The Criminal Justice System

Society has different definitions for the word justice. Some believe that justice is fair treatment for someone who commits a crime, while others believe that justice is a corrupted system that purposely finds ways to ruin someone’s life. In law enforcement is justice actually helping society stay structured or is justice causing more strife between the people and the judicial system? First let us define what justice actually means. Justice is the process or result of using laws to fairly judge and punish crimes and criminals. A judge can also mean justice because he or she is the person who decides the level of punishment for the criminal of the crime. Simply, justice is a process that is used to fairly punish one for the crime or crimes

The district court is where a case is heard for the first time where a person is allowed to testify federal charges. Second, Circuit Courts is where cases are appealed from the district courts and are reviewed to check if the decision made from the district court was correct and fair. Lastly, Supreme Court which is simply the highest court that exists within the judicial system. The Supreme Court has the power to overrule any of the decisions made from the district courts or circuit courts.

Let us see the history of where the thought of justice originally came from. In his book Crime and Punishment: A History of the Criminal Justice System, Mitchel Roth writes “The earliest societies relied on customs, magic, and religion to maintain order prior to the advent of complex systems of law. In primitive cultures any breach of the customary code could expose an offending individual as well as his or her corresponding social group to the wrath of the gods. Hence, it was necessary for the community to punish the individual to prevent supernatural forces from taking revenge on the tribal group.” (2) As we see from early societies committing a sin against your culture was the same to committing a crime in today’s world. Slowly enough we begin to see justice starting to form as time goes

This led to problems involving the judicial system in the United States. How were they going to be able to control the crime and find fair punishments for those who committed the crimes? Roth later writes, “For most Americans, the perception of crime often conflicts with the reality of crime statistics.” (307) in reality, we pay attention to the statistics that we want to when it comes to crime. For example, the media can be biased towards the higher class crime than lower class. It seems as if media idolizes that celebrities receive lower punishments than actual citizens do. As a whole we have to remember that justice is evolving along with society which is happening at a rapid pace. In contrast to early societies they did not have the media or huge cities as we do now. Just like the famous O.J Simpson case. A criminal case that was widely publicized had a huge impact on the outcome of the case. The testimonies were on live television that influenced biased public opinion. Another example would be the trial of George Zimmerman and think about the effect that criminal case had on modern society. There are many more famous criminal cases that were aired on live television, but think about how much the media has changed our society's perception on the view of justice. In addition, questioning if our criminal justice system is “just” and