CONTEXT Mental health courts are growing in popularity as a form of jail diversion for justice system-involved people with serious mental illness. This is the first prospective multisite study on mental health courts with treatment and control groups. OBJECTIVES To determine if participation in a mental health court is associated with more favorable criminal justice outcomes than processing t...

in modern legal systems there are a variety of sources of law. judicial precedent is one of the legal sources; thus, precedents of supreme court, like enactments of parliament, are enforceable in courts. this similarity between precedents and acts impose many problems as role of supreme court in interpretation of   laws. but the most important problem is the possibility of changing previous pre...

In this contribution an empirical approach is used to gain more insight into the relationship between neuroscience and criminal law. The focus is on case law in the Netherlands. Neuroscientific information and techniques have found their way into the courts of the Netherlands. Furthermore, following an Italian case in which a mentally ill offender received a penalty reduction in part because of...

Law enforcement agencies refer approximately two-thirds of all youth arrested to a court with juvenile jurisdiction for further processing. As with law enforcement, the court may decide to divert some juveniles away from the formal justice system to other agencies for service. Prosecutors may file some juvenile cases directly in criminal (adult) court. The net result is that juvenile courts for...

Polygraph test results are by and large ruled inadmissible evidence in criminal courts in the US, Canada, and Israel. This is well-conceived with regard to the dominant technique of polygraph interrogation, known as the Control Question Technique (CQT), because it indeed does not meet the required standards for admissible scientific evidence. However, a lesser known and rarely practiced techniq...

Studies of criminal-court dispositions have traditionally aggregated courts along political and geographic boundaries. This article suggests that courts should be analyzed individually, even within the same jurisdiction, as a means of increasing the explanatory capacity of the variables involved. Further, it is contended that intercourt differences are a result of organizational infiuences oper...

BACKGROUND Mental health courts were created to help criminal defendants who have a mental illness that significantly contributes to their criminal offense. Despite the increasing number of mental health courts around the world, data about their effectiveness have only begun to emerge in the past decade. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to assess the current evidence on the e...

Abstract Drawing mainly from the common law tradition, article identifies notion and normative value of precedent, summarizes its historical development, distinguishes between application in fields case law, constitutional statutory legislation. It then ponders pros cons precedent-based adjudication institutional ethical requisites for application. finally considers recent phenomena arbitration...