Honesty, justice, and due process in criminal justice and security ethics

Due Process, Truth, And the Criminal Justice System

Due Process is one of the most important founding principles underlying the U.S.

A criminal justice system. It derives from the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution (which applies to federal government action) and has traditionally been applied identically to state actions by the identical provision contained in the Fourteenth Amendment (Schmalleger, 1997). The specific wording that appears in both amendments prohibits the deprivation of "life," "liberty," and "property" by the government without the "due process of law." Due process also requires grand jury indictment, and prohibits double jeopardy and compelled self-incrimination, and therefore, is one of the most influential concepts defining criminal procedure in the enforcement of penal laws in the U.S.

Supreme Court interpretation continually directs the evolution and refining of permissible criminal procedures and establishes the limits of permissible police and other law enforcement-related functions. Therefore, modern law enforcement and the security industry must continually update their tactical procedures to ensure compliance with changes in constitutional law of due process to ensure compliance, because the consequences of error in this area can potentially undermine investigations and criminal prosecutions requiring the release of guilty criminals back into society without punishment for their crimes (Dershowitz, 2002).

Striking a Balance between Two Important Principles:

Law enforcement always requires the balancing of two competing social concerns: on one hand, is the government's interest in protecting its citizens and prosecuting criminal conduct; on the other hand, is the right of innocent citizens to be free from unrestricted searches and seizures and compelled confessions. Under British rule before the Revolution that established a sovereign United States, citizens were subject to unwarranted searches of their property and seizure of their persons for suspicion of criminal conduct without the need for justification on the part of government agents. This experience under British rule was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution and its subsequent amendments, including the Bill of Rights, precisely to provide the protection of citizens against unrestricted governmental police powers.

Unrestricted police powers might, in principle, allow for the highest level of crime prevention and prosecution, but at a very steep cost, because virtually any police action would be permissible, including searches and apprehension, detention, and imprisonment without any justification, based solely on the suspicions, or even the whims, of government agents. Excessive protections of individual rights would prohibit the investigatory, arrest, and prosecutorial functions necessary to enforce the laws of society.

The goal of modern constitutional criminal procedure is to define principles of law enforcement that protect citizens from government intrusions that are unreasonable in their effect on personal liberties, while simultaneously facilitating the reasonable enforcement of law and protection of society by prosecuting and punishing criminal conduct.

One of the first principles in early American constitutional history was the idea that it was more beneficial to society and its citizens to protect the rights of the innocent than to ensure the apprehension, prosecution, and punishment of every perpetrator of criminal conduct. This is often expressed as the notion that it is "better to let 100 guilty men go free than to punish a single innocent man" (Dershowitz, 2002). In many other countries, the balance between freedom and law enforcement is shifted much more toward the other end of the spectrum, and as a result, citizens of those countries are subject to investigative detention, arrest, and post-arrest interrogation based on suspicion alone, and even to long-term incarceration before any adjudication of guilt in any judicial proceeding (Schmalleger, 1997).