Thursday, October 26, 2006

Martinek's class: online assignment

Students will be able to explain a brief history and role of political parties in America.

Go to:

www.crf-usa.org

Click on "Election Central 2006"

Click on "Online Lesson: Political Parties, Platforms and Planks"

Read and complete the discussion questions.

Next week we will examine the actual party platforms. You may want to google them in advance.

Victim's Rights Movement Info

Write a 5 page essay (hand written) on the Victim's Rights Movement. Include a bibliography and a title page. Due Wed., Nov. 1

Check these websites, they have lots of info.

Rethinking Victims' Rights

Should the Victims' Rights Movement Have Influence Over Criminal Law Formulation and Adjudiciation?

Basic Victim Rights

The Victims' Rights (VR) movement has achieved enormous levels of success and stability because of its ability to take advantage of the social and political forces in the late 1960s and 1970s that helped create the war on crime.

The victims' rights movement has come into increasing influence in setting criminal justice policy. What can be said about where its influence should be heeded, and where it should not? With regard to substantive criminal law in particular, should the victims' rights movement have influence over its formulation and adjudication?

Crime Victims' Rights in America - An Historical Overview

Two phenomena have shaped American criminal law for the past thirty years: the war on crime and the victims' rights movement. As incapacitation has replaced rehabilitation as the dominant ideology of punishment, reflecting a shift from an identification with defendants to an identification with victims, the war on crime has victimized offenders and victims alike. What we need instead, Dubber argues, is a system which adequately recognizes both victims and defendants as persons.

National Constitutional Amendment for Victim Rights

Crime Victim Advocates Applaud Enactment of "Ground-Breaking" Federal Victim Rights Law

Tensions persist between the growing public concern for victims' rights and traditional concerns for the rights of an accused2 - hence the perennial joke that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested. While the victims' rights movement can be criticized as having more to do with crime control than with the alienation of victims in the criminal justice system,3 proposed constitutional amendments and other legislation to protect victims and to ensure their opportunity to participate in criminal trials continue to proliferate.4 Achieving an appropriate balance between victims' rights and the rights of defendants in the criminal law process, which sometimes appear contradictory, is an ongoing challenge for courts and commentators.5

Rights of Federal Crime Victims

A fundamental error, however, is visible immediately in the name of the movement: Victims’ Rights. The victims of a crime should of course be treated fairly and with sympathy, especially by a justice system which can too often be rather impersonal and imperial. Nevertheless, victims of crimes have no particular rights which others in society don’t already have. They most certainly have no rights over whomever is accused of a crime. It is, instead, the accused who has particular rights by virtue of being put on trial by the powerful state.

Our New Home

This is where I will put all the information for Law Class