|
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Vol 6, No 4 (2016): The Politics and Jurisprudence of Group Offending
(October-December)
Issue edited by Anthony Amatrudo (Middlesex University. School of Law)
Anthony Amatrudo. Applying Analytic Reasoning to Clarify Intention and Responsibility in Joint Criminal Enterprise Cases.
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2847796
This paper argues that both criminologists and lawyers need a far more philosophically robust account of joint action, notably as it relates to technical matters of intentionality and responsibility when dealing with joint criminal enterprise cases. Criminologists are often unable see beyond cultural explanations that are ill-suited to understanding matters of action. Law seems wedded to mystical notions of foresight. As regards the law there seems common agreement that joint enterprise prosecutions tend to over-criminalise secondary parties. This paper suggests that the current discussions around joint criminal enterprise will benefit from a critical engagement with analytical philosophy. The paper will examine a series of technical accounts of shared commitment and intention in order to explain the problems of joint criminal enterprise (multi-agent criminal activity).
Peter Squires. Voodoo Liability: Joint Enterprise Prosecution as an Aspect of Intensified Criminalisation.
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2871266
Following the collapse of a number of 'gang-related' prosecutions in England and Wales from the late 1990s, the police and Crown Prosecution Service revived a practice of 'joint enterprise' prosecution. Joint enterprise was a historic common law principle holding co-defendants equally responsible for offences which appeared to evince a common collective purpose. Unfortunately, over time, a combination of (apparently 'wayward') judicial interpretation, and police and prosecutorial practice contributed to a lowering of the threshold of 'joint liability' such that involvement in a gang, and 'bad character' evidence admitted at trial were taken to imply the 'foreseeability' of violent offences. The apparent tendency of the police to over-define criminal activity by young black males as 'gang-related' has led to the construction of a spurious and 'voodoo criminal liability' leading to the intensified criminalisation (over-prosecution and over-incarceration) of young black men. Between the first presentations of the paper and the written version which follows, the law was amended (R v Jogee 2016) but, as will be argued, not in a way which fundamentally changes the construction of 'joint liability' discussed here.
Michael Welch. Clinical Torture: Drifting in the Atrocity Triangle.
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2871636
So as to immunize the Bush White House against cases involving the abuse of detainees held under the war on terror, its legal advisors warped laws prohibiting torture. More recently, evidence reveals that the CIA colluded with the American Psychological Association (APA) to rewrite an ethics policy that would enable psychologists to participate in harsh interrogations as well as torture. The shift from consultant to that of a hands-on operational psychologist marks a significant development in what is described herein as clinical torture. Moreover, the adoption of a new role in the interrogation and torture program demonstrates the dynamics of drift in the atrocity triangle that features perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Specifically, psychologists progress from bystanders to becoming perpetrators in ways that abandon their obligation to do no harm. This article explores the nuances of the atrocity triangle and the atrocity-producing situation set forth by Stanley Cohen and Robert Jay Lifton. Implications to the prosecution of group offenders are discussed throughout.
Adam Edwards. Actors, Scripts, Scenes and Scenarios: Key Trends in Policy and Research on the Organisation of Serious Crimes.
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2875318
The problem of ‘transnational organised crime’ has become a prominent issue in international affairs over the past two decades. Official constructions of the problem identify threats to public safety resulting from the greater mobility of people and goods across national borders and the exploitation of this mobility by ‘organised crime groups’ (OCGs). In turn, this has led to the generation of a new genre of policy-oriented learning, the ‘threat assessment’, which informs and legitimises the cross-border co-ordination of preventive interventions against such groups. This article considers arguments over the conceptual and methodological value of these threat assessments and their central preoccupation with criminal actors. An alternative approach is advanced, concerned with the ‘scripts’ involved in the commissioning of serious crimes and their facilitating conditions or ‘scenes’. This approach can also identify future ‘scenarios’, providing less certain but more satisficing grounds for anticipating and governing the organisation of serious crimes.
Don Crewe. Gang: Culture. Eidos and Process.
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2875344
The terms ‘gang’ and ‘culture’ are used with varying degrees of (im)precision in different fields of academe, media, public, and policy; and this paper will contend that this circumstance provides a fertile ground for the reification of these two concepts. It will suggest that this phenomenon of reification has already taken hold in various parts of the study of gangs more recently, and in cultural criminology in a more established way. This paper will deconstruct the concepts ‘gang’ and ‘culture’ and attempt to reconstruct them in a way that opens up the discourse of ‘gangs’ and ‘culture’ such that better sense may be made of the phenomena that these terms are intended to evoke.
Regina E. Rauxloh. Group Offending in Mass Atrocities: Proposing a Group Violence Strategies Model for International Crimes.
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2875712
Most research in mass atrocities, especially genocide, is conducted at the macro level exploring how mass violence is instigated, planned and orchestrated at the level of the state. This paper on the other hand suggests that more research of the individual perpetrator is needed to complement the understanding of mass atrocities. The author develops therefore a new model, the group violence strategies model. This model combines various traditional criminological models of group offending and proposes a three stage analysis, looking at the individual aggressor, the actions within the offender group and the actions between offender group and victim group to understand better the phenomenon that ordinary people commit unspeakable crimes.
James Hardie-Bick. Escaping the Self: Identity, Group Identification and Violence.
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2875737
This article draws on the early work of Erich Fromm. In Escape from Freedom Fromm (1969 [1941]) directly addressed the psychological mechanisms of escape modern individuals employ to protect themselves from feelings of ontological insecurity and existential estrangement. The article builds on Fromm’s analysis by discussing the significance of his escape mechanisms for understanding the dynamic psychological attractions of identifying with entitative groups. Fromm’s work will be discussed in relation to Hogg’s recent work on uncertainty-identity theory. The aim of the article is to examine the advantages of combining Fromm’s psychoanalytic analysis with Hogg’s uncertainty-identity theory and to highlight the potential this approach has for understanding why groups engage in violent and destructive behaviour.
Antje du Bois-Pedain: Violent Dynamics: Exploring Responsibility-Attribution for Harms Inflicted During Spontaneous Group Violence.
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2875780
Violent encounters between groups of individuals often leave one or more of the participants dead, and it may be clear from the evidence that the physical cause of death was set by the single, deliberate act of one of the participants only. When this happens, the question arises whether, and how, responsibility for the fatal act and/or for its consequences can be attributed to other participants in the punch-up. Criminal law has long sought – and found – ways of holding others apart from the direct agent responsible for the harms caused in such encounters, although the legal constructions used differ between legal systems and often change significantly over time even within the same jurisdiction. This paper investigates the appropriateness of different criminal-law responses to these cases from two directions: first, by exploring the possible doctrinal grounds within the criminal law for attributing responsibility for the fatal act/outcome to all participants; and then by investigating the extent to which these responsibility-ascriptions are supported or challenged by insights from psychological studies of group action.
|
