Suchergebnisse

Despite persisting impunity, over the past several years Guatemala has made important strides in prosecuting war crimes committed during the internal armed conflict (1960–1996). This article provides an ethnographic account of the 2018 Molina Theissen trial, which resulted in the conviction of four senior military officials for crimes against humanity, aggravated sexual violence, and forced disappearance. An ethnographic study of this critical human rights trial can help us understand how a country with a relatively weak judicial system and well-organized spoilers has managed to hold the intellectual authors of wartime atrocities responsible for their acts. It also contributes to a richer understanding of the construction, meaning, and impact of human rights prosecutions for victims and the broader society, and what role they play in broader public debates over the historical memory of conflictual pasts. ResumenA pesar de la impunidad institucionalizada en Guatemala, en los últimos años ha habido importantes avances en el enjuiciamiento de los crímenes de guerra cometidos durante el conflicto armado interno (1960–1996). Este artículo ofrece un relato etnográfico del juicio Molina Theissen, que en 2018 culminó con la condena de cuatro altos oficiales militares por crímenes de lesa humanidad, violencia sexual agravada y desaparición forzada. Un estudio etnográfico de este proceso judicial nos ayuda a comprender cómo un país con un sistema judicial relativamente débil y spoilers bien organizados ha logrado condenar a los autores intelectuales de crímenes graves. También contribuye a una mejor comprensión de la construcción, el significado y el impacto de los juicios de derechos humanos para las víctimas y la sociedad en general, y qué papel juegan en debates públicos más amplios sobre la memoria histórica de pasados complicados.

Is a federal prosecutor's decision whether to pursue violent crime charges political? While prosecutors frequently assert their decision-making independence, their selection and operational constraints suggest a very different story. We assess whether political factors related to the prosecution priorities of the president, Congress, and the local public affect federal prosecutors' decisions to pursue or decline charges in violent crime matters. To empirically examine this, we utilize data from 89 U.S. Attorneys offices from 1996 to 2011. The results provide rich new insight into when and why federal prosecutors' decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions are driven by the preferences of the president, Congress, and the local public. The findings also have important broader implications for the role of political factors in a U.S. criminal justice system believed by many to be in crisis.

A review essay on books by (1) Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U Press, 2000); & (2) Sarah B. Sewell & Carl Kaysen [Eds], The United States and the International Criminal Court (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). These books are important additions to the current debate about the role of international criminal justice. Bass's well-researched & highly readable account of past & present war crimes tribunals focuses on the political reasons governments either support or reject them. He treats war tribunals as a recurring phenomenon, beginning with the failed 1815 trials of Bonapartists at St. Helena, & ending with current tribunals for the former Yugoslavia & Rwanda. The volume edited by Sewell & Kaysen explores US proposals regarding the drafting of the International Criminal Court Statute & concerns surrounding them. Although most of the contributors support the court to varying degrees, they offer well balanced & insightful assessments of the benefits & costs associated with the court, & the introductory chapter places the process of developing the International Criminal Court within its broader global legal & political context. J. Lindroth

This article theorizes prosecutorial decision-making using an ecological model which proposes that prosecutorial outcomes are shaped by four inter-related and intersecting systems: (a) macro-level, or societal, factors such as crime rates (b) meso- and exo-level factors, such as organisational culture, (c) micro-level factors, such as interactions between prosecutors, and (d) individual-level factors, such as victim and perpetrator characteristics. While the model is designed to explain prosecutorial decision-making in general, it also accounts for the paradoxical trends observed in the US since the financial crash in 2008 when the number of prosecutions fell despite a heating up of political rhetoric around white-collar crime. The utility of the model is explored through a critical reading of the extant literature and an analysis of relevant qualitative and quantitative data. The discussion shows that, while each set of factors shapes prosecutorial outcomes to some extent, two explanations are particularly convincing. First, the data suggest that the dip in prosecutions may be explained by prosecutors focusing limited resources on more serious (albeit fewer) cases. Second, delays in case processing emerged sometime between 2011 and 2012 due to bottlenecks in the criminal justice process and coincided with the fall in prosecutions. While the roles played by some of the factors considered in this article are already well-known, the contributions of systemic delays and the shift towards more resource intensive cases represent new findings.