Academic literature on the topic 'Public prosecutors – England'

This paper examines the role of the victim through the prism of prosecutor in the first third of the nineteenth century when England did not have a public prosecutor or national police force and most crimes were prosecuted in the courts by the victim. The selection of cases is drawn from a larger investigation of female offenders punished by transportation to New South Wales, Australia. The cases demonstrate the diversity of victims, the power they held as prosecutors and highlight the process from apprehension to conviction. Historical records of regional English Assizes and Sessions were investigated to identify the victim and record the prosecution process.

Following the House of Lords' decision in Purdy, the Director of Public Prosecutions issued an interim policy for prosecutors setting out the factors to be considered when deciding whether a prosecution in an assisted suicide case is in the public interest. This paper considers the interim policy, the subsequent public consultation and the resulting final policy. Key aspects of the policy are examined, including the condition of the victim, the decision to commit suicide and the role of organised or professional assistance. The inclusion of assisted suicides which take place within England and Wales makes the informal legal change realised by the policy more significant than was originally anticipated.

Although modern societies generally entrust enforcement of the criminal law to public prosecutors, most crimes in premodern societies were prosecuted privately. In classical Athens, ninth-century Germany, and England before the nineteenth century, there were no public prosecutors for most crimes. Instead, the victim or a relative initiated and litigated the cases. This article is the first rigorously quantitative analysis of private prosecution. It focuses on thirteenth-century England and uses statistical techniques, such as regression analysis, to show that changes in the treatment of settled cases can explain the rate of private prosecution.

Police powers of discretion to discontinue criminal proceedings are rather exceptional in Europe, where most Criminal Justice Systems are based on some kind of principle of legality. Germany and England may be regarded as contrasting examples for different decision-making-models on the question whether or not to prosecute an offender. Germany, with a principle of compulsory prosecution theoretically guiding the work of public prosecutors—compared to England, where already the police have significant powers of discretion when deciding about a case. In recent years, however, the differences between the practice of these principles seem to have vanished: Whereas some German federal states have started to involve police in prosecution decisions, policy makers in England try to restrain the traditionally wide discretion of police in dealing with cases of minor crimes. Interesting lessons that might be useful for future harmonization of European criminal justice systems can be drawn from the experiences in both countries.

This article discusses one of the most important decisions the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) can take: the decision to drop a case. When this happens, the case will either be referred to national prosecutors or to the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) or dismissed entirely. Why is this an important decision? Because it means the EPPO declines to prosecute, prosecution being (along with investigation) its very raison d’être. This is why it is important to understand how and when the EPPO may drop a case. In this respect, the EPPO Regulation (adopted on 12 October 2017) pursues two goals: first, it seeks to leave the EPPO a certain margin of discretion when deciding whether to drop a case; secondly, however, it seeks to limit that discretion in order to reduce the risk of decisions that are arbitrary or based on irrelevant considerations. This article argues that this strikes an acceptable balance between two different legal traditions: the ones inspired by the strict legality principle, such as Italy and Germany, and those inspired by the principle of opportunity, such as France or England and Wales. The article further explores how this balance is consistent with the emerging principles of international criminal law, where international tribunals try the most serious crimes only.

With the help of several case studies from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, this article focuses on two key questions. How did ordinary Dutch citizens protect themselves against corruption and misuse of power by law enforcement agents, public prosecutors and the courts? And, whose interests were actually being served by the early modern criminal justice system? Or, put another way: whose order was being maintained and who was excluded from it? Its is argued that the weakness of a critical traditional in Dutch -and possibly even more widely, in Continental European- historiography concerning these issues fits in with the Continental perspective in which the rights of the state are emphasized rather than the rights of the individual. In England (perhaps even in the wider Anglosaxon context) the opposite seems to be the case: a critical historiographical tradition juxtaposed to a past in which civil rights rather than state privilieges were emphasized, together with resistance to the state and other bastions of power.

Increasing concerns about the societal impact of medical research fraud have led to calls for its criminalization within the United Kingdom, but there has been little discussion of how the criminal law could be applied in this context. The author proposes a legal framework whereby acts of falsification or fabrication may be prosecuted under a general offence of fraud contained within the Fraud Act 2006 in England and Wales. The threshold for prosecution may be determined by assessing the effect of an act on the reliability and robustness of research findings and using a Two-stage Full Code Test modelled on the Crown Prosecution Service Policy for Prosecutors in Respect of Cases of Encouraging or Assisting Suicide. This provides a pragmatic approach to handling an unyielding problem that affects many sectors of society and necessitates the implementation of an explicit government policy aimed at balancing the protection of public interests against the promotion of medical advancement.

In the conditions of formation and development of new socio-economic relations, reformation of legislative state structures, executive and judicial power, the task of creating a legal basis for law strengthening and the law enforcement activity improving arises. The legal sciences should develop and form the statehood and lawfulness legal basis of law-enforcement activity, aimed to reliable protection of constitutional rights and legitimate interests of citizens, public formations and state structures of Ukraine. Criminalistics equips law enforcement officers with effective methods and means of detecting and investigating crimes, which promotes the principle of the inevitability of punishment, the objective use of criminal law and preventive influence. Recently, Ukraine has been paying special attention to the law enforcement agencies activities improving and strengthening the scientific and technical base for combating crime in general, and organized in particular. The current level of criminalistics science and the scientific and technical potential of the natural and technical sciences, allowing prosecutors, internal affairs, security and court authorities to prevent, suspend and investigate very complex crimes, thereby contributing to the solution of one of the main tasks – strengthening law and order in Ukraine . Criminalistics science is a legal science that has emerged in the criminal process depths in the last century as a set of technical means and tactical techniques, as well as ways of using them for disclosure and investigation. The article further investigates the problems of criminalistics theory and history in some countries of Europe, USA, and England. The overall purpose of this analysis is to investigate how the development of criminalistics outside our country, their problems, and most importantly, to reach a conclusion about the need for restructuring (or sufficiency) of criminalistics methods and expert research system. The study deals exclusively with the theory and history of scientific knowledge development in criminalistics outside our country, to identify the positive features of its modern development and extrap-olation to the conditions of our science, which serves as a specific tool in investigating crimes and identi-fying the perpetrators. In the next study, it is planned to offer a discussion among scholars and practitioners involved in crime investigations about the contemporary achievements possible implementation of our criminalistics colleagues abroad.

Abstract This article examines the changing nature of public protection police work in a climate of continued austerity and increasing prosecutions for sexual offending, which have made a significant impact on the workloads of police teams who manage and monitor registered sexual offenders in the community. This increase has run parallel to a decrease in the general policing budget, which has seen it cut by an average of 22% across England and Wales [BBC. (2017). Utilizing data from observations and in-depth qualitative interviews with police officers from a force in England, this article highlights the effect which cost-saving measures have had on the professional standards of the police service in the management of sex offenders; how collaborative working practices have been hindered by these austerity measures, and finally how continual cuts have had a detrimental effect on the police’s ability to protect the public.

Statistics published by the government in 2021 highlight serious problems in England and Wales with a drop in prosecutions of sexual crimes. Part of this issue is attributed to the complexities around sexual consent and public understanding of it. This article highlights a particular problem in the law around conditional consent. It shows that the law on conditional consent is completely incoherent, complicating efforts to increase public education on the matter. The law is also limited in its protection of sexual autonomy of victims, as well in its protection of victims against pregnancy. Critics of reform warn against overcriminalisation of rape, and against imposing morals on society. However, it is argued that given the current reality of how rape is dealt with in England and Wales, these concerns should not prevent reform to the law of conditional consent. The article ends by arguing that reform should be carried out to make the law on conditional consent more coherent and to take account of pregnancy as a consequence of sexual intercourse.

Chargés de mettre en œuvre la loi pénale contre les personnes soupçonnées d’infractions, les procureurs bénéficient traditionnellement d’un large pouvoir d’appréciation qui est en général encadré par la loi et par des instructions hiérarchiques que les procureurs doivent suivre lorsqu’ils prennent leurs décisions. Avec une analyse fondée sur des observations et des entretiens dans les systèmes français et anglo-gallois, cette étude comparative vise à comprendre comment les systèmes de justice pénale étudiés s’efforcent de combiner les nécessités du contrôle des autorités de poursuites dans des sociétés démocratiques modernes avec la souplesse et la réactivité nécessaires à l’application de la loi résultant de la marge d’appréciation laissée aux procureurs. Il existe actuellement peu d’études empiriques et systématiques du processus de décision des autorités de poursuites. Cette thèse montre qu’aucun des systèmes observés ne parvient à un équilibre satisfaisant entre le degré de responsabilité et le pouvoir de décision des procureurs. En France, bien que le contrôle démocratique et hiérarchique des procureurs soit bien développé en théorie, il reste limité en pratique, en raison en raison de la primauté du principe d’individualisation dans la culture juridique et du statut professionnel des procureurs comme magistrats indépendants. En Angleterre et au Pays de Galles, les procureurs font partie d’une structure particulièrement bureaucratique et centralisée qui impose une stricte uniformité des décisions de poursuites aux dépens du pouvoir de décision et de l’autonomie des procureurs dont le rôle se limite à des tâches simples et répétitives en raison de la segmentation de la procédure de poursuites. Cette structure autoritaire de contrôle, conjuguée à un équilibre historique des pouvoirs en faveur de la police, semble empêcher les procureurs de prendre des décisions qui pourraient être mal vues par leur hiérarchie ou la police. Enfin, le manque de ressources et une recherche constante d’efficacité dans chacun des systèmes juridiques étudiés ont produit une bureaucratisation de la procédure pénale, certaines tâches étant déléguées à du personnel peu qualifié et les affaires mineures étant expédiées le plus rapidement possible selon un traitement standardisé
Tasked with enforcing the criminal law against suspected offenders, public prosecutors have traditionally enjoyed broad discretion, which is usually structured by legal and policy guidelines defining rules prosecutors should follow when making their decisions. Basing its analysis upon direct observations and interviews in the two jurisdictions under study, this comparative thesis endeavours to understand how the French and Anglo-Welsh criminal justice systems attempt to combine the necessities of accountability for public prosecution services in modern democratic societies with the flexibility and reactivity needed in the application of the law provided by prosecutorial discretion. There have been few systematic, empirical accounts of the decision-making process of these national prosecution services.This thesis argues that neither system observed achieves a satisfactory balance between accountability and discretion for public prosecutors. In France, although democratic and hierarchical accountability channels are well developed in theory, oversight is weak due to the primacy of the concept of ‘adaptation’ in the legal culture and the strong professional ethos of procureurs as independent judicial officers. In England and Wales, public prosecutors are part of a highly bureaucratic and centralised structure which strictly enforces consistency in prosecutorial decisions at the expense of much discretion and autonomy for individual prosecutors whose responsibility is limited to narrow and repetitive tasks due to the segmentation of the prosecution process. This overbearing accountability structure, coupled with a historical balance of power in favour of the police, appears to prevent prosecutors from making decisions perceived as unpopular with their hierarchy or the police. Finally, pressure on resources and a drive for efficiency in both jurisdictions have resulted in the bureaucratisation of the criminal justice process with part of the prosecution workload being delegated to unqualified staff and minor cases being processed as quickly as possible into a one-size-fits-all system

Defence date: 23 June 1997
Examining board: Prof. John Baldwin (University of Birmingham) ; Prof. Juan Luis Rascon Ortega (University of Cordoba) ; Prof. Gianfranco Poggi (EUI-Supervisor) ; Prof. Roberto Toniatti (University of Trento)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

This chapter first explains the meaning of law. It then discusses the historical development and characteristics of English law, and the different types of law (public law, private law, criminal law, and civil law). Laws are rules and regulations which govern the activities of persons within a country. In England and Wales, laws are composed of three main elements: legislation which is created through Parliament; common law; and, until the UK leaves the EU, directly enforceable EU law. This chapter also considers the terminology used for criminal prosecutions and civil actions, and outlines the legal profession in England and Wales.

This chapter first explains the meaning of law. It then discusses the historical development and characteristics of English law, and the different types of law (public law, private law, criminal law, and civil law). Laws are rules and regulations which govern the activities of persons within a country. In England and Wales, laws are composed of three main elements: legislation which is created through Parliament, common law, and, until the UK leaves the EU, directly enforceable EU law. This chapter also considers the terminology used for criminal prosecutions and civil actions, and outlines the legal profession in England and Wales.

This chapter explores the main substantive financial services offences, their individual components and their distinguishing features. Specifically, it considers the criminal offences of insider dealing, making misleading statements or impressions (either in relation to benchmark arrangements or more generally), fraud, and money laundering. The commission of any one of these offences in England and Wales will risk prosecution by the appropriate regulator, the Secretary of State, or the Director of Public Prosecutions. However, there are a number of statutory defences that relate to each offence. The most commonly encountered specific defence is that of ‘due diligence’. The due diligence defence is formulated slightly differently between statutes, but generally it is a defence for the defendant to prove that he ‘took all reasonable precautions and exercised all due diligence to avoid commission of the offence by himself or by a person under his control’.

The accession of James VI in England saw a Catholic toleration campaign which was at least as aggressive as the better-known puritan one. Catholic lobbying in the end helped to trigger the reimposition, via new legislation, of an augmented version of the previous reign’s penal law against aspects of contemporary Catholicism. In turn, this provoked some Catholics into sometimes aggressive public displays of separatist independence, notably in the Welsh borders in summer 1605, all by way of reaction against what they saw as the king’s reneging on promises that he had made before his accession in England. Ultimately this led into whatever the Gunpowder Plot was. That conspiracy provoked further parliamentary legislation and a series of subsequent confrontations between Catholics and the regime over what appropriate political loyalty and compliance actually were. There were fewer treason prosecutions of Catholics in the early Jacobean period; but the ones that were taken all the way tell us a good deal about the place of Catholicism in the new Jacobean polity. The regime formulated a new oath of allegiance, and it was promulgated in statute. Catholics’ responses to the oath framed most of the proceedings against clergy in the period after 1606. Faced with royal hostility and the seeming evidence of actual sedition by some of their co-religionists, those who had fronted the appeals against the archpriest late in Elizabeth’s reign renewed their lobbying at Rome for the institution of an episcopal hierarchy which would govern English Catholics appropriately.

The source of the power to control advertisements is found in ss 220 to 225 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 (the 1990 Act). Section 220 gives the Secretary of State power to make regulations for restricting or regulating the display of advertisements, so far as it appears to him to be expedient in the interests of amenity or public safety. The present regulations are the Town and County Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007, SI 2007/783 (the Regulations). The Regulations update and improve the arrangements for controlling outdoor advertisements and make the control more responsive to rapidly changing forms of advertising. Circular 03/2007 further explains the legislation and provides guidance for local planning authorities and advertisers to help ensure that the system operates effectively. The latest Regulations also coincide with the creation of a database to enable local planning authorities to input and extract details of prosecutions and formal cautions against advertisers who unlawfully display advertisements alongside motorways and trunk roads. The database will also include details of persons guilty of fly-posting. It is hoped that this information will help to track down persistent offenders and ensure that fines reflect the seriousness of the offence.