The paper focuses on the extent of sentencing for the white collar crimes. The paper highlights the imbalance of sentencing when compared to conventional crimes and also talks about aspects of civil suits and how they work within the white collar crime. The paper ends with the web field trip.
White Collar Crime in Contemporary Society
Assessment of the objectivity and likely competence of trial juries in white collar crime cases
The biggest and most important aspect of trial juries in white collar crimes is the personal likeness towards an individual or a prospect that sways their judgment. There is a lot of speculation on a trial jury's personal traits and trends of prior judgments that can allow the court to understand even before the case starts on how the jury will most likely vote. This hampers a complete objective decision; as, even if the majority of the jury members in a trial do end up taking complete objective decisions, there are always one or two sway votes that are not bound to be completely objective (Friedrichs, 2010). Furthermore, there is also significant skepticism with regards to whether or not the modern structures of crime are baffling the modern trial juries and thus leaving their judgments incompetent. This is especially true in the case of the white collar crimes as they are a constantly evolving and complicated sector of crime and can result in confusion for the trial juries; and, thus we can see the result being a very haphazard trend of sentencing by the trial jury for differing white collar crimes (Ward, 2006).
Issues surrounding the involvement of jurors in criminal cases - representativeness, possible biases, and competence
The group dynamics of a jury or jurors or jury members is made up of personal characteristics of each individual like age, sex, social class, race, etc. All these personal characteristics play a strong part in the representativeness of jurors in criminal cases as the most balanced and appropriate personal characteristics are chosen and then those are used to control or guide the group dynamics (Friedrichs, 2010). Irrespective of this, there will always be certain biases that will surface based on not just the personal characteristics but the social opinions and pressures that the individuals face which will hamper their competence as well to make the right and correct decisions. Whether or not the social biases towards a case affects the juror's competence, the fact that the modern nature of white collar crimes is extremely complicated, the chances of the jurors being incompetent to tackle the intricacies is still very high (Moore et al., 1996).
Australian Institute of Criminology
The Australian Institute of Criminology is primarily a research centre focused on the crime and justice trends in the society. The focal purpose of this institute is to increase research and knowledge in areas of rising crime; hence one of the main crimes that this institute has focused on in recent years has been the trafficking of women in the region. The institute primarily focuses on social aspects of the crime fulfilling the purpose of increasing awareness amongst the citizens on how to counter the negating effects of crime as well as how they can report the crimes to the right authorities. To fulfill its purpose of increasing knowledge on crime and justice in the region, the Institute publishes regular statistics on crime trends, distributes latest and updated publications on the crimes and their effects, holds regular conferences and seminars focused on facts of crime and their effects (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2012).
Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation (SLAPPs)
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