Alexander Racini & Associates
International Law Firm
Principles of Criminal Law
We specialize in Criminal Law Cases in the United States, England and in most of the member states of the Commonwealth. Our Firm also practices in more than 70 countries worldwide, some international cases need to be worked in two or more countries when this kind of jurisdiction is required.
The traditional approach to criminal law has been that a crime is an act that is morally wrong. The purpose of criminal sanctions was to make the offender give retribution for harm done and expiate his moral guilt;punishment was to be meted out in proportion to the guilt of the accused. In modern times more rationalistic and pragmatic views have predominated.
Writers of the Enlightenment such as Cesare Beccaria in Italy, Montesquieu and Voltaire in France, Jeremy Bentham in Britain, and P.J.A. von Feuerbach in Germany considered the main purpose of criminal law to be the prevention of crime. With the development of thesocial sciences, there arose new concepts, such as those of the protection of the public and the reform of the offender. Such a purpose can be seen in the German criminal code of 1998, which admonished the courts that the “effects which the punishment will be expected to have on the perpetrator’s future life in society shall be considered.”
In the United States a Model Penal Code proposed by the American Law Institute in 1962 states that an objective of criminal law should be “to give fair warning of the nature of the conduct declared to constitute an offense” and “to promote the correction and rehabilitation of offenders.” Since that time there has been renewed interest in the concept of general prevention, including both the deterrence of possible offenders and the stabilization and strengthening of social norms.
