Montreal Cleveringa Lecture 2016 “It takes a village to get someone into prison”

The Cleveringa Committee of Montreal holds a new commemoration of the famous speech of Professor Cleveringa on November 26, 1940.

The conference is an initiative of Professor Jo-Anne Wemmers, organized in collaboration with the ICCC, the CRDP, the Leiden University and the CAANS.

Pauline Schuyt, criminal law professor, Leiden University, will give a lecture on the theme “It takes a village to get someone into prison”, which will be followed by a discussion led by the professor emerit Robert Kok.

To watch this conference on Youtube.

Summary:

Criminal Law is about two things: an action that can be qualified as a criminal offence and an accused person, who is criminally liable for that action. When sentencing, the judge has to do justice to both aspects. Two recent, seemingly contradictory, developments show that it is not easy for judges to do justice to both of these aspects. On one hand, there is a development to increase consistency in sentencing, resulting in sentencing guidelines for the public prosecutors and judges. These are mainly based on characteristics of the criminal action and the severity of the crime. On the other hand, judges seem to pay more and more attention to the fact that an accused person is more than just someone who did something wrong: He is a person, someone who may or may not have a job, a family, social ties, often with medical- psychological and/or developmental problems. And those characteristics may have contributed to his delinquent behavior. More and more judges try to take into account those specific characteristics of the accused person, when choosing a sentence and create, within the boundaries of the law, a sentence that contributes to solving the problems that may cause his criminal behavior. From that point of view, the severity of the crime is less important than the personality of the accused person. In this lecture, Prof. Pauline Schuyt will talk about these two developments and she will answer the question what this means for the three last phases of the criminal procedure: choosing a sentence, executing the sentence and the lives of those who served their sentence.