Resolving Criminal Cases without Having a Trial

In recent years, one objective of people working in the field of criminal law has been to come up with methods of resolving criminal cases without having an actual trial. One reason for this is simply to relieve the pressure on the court system, which is backed up with an ever-increasing number of cases. Another reason is to give people who have run afoul of the system a chance to turn their lives around without having the stresses of a trial and the traditional punishment if they're found guilty.

One step in attaining this objective is provided by the extrajudicial sanctions programs set out in the Youth Criminal Justice Act. The Youth Criminal Justice Act is a federal statute that establishes procedures and penalties for young people ... between the ages of 12 and 17, inclusive - who are charged with having committed criminal offenses. The extrajudicial sanctions program established in this statute allows non-violent, first-time young offenders an alternative to going through the normal trial processes.

The extrajudicial sanctions program of the Youth Criminal Justice Act is one of the best-known programs aimed at providing certain sorts of offenders options to going through the court system. A similar sort of program is now available to adult offenders in some situations. Known as an adult diversion program , this new alternative to the normal processes is available to adults accused of minor crimes who have no criminal record or who haven't previously benefited from diversion programs. Though it's administered differently from the alternative measures programs of the Youth Criminal Justice Act, its goals and results are substantially the same.

Other experiments in this area deal exclusively with Canada's Aboriginal peoples. Perhaps you have heard of sentencing circles or healing circles as alternative ways of dealing with Aboriginal criminals. These attempts to use traditional methods are sometimes employed in Aboriginal communities to resolve conflicts, redress wrongs, and, hopefully, rehabilitate offenders. The underlying idea here is that a process in keeping with the values and traditions of the Aboriginal community, and administered by the community, will be more likely to rehabilitate criminals than will a process that seems foreign and external to those accused of offences.