Dressler Criminal Procedure, Investigating Crime

The aim of this book is to delve into the impact of the Information and Communications Technologies in the criminal prevention and investigation, by addressing the state of the art of different measures and its implementation in different legal systems vis à vis the protection of human rights. Yet this research not only pursues a diagnostic goal but furthermore aims at providing a reconstruction of this problematic area in light of modern, human rights-oriented notion of criminal justice. This broadens the scope of this investigation, which encompasses both unprecedented safeguards to traditional, or anyway widely recognized individual rights and the emergence of new rights, such as the right to informational self-determination, and the right to information technology privacy.

This book deals with the role and the protection of third parties in criminal proceedings. Starting from a comparative-law definition of formal parties in criminal proceedings based on seven domestic jurisdictions, this research focuses on the increasing impact of criminal investigations and criminal trials on different categories of third parties, i.e. those individuals who, without being suspected or accused of a criminal offence, are involved in criminal investigations and trials. The complex features of this topic require a further analysis from another comparative perspective that looks at the protection of victims and third parties at the levels of international and supranational law. Particular attention is firstly be devoted to the acknowledgment of a set of procedural safeguards to victims and individuals other than formal participants in criminal proceedings by means of the enormous contribution made by international human rights courts, with a specific focus on the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Regarding victims in particular, their multifaceted status are also examined from the viewpoint of international criminal justice as well. The European scenario, moreover, allows for further deepening of the role and the procedural guarantees granted to third parties and victims from the viewpoint of EU law in relation to the area of freedom, security and justice, in which additional human rights challenges emerge in the field of transnational criminal justice. Comparison shall at all levels be carried out in the light of the enormous transformations due to the digital transition, which has brought about unbelievable changes in every area of mankind's life, including criminal justice. Ever newer tools, indeed, govern procedural activities, and although unprecedented investigative measures allow for increasingly accurate fact-finding, new risks also arise, including those vis-à-vis third parties whose procedural rights risk to be inevitably infringed.

This book examines the lived experienes of death penalty defense lawyers and how they created a legal culture of resistance to the death penalty. It argues that an important social component of death penalty abolition in the state of Colorado was due to the efforts of capital defense attorneys. Specifically, it explores how the death penalty defense lawyers created and embraced a legal culture of resistance which compelled the attorneys to fight tenaciously in order to win life sentences for clients that had committed brutal homicides. A legal culture of resistance does not exist in a vacuum. Thwarting Death traces the lived experience of 15 death penalty defense lawyers from when they were kids all the way up through retirement to explain how a legal culture of resistance forms and lawyers operate within it after being established which in turn can have a massive influence on public policy outside of a courtroom; such as creating a social and political environment conducive to abolishing the death penalty.