Criminal Procedure Policy Paper

Words: 1453
Pages: 6

Criminal Procedure Policy
Kristen Torres
CJA/353
June 14, 2010
Kathleen H. Mooneyhan

“Criminal procedure is the branch of American constitutional law concerned with the state’s power to maintain an orderly society and the rights of citizens and residents to live in freedom from undue government interference with their liberty” (Zalman, 2008, p. 4). The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth amendments are significant in studying criminal procedure. In criminal justice, the criminal procedure is important because it deals with the conflict between order and liberty directly. To understand the friction between order and liberty, Herbert Packer studied the competing values that underlie the constitutional order through the Due
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The main difference between these two models is that the Due Process Model is adamant on legal guilty; whereas the Crime Control Model emphasizes factual guilt as well as that, every defendant should receive equal treatment.
To appreciate criminal procedure a person has to understand criminal justice practices. Criminal procedure law covers six major stages of criminal justice practice by police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, trial judges, and appellate courts. These are police investigation, interrogation, search, and arrest; the pretrial process; formal charging by the prosecutor; adjudication; sentencing; and appellate review by higher courts. In the last stage of the criminal process, appellate review, a person can find most constitutional rights of a suspect. In the criminal justice system, there are two types of courts, which are trial courts and appellate courts. Every state has trial courts, and some states have many states have different levels of this particular court. Appellate courts are above trial courts and the primary focus for these courts is rule making. Every state as well as the United States has an appellate court. Once a jury finds a person guilty of the alleged crime, the individual has the chance to appeal the decision by asserting that there was a violation against his or her legal rights during trial. A court’s decision, a statute, refers to a