Other cases established that persons who threaten the public health could be quarantined or subjected to other limitations on their liberty without triggering criminal law due process requirements.
To achieve their ends, they say, governments have suspended judicial oversight over law enforcement agents and public officials, concentrated unprecedented power in the hands of the executive arm of government, and rolled back criminal law and due process protections that balance the rights of individuals against the power of the state.
These can be dealt with by the ordinary process of criminal law, but the police are powerless when no one will talk to them, and though this is sometimes the result of alienation, it appears in some cases to be the result of intimidation too.
Most criminal law systems begin a criminal process with an indictment which will lead to trial, unless there is a plea bargain disposition to the case (a uniquely Anglo-American phenomenon).
The inquiry by Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel, into President Clinton's relationship with a former White House intern raised for the first time since Watergate the question of whether impeachment is the only means of pursuing potential criminal charges against a President or whether the ordinary processes of criminal law can go forward.
To suggest that someone who comes from the defence side is somehow disabled in my position is a complete misreading of the way the criminal law works and the criminal trial process works.
Until the new laws allowed them to put restrictions on offenders, close down houses used for drug dealing, seize dealers' assets, disperse gangs of youths, fine vandals on the spot, the victims had nothing to protect them except the usual process of the criminal law, which was hopelessly inadequate.
It should check and balance political power from the outside, while itself being held in check by the ordinary processes of the criminal law.
Ben Grunwald's academic interests include criminal procedure, criminal law, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and empirical methods.
