During the 1990's, medical euthanasia and "physician assisted suicide" became controversial. The latter was variously criminalized, decriminalized and legalized. This dissertation analyses some of the factors leading to changes in de jure and de facto criminal law. With special reference to the 1990s criminal trials of Dr. Jack Kevorkian (a retired pathologist who became a self-styled "Dr. Death"), it considers the creation and implementation of criminal law regarding medically hastened death in Michigan. I examine the social roles of chief prosecutors, judges, juries, family members of the decedents, and the media. This method of analysis presents a unique opportunity to study key players and how they may have influenced (or been influenced by) the court processes during the emergence of an important issue in a specific jurisdiction. The longitudinal study focuses upon one defendant in one locale, but also examines different statutes and cases. Thus, it becomes possible to scrutinize alternative legal theories of the prosecutions of the cases, along with the development of law in the books and law in action. Anchoring this study is Kevorkian's 1999 trial culminating in a conviction for euthanasia murder and related drug delivery charges. A landmark was a tape-recording of the consensual euthanasia, which Kevorkian made for broadcast on national television, and whose use by the media, the prosecution, and by Kevorkian, proved highly revealing. In short, the thesis supplies a detailed empirical and analytic examination of critical legal, social and political issues in the public response to physician assisted suicide and medical euthanasia. One principal conclusion is that in those Kevorkian cases in which the politics of death and the emerging assisted suicide debate were factors, the result was acquittal by juries. In sharp contrast, when the trial was limited to the elements of the crime, and eliminated questions of patient suffering and the families, the prosecution obtained a conviction.

Judge and Jury: Towards a New Division of Labour in Criminal Trials

The politics of euthanasia and assisted suicide : a comparative case study of emerging criminal law and the criminal trials of Jack 'Dr. Death' Kevorkian

Lacey, Wells and Quick Reconstructing Criminal Law Text and Materials: Criminal Laws in Context

INTRODUCTION It is a truism to say that while jury trial remains an article of faith in England and Wales and a number of other common law jurisdictions, there has been a fairly constant decline in the frequency of jury trial throughout the common law world. Certain countries have abolished the jury altogether, others are circumscribing its use and even in England and Wales more and more cases have been deemed triable by magistrates' courts instead of by jury.\" Attention has focused in recent years on the cost and delay involved when defendants elect to be tried in the Crown Court rather than in the magistrates' court. When the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice first proposed that the defence right of election be abolished in 1993, there was an outcry against the idea. But the proposal was made again earlier this year in the Narey report on delay in the criminal justice system, and the new Lord Chancellor appears to have revived the idea.f Although there remains strong opposition to this proposal, the chances are that the right to choose jury trial will ultimately lapse.

background

Trying criminal cases without juries.

There has been a lot of material devoted to the high-profile, capital murder trial of Casey Anthony. Americans were (and some may certainly argue, are still) invested in this story of the murder of a little girl and her young, out-of-control mother. The trial proceedings and not-guilty verdict only ignited their passion and outrage all the more. I use the articulations of whiteness narrated by the prosecution and defence as the focal point from which to begin my analysis, by looking at how both victim and perpetrator statuses were ascribed to (the body of) Casey Anthony. Considering how different narrations intersect with each other, the social discourses that shape our understanding of those narratives, and the by-products of that intersection, I look at the courtroom constructions of Casey Anthony along multiple dimensions of identity including race and gender to examine the role of privilege in fostering the jury's final verdict. In particular, I use the Casey Anthony case to examine how the defendant was framed through discourses of whiteness and femaleness/femininity. These discourses were themselves subject to different interpretations and functions by the prosecution and defence in the two prominent texts describing the case of State of Florida v. Casey Anthony: Presumed Guilty – Casey Anthony: The Inside Story by Jose Baez and Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony by Jeff Ashton. Through close readings of these texts, which together form the bulk of my data set for this thesis, I assess how one narrative upholds an assumed and hegemonic social norm concerning the un-criminalised status of white womanhood, while the other narrative serves to destabilise or reposition that norm by " trashing " Casey Anthony's white, feminine identity.

Constructing whiteness : identity and imagery in the legal battle of State of Florida v. Casey Anthony

/pdf/le-jury-rempart-de-haute-securite-ou-simple-muret-3eflppcd19.pdf

Judge and Jury: Towards a New Division of Labour in Criminal Trials

Citations

The politics of euthanasia and assisted suicide : a comparative case study of emerging criminal law and the criminal trials of Jack 'Dr. Death' Kevorkian

Lacey, Wells and Quick Reconstructing Criminal Law Text and Materials: Criminal Laws in Context

Trying criminal cases without juries.

Constructing whiteness : identity and imagery in the legal battle of State of Florida v. Casey Anthony

Le jury: Rempart de haute sécurité ou simple muret ?

Related Papers (5)

The American Criminal Jury

A Brief Thought on the Revised Act of Korean Jury Trial System

Transplanting Jury Trials in South Korean Legal Soils: Comparative Analysis with Jury Trials in the United States

Is the jury trial a lottery

Jury Sentencing in Criminal Trial