, in Canada.

It is becoming increasingly apparent to criminal justice scholars that single theory models of criminal procedure — whether termed inquisitorial or adversarial — are being stretched beyond their capacity by the phenomena they are designed to control. Virtually everywhere, formal systems of charge and adjudication cannot possibly be enforced in accordance with the premises underlying them. There are simply too many offenses, too many offenders and too few resources to deal with them all. One result has been a steady movement towards a convergence of legal systems — towards borrowing from others those institutions and practices that offer some hope of relief.

In this transnational effort to cope with system overload, two issues have emerged as more than ordinarily significant: The first is the desirability of abandoning the principle of obligatory prosecution, so common in Continental Europe, and turning instead to the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The second is the question whether the ban on guilty pleas and plea bargains should be lifted, as in adversarial systems.

The standard form of disposition for most English and American criminal cases is the guilty plea, by means of a plea bargain. Jury trials are the rare exception rather than the rule. Although plea bargaining is the subject of a huge scholarly literature analyzing its nature and functioning, there is a much smaller literature on its origins and development. Most of the literature is highly critical, and much of it rests upon a belief that bureaucratic justice has come to replace the vigorous adversarial jury trial. Some critics lament “our vanishing jury”. Others decry the rise of “technocratic justice”. And still others warn that we are witnessing the “twilight of the adversary process”, or the decline of the adversary system. Even those who defend plea bargaining, such as justices on the United States Supreme Court, tend to regard it as a “necessary evil” required as an expedient to cope with the rising tide of caseloads rather than an ideal process.

Despite important differences of emphasis among these and still other commentators, most share an important commonalty; they adopt a form of functional analysis that understands plea bargaining as an adaptation to caseload pressures. Hence the power of the metaphor “the twilight” of the adversary process. This assessment seems plausible in light of pervasive plea bargaining and the crush of caseloads in American and English courts.

According to Article 13 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal in the determination of any criminal charge against him. The essence of both provisions could be rephrased by saying that criminal sanctions may only be imposed on a person by an independent and impartial tribunal and only if that person has been able to defend himself against a charge during a hearing that satisfies all requirements of a fair trial.

Realities, of course, are rather different. In almost all national systems of justice there is an increasing tendency to develop procedures that allow for imposing sanctions without the necessity of a criminal trial. Their main purpose is usually to relieve the system of a burden of cases with which it cannot really cope. Basically, there are two strategies to reduce the workload of courts and public prosecutors. The first is to invite the suspect to waive his right to trial in exchange for certain favours. This usually occurs in the form of an agreement between the public prosecutor and the suspect, while quite often the cooperation of the court that would have tried the case is also required. The second solution is to grant sanctioning powers to administrative bodies and to allow individual persons an appeal against their decisions to an independent and impartial tribunal.

Anyone who has studied the case law of Israel in the 1990s and the recent Bill on the issue of plea-bargaining, will have found it difficult not to have detected signs of the following phenomenon, that has started to take root: the growing readiness to permit the prosecution to dictate to the court the exact sentence. Does this not deviate from the accepted and appropriate division of roles between the court and the prosecution? It would also appear, that at present, there are not many who support the idea that the victim of the crime should be informed of the pleabargain that is being negotiated and that his reaction to it should be heard before the court decides whether or not to adopt it. Is this the appropriate level of consideration that should be paid to the victim, according to Israeli law, particularly in our age of emphasizing the constitutional nature of human rights?

In this paper I shall try to do two things: first, for those who do not have a detailed knowledge of criminal procedure in England, I shall give a bird's-eye view of what the victim's legal position is today. Secondly, I shall examine the difficulties, theoretical and practical, which make it hard to give the victim the deal which many of those who claim to speak for victims believe they ought to have.

In the last twenty years the victim, for long the “forgotten man” in the criminal justice system, has been rediscovered. Politicians of all parties have learnt that victims, and those who identify with them, have votes, and therefore need to be placated. Up to now, however, this has mainly been done by words rather than deeds.

An example is the document rather grandly entitled “The Victim's Charter”, which the Government issued in 1990 (with a revised version in 1996). Contrary to what the title “Charter” might lead one to suppose, this document confers no rights or privileges, but merely lists the ways in which the various parts of the machinery of criminal justice ‘ought’ to be sensitive to the position of the victim.

In general, the Dutch codification of Criminal law is constructed on the basic divisions that can be found in most Civil Law jurisdictions. The substantive law and the procedure are regulated in two separate Codes: the Penal Code (Wetboek van Strafrecht) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (Wetboek van Strafvordering). The present Penal Code came into force in 1886; the present Code of Criminal Procedure in 1926. Both Codes have been reformed often, but their basic features have been preserved.

The Code of Criminal Procedure regulates the due course of the procedure as a chronological sequence of investigations and decisions. A trial before a District Court (arrondissementsrechtbank), which sits as a chamber of three judges (meervoudige kamer), serves as a model for the manner in which trials must proceed. Most of its provisions are also applicable to trials before other Courts, such as those before the Court of Limited Jurisdiction (kantongerecht); the District Court with a single judge sitting alone in simple cases; the District Court, which handles appeals from the Court of Limited Jurisdiction; and the Court of Appeal, which handles appeals from the District Court.

In the last two decades the victim of crimes has been moved from the periphery to the centre of interest of penal law and criminal policy.

In the domain of substantive penal law the victimological approach created a trend toward the restriction of the field of application of certain penal provisions, especially in cases where the victim could have protected himself or herself more effectively, e.g., in fraud cases.

In the area of criminal procedure the trend has been toward an increased protection of the victim. This trend was extended gradually to the policies of crime prevention and influenced even the policies of enforcement of penal decisions and treatment of offenders. In this paper, however, I am going to address myself mainly to the problems of the protection of and assistance to the victim in the penal process, which raise a special concern, since they seem sometimes to be in conflict with other purposes of the penal law in general and the criminal process in particular.

Over the past two decades considerable interest has developed in the subject of the victims of crime. This interest reached a peak in the United States in 1982 with the establishment and report of the President's Task Force on Victims of Crime, which made numerous recommendations for legislative, executive, and other institutional action on both the Federal and State levels, including an amendment to the United States Constitution. The momentum, however, continued. Subsequent developments have included the establishment of an Office for Victims of Crime in the Office of Justice Programs, a flurry of legislative activity across the nation, and the declaration of National Victims' Rights Weeks with the participation of the U.S. President. The interests of victims have been taken up not only by special organizations established for the purpose, such as the National Organization of Victims' Assistance (NOVA), the Victims' Assistance Legal Organization in Virginia, and the National Victim Center (founded in honor of Sunny von Bulow) — as well as more narrowly focussed groups such as MADD (Mothers against Drunk Driving), but also by such mainstream professional bodies as the American Bar Association, the National Association of Attorneys General, the National Conference of the Judiciary, the American Psychological Association, and the National Institute for Mental Health.

When comparing the structure of the criminal procedure in the civil and the common law systems, one is soon confronted with the wide-spread belief of deep differences between the “inquisitorial” tradition on the one hand, and the “adversary” on the other. Consequently, one would expect differences between the Israeli criminal procedure, as mainly based on common law tradition, and the German procedure, as an example of a continental civil law system. If one takes a closer look, however, it appears that those assumptions of deep differences, at least in view of the practical result, are to a great extent mistaken because of foregone prejudices.

In recent years reform of the Law of Evidence has been the subject of renewed interest in many common law countries. Since the adoption of the Federal Rules, debate about wholesale reform has been relatively muted in the United States. But this is exceptional. Major reports have been produced in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Scotland, and England. With the exception of Canada, most of these have led, or are likely to lead, to significant legislative changes. This period of reformist activity has coincided with a greatly increased interest in theoretical aspects of evidence and proof, sometimes referred to as “The New Evidence Scholarship”. The historical origins of these two movements are rather different, but their ways of talking and thinking about the subject are, of course, intimately connected.

You may know the standard illustration of chutzpa — the man who kills both his parents and then begs the sentencing court to have mercy on an orphan. In this article, I discuss a case of chutzpa that is nearly as outlandish — the criminal defendant who, having rendered his victim unavailable to testify, contends that evidence of the victim's statement should not be admitted against him because to do so would violate his right to confront her. I contend that in a case like this the defendant should be deemed to have forfeited the confrontation right. On the same grounds, if the jurisdiction applies a rule against hearsay, he should be deemed to have forfeited the right to invoke it against evidence of the statement.

The “DNA Wars” we are told are over. Two of the key, and at times most effective, participants in the battle, the FBI's Bruce Budowle and the leading early scientific skeptic, Eric Landers, have declared their own private truce and suggested that all are included. The controversial report of the first National Research Council Committee on DNA Evidence has in crucial respects been replaced by a second National Research Council Committee Report on DNA Evidence that has debuted to far better reviews than its predecessor and is likely to erase the earlier report's influence as courts grapple with DNA evidence. Yet all is not quite as peaceful as it appears; DNA2, despite its virtues does not adequately resolve all questions about the significance of DNA evidence, and some veterans of the DNA wars are not yet content to lay down their arms. We can better understand why the Landers-Budowle truce and DNA2 may not resolve all conflict if we first understand why disputes over the population genetics and statistical issues raised by the forensic use of DNA identification evidence became so heated that people came to speak of the “DNA Wars”.

Consider the following statements, which describe the Anglo-American laws of evidence: