American Criminal Justice System - Essay Example

For instance, according to Article III of the constitution, it is the federal courts that are vested with the paramount judicial powers. And, Article III ensures both federalism and separation of powers by providing a mechanism for the Supreme Court to put forward guidelines for the lower courts. It is pointed out that “the Constitution does limit in important ways congressional power to shift ultimate judicial power from federal to state courts” (Amar, 271). Additionally, there are mechanisms such as “the case or controversy requirement, also called the “justiciability” doctrine, includes more specialized notions of ripeness, mootness, and standing to sue, and prohibits consideration of constitutional issues except as a necessary incident to the resolution of a concrete “case” or “controversy” (Brilmayer, 297).

Also, judicial precedent is one of the constitutional provisions for ensuring coherence in the praxis of criminal justice in the United States. The doctrine of judicial precedent in America is closely linked to other constitutional provisions such as the hierarchy of courts, separation of powers, judicial supremacy, and the ideology of judicial adjudication. The interpretative nature of judicial precedent is based on the fact that “judicial outcomes are fundamentally indeterminate” (Shapiro and Sweet, 122).

However, judicial precedent functions in all directions as all courts have to refer to each other decisions on criminal justice of similar type irrespective of the court hierarchy. It means that judicial precedents, in practice, “help judicial law-making -an intrinsically decentralized mode of governance- achieve a semblance of centralization and systematic coherence” (Shapiro and Sweet, 121). American federalism is deep and substantial as it allows an inherently heterogeneous legal system wherein state laws exist in competition with what is legal in the federal realm and other states.

American criminal justice system too is highly influenced by Montesquieu's ideas of division of powers. However, practicing the doctrine of the division of powers in the American context has become a division of institutions of criminal justice in the country and the separation of criminal justice systems in the states from each other and the federal system. However, coherence in the criminal justice system is achieved through the “established hierarchy of the courts and operates in such a way that generally, a court is bound by the ratio decidendi, or rule of law implicit in the decisions of a court above it in the hierarchy and usually by a court of equal standing in the hierarchy” (Slapper and Kelly, 3).

Green is of the view that since there is more emphasis on the protection of fundamental rights of “the defendants who are entitled to a range of elaborate procedural protections that apply regardless of the seriousness of the penalties they face”, the competing and overlapping organizational structure is not a hindrance (53). On the other hand, this institutional diversity and complexity help the best outcome in criminal justice cases.  However, such measures could be curtailed by some other grass root issues.

Perhaps, one may argue that victims’ rights are more vital to procedural protection than the rights of criminals as the “citizenry cannot be seen as a whole, rather, needs to be distinguished as victims and criminals” (Cartwright, 18). Such a distinction is important in understanding the issues of illegal immigrants like the battering of an illegal immigrant woman. 

Different states have different legal procedures to deal with gender violence against illegal immigrant women. Also, there is no consensus over whether we need to consider illegal immigrants on par with the citizens in terms of legal rights. The discourse on a federal health care system too is contested by the argument that it is an overreach on the state functions.

To conclude, it is possible to say that the fragmented nature of the American criminal justice system helps ensure the resilience of the federal setup, it constrains the system in tackling certain critical issues such as immigration and health care. And, many constitutional provisions such as Article III and judicial precedent enable the criminal justice system in practice to achieve high levels of cohesion.

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