Criminal Justice History and Current Essay

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The goals are often jointly incompatible and must be prioritized. A very essential example is the prohibiting of illegally obtained facts. When this is done, the objective of defending civil liberties is served but the aim of finding the truth and shielding public safety are denied. The problem becomes what are the main concerns. The result is that criminal justice reforms have been a mixture of programs that serve dissimilar, often unequal, goals, leaving Taiwan's bench uncertain of what its objectives are and in what order they are to be pursued (Kennedy, 2003).

Another primary aspect of reform that seems to be forbidden is any contemplation of the costs of different criminal justice reforms. In the course of figuring out the new reforms there was never any cost analysis or cost projection done to find out what economic impact the new customized adversarial system or any of the other reform programs would have. While it is admirable to take the position, as the Judicial Yuan seems to have, that money does not matter and that Taiwan must have a system that is just and progressive, this position is not realistic in a time of declining revenues and general economic slowdown. Cost issues naturally tie in with manpower issues. One of the major problems with the proposed reforms is that the modified adversarial system places a huge new burden on a prosecution system that is already stretched as thin as it will go. Taiwanese prosecutors are responsible for a much wider range of tasks than their American counterparts (Kennedy, 2003).

The modified adversarial system, with its demand that the prosecutor have primary responsibility for the in-court presentation of the case, adds a major increase in the prosecutor's workload. A rough estimate is that for the new system to function, approximately a third more prosecutors would be needed. But there are no indications that any significant number of new prosecutors is to be added anytime soon. Beyond the fundamental problems of what are the priorities and how much will all this cost, and how do we get one prosecutor to do the work of two, are a host of other problems with the new reforms.

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Prominent among them is confusion over the role of the judge in the new system. Are Taiwan's criminal-law judges responsible for finding the truth or deciding if the prosecution has proven the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt (Kennedy, 2003).

Trial judges in Taiwan have to file comprehensive written judgments in all their cases. The judgments can be better seen as explanations in the sense that judges must rationalize the decisions they made, justify it to the parties and to their high court supervisors. If the high court is not pleased with the handling of the case by the lower district court judge, the case is sent back for additional examination by the district court. This puts the two systems on a direct conflict course. On the one hand, the judge in the customized adversarial system is believed to take a lenient approach in the direction of the presentation of evidence and the questioning of witnesses. That is to be left to the attorneys and the parties. On the other hand the judge is mandated by law, by his supervisors, and by the demands of Taiwanese society to create a detailed ruling in the case. This becomes a trouble if judges do not engage themselves to a substantial extent in the treatment of their cases. Simply put, judges often cannot get the research material they need for their reports if they just sit back and let the attorneys and parties present the cases. The difficulty is worsened by the fact that in the preponderance of cases the defendant has no attorney. Taiwan's trial judges view this dilemma as the most important reason why the customized adversarial system is either doomed to failure or doomed to be overlooked (Kennedy, 2003).

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