Portal:Criminal justice

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Criminal justice is the system of practices, and organizations, used by national and local governments, directed at maintaining social control, deterring and controlling crime, and sanctioning those who violate laws with criminal penalties and rehabilitation. The primary agencies charged with these responsibilities are law enforcement (police and prosecutors), courts, defense attorneys and local jails and prisons which administer the procedures for arrest, charging, adjudication and punishment of those found guilty. When processing the accused through the criminal justice system, government must keep within the framework of laws that protect individual rights. The pursuit of criminal justice is, like all forms of "justice", "fairness" or "process", essentially the pursuit of an ideal. Throughout history, criminal justice has taken on many different forms which often reflect the cultural mores of society.

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Paragraph 175 (known formally as §175 StGB) was a provision of the German Criminal Code from May 15, 1871 to March 10, 1994, which made male homosexual sex a crime. The statute was amended numerous times. Nazi Germany greatly exacerbated its severity in 1935. East Germany reverted to the old version of the law in 1950, limited its effect to sex with youths under 18 in 1968, and abolished it entirely in 1988. West Germany retained the Nazi-era statute until 1969, when it was limited to "qualified cases"; it was further attenuated in 1973 and finally revoked entirely after German reunification in 1994. In some of its forms, the law also addressed zoophilia.

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Credit: Adrian Pingstone

Italian public security is provided by five separate police forces: Arma dei Carabinieri (military police), Guardia di Finanza (financial and customs police, also organized as a military force), Polizia di Stato (state police), Polizia Penitenziaria (penitentiary police) and Corpo Forestale dello Stato (forestry police).

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John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865. Lincoln died the next day from a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, becoming the first American president to be assassinated. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth family of actors from Maryland. He was also a Confederate sympathizer and expressed vehement dissatisfaction with the South's defeat in the Civil War. He opposed Lincoln's proposal to extend voting rights to recently emancipated slaves. Booth and a group of co-conspirators led by him planned to kill Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State William Seward, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in a desperate bid to help the tottering Confederacy's cause. Although Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered four days earlier, Booth believed the war was not yet over since Confederate General Joseph Johnston's army was still fighting the Union Army under General William Tecumseh Sherman. Of the conspirators, only Booth was successful in carrying out his part of the plot. Following the shooting, Booth fled by horseback to southern Maryland and eventually to a farm in rural northern Virginia, where he was tracked down and killed by Union soldiers two weeks later. Several of the other conspirators were tried and hanged shortly thereafter.

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Did you know...

...that Juan Garcia Abrego (pictured), in 1995, was the first drug trafficker to ever be listed on the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation's Top Ten Most Wanted List?
... that before Homer Plessy challenged the Separate Car Act leading to Plessy v. Ferguson, Daniel Desdunes had challenged it but had his charges dropped?
... that Rachel Wall was the first American-born female pirate, and the last woman to be hanged in Massachusetts?