DAY69

¡¡¡¡Reading comprehension

¡¡¡¡Direction: In this part, there are four passages followed by questions or unfinished statements, each with four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the on
e that you think is the correct answer.

¡¡¡¡Passage 1Justice and injustice in criminal adjudication are more than abstract concepts; in modern America each term conjures up its own paradigm image. Justice occurs in a somber courtroom where a robed reach a legal decision. Injustice is a bloodthirsty mob bearing lit torches, intimidating on the doors of the jail desperate to wreak revenge upon the suspected wrongdoer held within.

¡¡¡¡This image of injustice provides many normative insights. One that courts have frequently drawn is that in criminal adjudication emotion is unalterably opposed to reason and thus to justice itself. Taking this principle a step farther, courts have urged that the more a legal issue might provoke popular rage, the harder courts must work to insulate the legal decision from emotive influence. The classic example is capital sentencing, an occasion which evokes strong emotions. Here the Supreme Court has worked to ensure that ¡°any decision to impose the death sentence be, and appear to be, based on reason rather than caprice or emotion.¡± The Court has, over a period of years, undertaken an extensive regulatory project aimed at suppressing emotive influence in capital cases by mandating rationalistic ruled to guide sentencing. This insistence upon the injustice of all emotion stems from a misconception of emotion and its influence upon criminal punishment. Although the mobª²atª²jail scene illustrates that anger can lead to injustice, it does not support the proposition that all decisions influenced by anger are morally tainted. Anger can be justified and have moral decisionª²making is complex; untangling it involves a close examination of emotion than the law has generally undertaken.

¡¡¡¡This has obvious significance for criminal law as a form of social concord. But it is also important for its alleged role as a restraint on power. Criminal law does little or nothing to restrict the efforts of the various professionals mow responsible for preventing and reshaping deviant behavior. Rather it is them who have colonized its territory, as in the welfare of the professional authority that legitimates them and because they enter into the enabling role of the state as dispenser of benefits. This is to say nothing of other forms of market and bureaucratic power and social control exercised by groups other than government. Under these conditions the alleged protections of the criminal law seem premised on a nineteenth century view of the state and society; those interested in the law in the twentieth century must look to the potential of administrative law rather than to criminal law. Either way critical writers would be wasting their time here.

¡¡¡¡Whilst there is a lot of truth in this picture of the decli

ÔðÈα༭:gaoyan