[MUSIC] Hello, my name is Stephen Morse. I'm a lawyer and professor at Penn Law School, and I've been teaching and writing about criminal law for many decades. I'm also a psychologist and a forensic psychologist, and I've testified in many criminal cases. It is my pleasure to provide this introduction to criminal law in the United States. Let's begin. As is well known, the American political system is federal. The states and the federal government are independent but related entities and each has its own legal system. There are essentially 51 sets of criminal laws, one for each of the 50 states and the federal government. This lecture will attempt to provide a general over you, view, but you should recognize that there may be substantial variation concerning particulars across jurisdictions. I begin by describing the nature of law and what is distinctive about criminal law that differentiates it from civil regulation. Then I address the justifications for state blame and punishment, which are the touchstones of criminal law. The next section describes the harm and fault principles that guide definition of so much of the criminal law. Following that, this lecture describes the structure of criminal guilt, that is, how criminal liability is established. The lecture concludes by considering sentencing. I will also try to say what is distinctive about United States criminal law, but United States criminal law is very similar in most, but not all respects, to the criminal law of other developed, post industrial countries. What is distinctive about law and about criminal law in particular? In this section, I first offer a simplified picture of what law is, then I turn to what is distinctive about criminal law in particular. It is difficult to describe what is distinctive about criminal law, without saying something about what is distinctive about law as a way of regulating and ordering our lives together. Consider what kinds of creatures we are. As Aristotle famously observed millenia ago, we are social creatures, but so are ants and chimps. What is different about us, we human beings, is that we're the only creatures on earth that have linguistic abilities, and are able to be guided by reasons. We have biological predispositions like the other animals on earth, and these probably set limits. But we are the only creatures that self consciously, and intentionally, create systems of rules and institutions to help us order our lives by giving us reasons to behave one way or another. There is great diversity among human beings and how they order their lives, but the need for informal and formal rules to order them is universal, to make successful human life possible. Please forgive me for using a simple and quite crude example using ordinary language. Suppose while you are attending some social gathering, you develop an intestinal cramp and really want to fart to relieve the pressure, probably you won't, but why not? After all, you'd feel so much comfortable if you did. You won't because there are rules of etiquette and social norms that reject such intentionally boorish, rude behavior for which you might be ridiculed, criticized, or socially excluded. You won't fart either because you agree with the rule, have made it your own by internalizing it, or because you fear the consequences for violating it, or both. Customs and morality are similar sets of rules that order our lives. All these systems of rules have their own enforcement mechanisms, again ranging from social exclusion to criticism and condemnation. Law is yet another human intervention of a system of rules to regulate our interpersonal life, generally, and to moderate conflict in particular. What is distinctive about law however is that the creation and enforcement of legal rules is accomplished by the state, including its near monopoly on lawful force, even when a legal dispute is between two private parties. If the parties can not resolve their disagreement privately, they go to law to adjudicate the conflict and enforce the outcome if necessary. Well, all of us are acting in the shadow of the law which gives us reason to behave one way or another. No blind instinct necessitates adherence to the rules and indeed we often violate them. But the rules always give us explicit and implicit reasons for action even when we habitually and unthinkingly follow them. With this simplified understanding of what law is in mind, let us turn to what is distinctive about criminal law. Let us begin with a simple, but realistic example that is not for the faint hearted. Imagine an aggressive 21 year-old man who enjoys driving at very high speeds on the highway, behaving dangerously thrills him. One day he is driving at 75 miles per hour in the middle of the day on a semi-urban undivided roadway that has one lane in each direction, a 45 mile per hour speed limit, and intermittent traffic lights. He sees that a traffic light up ahead is about to turn red. Although not drunk, his blood alcohol is just above the legal limit. Instead of slowing down and stopping as he should, the man decides to run the light for the fun of it and speeds up to more than 90 miles an hour to make the light. Alas! The light turns red just as he reaches the intersection and a crossing vehicle properly enters it. Our driver crashes into the hapless other vehicle, killing the driver and paralyzing the passenger, who is irreversibly quadriplegic. The physical evidence and eye witnesses leave no doubt about the driver's exceptionally dangerous behavior and a breathalyzer test confirms that his blood alcohol content was above the legal limit. How does united state law respond to such an unnecessarily sad tragedy? First, the families of the victims could sue the driver for civil damages to compensate them for the harm done by his negligent behavior. This is a province of tort law. The legal rules that deal with certain types of civil harms including personal injury. This course on introduction to law includes a module on torts. Of course, money can never replace a human life or fix irreversible disability. But the point of civil damages is to try and make the victims as whole as possible given the inevitable limitations of money as a remedy. But the driver's behavior also manifests massive moral indifference to the rights and interests of others. It was a gross violation of the duty we all owe each other to avoid unnecessary harms. Compelling the driver to pay money damages seems an insufficient response. His behavior seems to call for a public response on behalf of society for societal blame and punishment. This is the province of the criminal law. Crimes are distinct from civil wrongs because crimes morally wrong all members of society and are prosecuted by the state rather than by private parties. Reflecting this distinction criminal cases are titled, not Smith versus Jones. Rather they are the titled The People versus Jones, or the State versus Jones, or the United States versus Jones in federal criminal cases. Crimes or wrongs against we the people, as well as the individual victims. Criminal law and tort law and both methods of regulating our lives together and they share some goals. Each involves some degree of blame and each includes sanctions, but only criminal law is based fundamentally on moral values about what we owe each other, and then imposes state blame and punishment for the gross failures of obligation that occur all too often. State blame and punishment are the most severe impositions of state power, because they evol, involve official public blame and stigma and the infliction of punishment, that is, the infliction of pain, because the offender deserves it. Because criminal blame and punishment are such severe inflictions, there is a different level of burden of proof in civil and criminal law. In civil law, the party bringing the suit must prove the wrongful injury by a standard known as the preponderance of the evidence, which is interpreted to mean more likely than not. In other words, if the evidence slightly favors the plaintiff, that is, the party who is seeking compensation, the plaintiff wins and the defendant must pay damages. In criminal law by contrast, the state must prove that the defendant's behavior was criminal beyond a reasonable doubt, this does not mean beyond any doubt. That degree of certainty is beyond human capacities in most cases. But before the state can impose blame and punishment, it must demonstrate with a very high degree of certainty that the defendant's conduct was criminal. We impose such a high degree of burden on the prosecution because the consequences are so potentially grave to the defendant. We favor the error of acquitting the guilty to the error of convicting the innocent. The differing levels of burden of proof thus reflect how much more is at stake in a criminal prosecution than in a private civil lawsuit. Let's now draw an important distinction between two ways of characterizing criminal law. The first is procedural. Those rules and practices that guide the investigation and adjudication of criminal guilt. These rules such as the right to remain silent and the right to be provided with an attorney are familiar to most people. They're extremely important and help protect citizens from unjustified state interventions in their lives but they are not the main subject of this lecture. Rather, in the remaining time, we'll be talking about what is known as the substantive criminal law. Those rules that define what behaviour is criminal and deserves state blame and punishment. These rules are codify by the state and federal legislatures and are then interpreted and applied by courts. In the United States, England, Canada, and other countries originally influenced by English law, we have what is known as a common law legal system. Judicial interpretation is far more important to the development of the law in common law countries than in so-called continental legal systems, and our process is considerably more adversarial. Despite these procedural differences however, the definitions of crimes and defenses in common law and continental penal codes are, on the whole, remarkably similar. Most criminal cases in the United States are disposed of by plea agreements, so-called plea bargains, by which the defendant agrees to plead guilty, thus saving the government the time, trouble, and expense of trials. In exchange, the prosecution usually agrees to a lesser charge or recommends a less severe sentence than might have been imposed if the defendant were convicted at trial. Virtually all judges routinely accept such prosecutorial recommendations. In our system, about 98% of federal criminal cases, and about 94% of state cases, are resolved in this way, and thus trials are a rarity compared to peer nations. In the United States, the rules of substantive criminal law are simply the backdrop in the shadow of which the prosecution and defense bargain. Now, let's talk about justifying state blame and punishment. I have said that criminal law's special province is the infliction of state blame, stigma, and punishment on wrong doers. Such infliction is intentional and thus raises the immediate question of how the state can justify such harsh treatment. After all, intentional pain infliction morally requires justification if anything does. What goals justify such state action? The most fundamental answers are that, the criminal law aims to do justice by giving wrongdoers what they deserve, and it seeks to control crime in two ways. By deterring would be wrongdoers from committing crimes, and by imprisoning criminals who would be dangerous if they were at large in the community. Let us consider both of these goals, giving people what they deserve and crime control in a bit more detail. The technical term for the justification for inflicting blame and punishment because the defender deserves it is retribution, which is also known as just deserts. Retribution is a theory of justice that aims to give people what the deserve. It should not be confused with imposing revenge, which is a common psychological desire when people have been wronged but that is not a justification of punishment. According to a retributive theory of justice, it is simply right in itself to give people what they deserve. Retribution is therefore, no different from similar theories of justice in property law, in which people are thought to deserve fair compensation for the fruits of their labor. Or contracts, in which people deserve compensation if others break their promises. In general, in the United States we believe that no one should be pun, blamed and punished criminally unless they deserved it. It would this be unfair and unjustified to convict people known to be innocent, even if doing so increased cri, crime control. We also believe that people should not be punished more than they deserve. Thus, desert is a necessary condition before the state can impose blame and punishment and it sets a limit beyond which punishment would be unjust. Interestingly, there is substantial experimental and other empirical evidence to suggest that most people are strongly disposed to blame and punish those who deserve such treatment, even if the imposition of punishment is costly and seems to produce no other good consequence. The questions raised by this justification of retribution are, when people deserve criminal blame and punishment rather than some other response, and how much blame and punishment is deserved for specific types of criminal conduct. Crime control is a justification that aims directly to produce the good consequence of cost effectively reducing crime. Although crime can be controlled by many means other than the threatened or actual imposition of layman punishment, such imposition may be especially effective because the imposition is so painful. The goal is not to prevent all crime, such a system which is anyway probably a fantasy would be too harsh and intrusive on liberty. The question then is, when the criminal law is the most appropriate means to control behavior consistent with other values we endorse, such as, the right to liberty, to pursue our projects without undue state infurents, interference and the right to be free of blame and punishment unless they are genuinely deserved. Although retributive and crime control goals can be complementary, sometimes they can conflict. For example, we might believe that a criminal defendant's mental abnormality makes the defendant less blame worthy because the abnormality interferes with his capacity to use his reason. Thus perhaps, the defendant deserves a somewhat lesser sentence than other defendants who committed the same crime but had no mitigating condition. On the other hand, the same abnormality might also make the defendant particularly dangerous, and thus a candidate for even longer than usual sentence. Balancing such goals can be a daunting task, as we shall see when we discuss sentencing later. This is a good time to take a break, when we continue, we will turn to the principles that guide the definitions of crimes. [MUSIC]
