Suchergebnisse

Shortly after the alleged discovery of America and its vast expanse of land waiting to be cultivated with cash crops using cheap human labor, millions of Africans fell victims and were kidnapped to work as slaves in American plantations for about four centuries. Even though it has been over 150 years since the official abolition of slavery in America, the effects of the 400 years of enslavement continue to reverberate: irrespective of the blackletter rights protecting Black people from injustices, the deep racist structures typically decrease the potency of these rights, and thus perpetuate oppression. This article assesses the roles being played by race and profit in the administration of criminal justice: it deems the systemic oppression of Black people as a humanitarian crisis and seeks to ascertain this by interpreting the attitudes of the various key players in the American Criminal Justice System, the majoritarian population, mainstream media, and Corporate America: it challenges some entrenched racist practices suspected to be the umbilical cord that links Black people in America with mass incarceration.

In most developing countries with weak rule of law and fledgling democratic institutions, theft of public assets by public office holders is rampant and has a strong correlation with the excruciating level of poverty and underdevelopment that besiege these countries (Ijewereme, 2013). While a myriad number of reasons may be responsible for this situation, the absence of a mature legal framework as well as the scant availability of sufficiently trained government personnel to trace and recover stolen assets, hidden domestically and abroad, arguably remain contributory factors. Granted that corrupt public office holders are typically enabled by porous (domestic) legal frameworks that provide them wide escape routes for their crimes, contestably however, the laws bordering on confiscation of assets in many foreign countries (safe havens) seem intentionally designed to frustrate any recovery of stolen assets by developing countries. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate of stealing public assets by public office holders in developing countries is foreseen to rise astronomically and is likely to deepen their existing levels of poverty and hopelessness (Ayode, 2020). Using Nigeria as an example of a developing country, the paper critically examines the underlying defects in the cross-border legal framework on asset recovery and confiscation and proffers suggestions on how these defects could be remedied.

The Trump Administration and its mantra to 'Make America Great Again' has been calibrated with racism and severe oppression against Black people in America who still bear the deep marks of slavery. After the official abolition of slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century, the initial inability of Black people to own land, coupled with the various Jim Crow laws rendered the acquired freedom nearly insignificant in the face of poverty and hopelessness. Although the age-long struggles for civil rights and equal treatments have caused the acquisition of more black-letter rights, the systemic racism that still perverts the American justice system has largely disabled these rights: the result is that Black people continue to exist at the periphery of American economy and politics. Using a functional approach and other types of approach to legal and sociological reasoning, this article examines the supportive roles of Corporate America, Mainstream Media, and White Supremacists in winnowing the systemic oppression that manifests largely through police brutality. The article argues that some of the sustainable solutions against these injustices must be tackled from the roots and not through window-dressing legislation, which often harbor the narrow interests of Corporate America.