Criminal Justice History and Current

Criminal Justice History and Current Justice System of Taiwan Over the past several years, Taiwan's criminal justice system has undergone a number of reforms. While most legal experts and the public agreed legal reform was in order and while the efforts at legal reform were admirable in spirit, many of these changes are bound for breakdown because they were not successful at fitting together into a consistent whole and failed to account for cultural issues.

Nevertheless, even though the rocky first round of criminal justice reforms, there are forces at work within Taiwan's criminal justice system that will make more triumphant succeeding rounds of reform (Kennedy, 2003). The focus of Taiwan's criminal law reorganization is the recently put into place customized adversarial system.

The Judicial Yuan, which was mainly accountable for coming up the system, has dedicated substantial expression to how significant this fresh trial system is and how it will supply a quantity of elemental returns, including enhancing judicial sovereignty, protecting human rights, and providing for more fair and just criminal trials. Working in the world today are two basic advances to criminal trials: the adversarial system and the Continental system. The adversarial system is the Anglo-American advance; the Continental system is the move toward what is used in most of Europe.

The judge in the adversarial system has little or no association in the course of the trial. The two parties and their attorneys structure the trial issues and are accountable for moving the case forward by calling witnesses, conducting questioning, and providing physical evidence. Evidence law and procedures figure profoundly in adversarial systems.

In the Continental system, which was the system used up until recently in Taiwan, the judge has the task of performing an examination of the facts, handling the calling and inquiring of witnesses, evaluating the physical substantiation, and determining what the legal issues are in the case. As a consequence, the judge is the most active participant in the case; evidentiary and procedural rules are not of any great significance (Kennedy, 2003).

Upon the beginning of the Republic of China in 1912, the assessment was made to follow a Continental model for the republic's new trial system, and that system was carried over to Taiwan. The Continental system was a normal fit for Chinese culture as it had much in common with the imperial Chinese legal system. Taiwan at different times has used the imperial Chinese system, the Japanese system, which is a Continental system, martial law, and consequently a German-based Continental system.

All these structures share common fundamentals: they are judge centered; statute rather than case law based, and do not use juries. With the exemption of the martial law period, each criminal law system that was previously used in Taiwan was a type of natural progression from the previous system. The newly institute customized adversarial system is an effort to bring together fundamentals from a variety of adaptations of the Continental system and new aspects of the adversarial system into a consistent new approach for Taiwan (Kennedy, 2003).

The center features of the new customized adversarial system are an augment in the utilization of cross examination and placing the accountability on the prosecutor to handle the calling and questioning of witnesses. The new system also includes Taiwan's first Anglo American fashion evidence law and has been accompanied by alterations in the Criminal Code that look to explain the function of the prosecutor and judge.

The Judicial Yuan had anticipated that the new system could take the best from the two systems, and act as a cooperation that would be established by the many divisions operating within the Judicial Yuan and the bigger legal profession (Kennedy, 2003). Obvious in the current reforms of Taiwan's criminal justice system is the failure to conclude exactly what the system's objectives are and to prioritize those objectives.

A criminal-justice system can supply a number of objectives: defending public safety, shielding civil liberties and constitutional rights, resolving disagreements, finding the truth of the case and offering a sense of retribution to victims. As to which are the main concerns in Taiwan's new criminal justice system, the reformers thin that it is all of the above. The goals are often jointly incompatible and must be prioritized. A very essential example is the prohibiting of illegally obtained facts.

When this is done, the objective of defending civil liberties is served but the aim of finding the truth and shielding public safety are denied. The problem becomes what are the main concerns. The result is that criminal justice reforms have been a mixture of programs that serve dissimilar, often unequal, goals, leaving Taiwan's bench uncertain of what its objectives are and in what order they are to be pursued (Kennedy, 2003).

Another primary aspect of reform that seems to be forbidden is any contemplation of the costs of different criminal justice reforms. In the course of figuring out the new reforms there was never any cost analysis or cost projection done to find out what economic impact the new customized adversarial system or any of the other reform programs would have.

While it is admirable to take the position, as the Judicial Yuan seems to have, that money does not matter and that Taiwan must have a system that is just and progressive, this position is not realistic in a time of declining revenues and general economic slowdown. Cost issues naturally tie in with manpower issues. One of the major problems with the proposed reforms is that the modified adversarial system places a huge new burden on a prosecution system that is already stretched as thin as it will go.

Taiwanese prosecutors are responsible for a much wider range of tasks than their American counterparts (Kennedy, 2003). The modified adversarial system, with its demand that the prosecutor have primary responsibility for the in-court presentation of the case, adds a major increase in the prosecutor's workload. A rough estimate is that for the new system to function, approximately a third more prosecutors would be needed. But there are no indications that any significant number of new prosecutors is to be added anytime soon.

Beyond the fundamental problems of what are the priorities and how much will all this cost, and how do we get one prosecutor to do the work of two, are a host of other problems with the new reforms. Prominent among them is confusion over the role of the judge in the new system. Are Taiwan's criminal-law judges responsible for finding the.