However fundamental he may appear to us, the public prosecutor was an historical latecomer. Judge and jury we can trace back to the high Middle Ages. But the prosecutor became a regular figure of Anglo-American criminal procedure only in Tudor times. Further, his appearance then has not been noticed in our historical literature, an especially remarkable omission when we discover that the prosec...

In three studies, we investigated support for applying sex offender registry laws to juveniles. Family law attorneys supported registry laws less for juveniles than for adults. Laypeople and prosecutors supported juvenile and adult sex offender registration equally--even though they perceived juveniles as generally less threatening than adults (Study 1)--because most people spontaneously envisi...

The U.S. Department of Justice released the first national guide for collecting and preserving eyewitness evidence in October 1999. Scientific psychology played a large role in making a case for these procedural guidelines as well as in setting a scientific foundation for the guidelines, and eyewitness researchers directly participated in writing them. The authors describe how eyewitness resear...

Using PsychInfo review of rape and sexual assault publications, the period of greatest fertility coincided with the establishment (1975) and demise (1987) of the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape. To document what has been learned and when, the era in which new rape concepts entered the literature is summarized and important developments highlighted. Then, new investigation...

Berryessa et al. (2022) consider how prior experience as a criminal prosecutor may influence judicial behaviour, but their concerns about apply much more broadly in the case of American judges. In United States, unlike many other countries, lawyers with advocates comprise great majority persons selected to be judges (Volcansek, 2010; Wilets al., 2022), and most focus practice on particular area...

Objectives Approximately 95 % of convictions in the United States are the result of guilty pleas. Surprisingly little is known about the factors which judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys consider in these decisions. To examine the legal and extralegal factors that legal actors consider in plea decision-making, we replicated and improved upon a 40-year-old study by asking legal actor part...

Law Number 8 of 1981 concerning the Criminal Procedure Code is legislation that has been positioned as a legal umbrella for every law enforcement officer. However, not all powers and discretion exercised by enforcers—especially investigators public prosecutors, can be tested or questioned their validity through submission pretrial application. One model action cannot act instrumental communicat...