Comparative Criminal Procedure: A Casebook Approach (Comparative Law Series)

This casebook on comparative criminal procedure presents a topical approach to the subject, focusing on the roles of public prosecutors, police, victims, and the defense attorneys in the investigation of criminal cases and trials up through the judgment phase. Separate chapters are dedicated to search and seizure; wiretapping and other privacy invasions; the interrogation; exclusionary rules; hearsay and the right to confrontation; the presumption of innocence at the trial stage; and the roles of professional judges, juries, lay assessors and magistrates in the decisions relating to guilt and sentencing.

Comparative Criminal Procedure also includes a chapter on alternative, simplified, abbreviated, and consensual forms of resolving criminal cases—some similar to American plea-bargaining. Thaman presumes a knowledge of American criminal procedure in the sections that focus on important cases from the European Court of Human Rights; the United Kingdom; and the author’s translations of cases and statutory texts from decisions of the high courts in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia.

Unique in Thaman’s approach is his use of high court jurisprudence in English translation to elucidate the European approach to important, and often controversial, areas of criminal procedure, as well as his linking of criminal procedure with its roots in substantive criminal law. Thaman looks at the early reactions to crimes committed flagrantly or in secret as the historical roots of modern criminal procedure. The approaches of the old inquisitorial system and the use of torture to solve circumstantial evidence crimes are also presented. Special emphasis is placed on how the presence of lay judges in the form of juries or mixed courts has impacted the development of the law.

Stephen Thaman is a professor of law and Co-Director of the Center for International and Comparative Law at St. Louis University School of Law.