Criminal law is the body of rules and statutes defining the offences against the community at large. It regulates how suspects are investigated charged and tried. The law also provides the punishments for convicted offenders. This is also termed as penal law.
In the broadest sense the term criminal law is used to include all that is involved in the administration of justice. In this sense it embraces three different fields. Substantive criminal law, criminal procedure and the special problems in administration and enforcement of criminal justice.
Substantive criminal laws define particular crimes :
In contrast criminal procedure describes the process through which the criminal laws are enforced or it establishes rules for the presentation of crime. For example, the law prohibiting murder in a substantive criminal law. The manner in which government enforces this substantive law through the gathering of evidence and prosecution is generally considered a procedural matter.
In criminal law, punishment in allowed due to the wrongful intent involved in the crime. A punishment such as incarceration seeks to give any victim involved retribution against the offender. Dater the criminal from future criminal acts and hopefully rehabilitates the offender. This is distinguished from civil law. which seeks to compensate the injured party rather than punish the wrongdoer.
Justifications for punishment typically take five forms.
1. Retributive
2. Deterrence
3. Preventive
4. Rehabilitative on
5. Institutionary
Elements of Crime :
Most crimes consist of two broad elements means real and actus reus.
Mens rea: The key to understanding the reasoning behind most criminal statutes is to first understand what the term mens rea means. In Latin, it means a guilty mind and the criminal concept behind it in that in order to be convicted of a crime.
A suspect must have acted with an intent or purpose that makes him or her morally blameworthy. Although you won’t find the terms mens rea in most criminal statutes. Most crimes require proof of a positive state of mind such as intent, recklessness, or willful blindness. However, it doesn’t matter whether you know that what you are doing was a crime, it only matters that you had the intent to commit that act. The corollary to this of course is that if you did commit a crime without intending to root instance, by mistake then you do not have a guilty mind, and in most cases you cannot be convicted [remembering of course that it is your lawyer’s duty to prove that you had an innocent mind at the time you acted.
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