United States Court System

Abstract

The court system in the United States serves as a tool to ensure that the society keep certain order and respect the law created by the Legislative and Executive power. The court system will ensure that crimes receive the deserve sanction applying the law (severe or not that severe, depending on the type of the crime) (Siegel L.J., Schmalleger F., Worrall J.L. 2011) How fair is the court system? How the court system that is used in today 's America was created or developed? How it works? A case that was presented by the United States media recently was the case George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman killed a young black boy named Trevon Martin during his community watch period. This case brought a lot of media attention
because the race of the victim and the defendant, and at the same time that media attention, on my personal opinion, had a lot of influence in the case development. Like this case, there is hundred and thousand of cases that are influenced by different situations, and sometime the court is not that fair working cases in courtrooms as is supposed to be. To understand how the system works, it is necessary to understand first where it came from.

Court System The Court: “..critical component of the American criminal justice system.. they determine what should happen to people charged with violating the law” (Siegel L.J., Schmalleger F., Worrall J.L. 2011). In the United States, the courts are defined by the U.S. Justice Department as “an agency or unit” that is part of the judicial branch with the authority to clarify, decide and dismissed cases in controversy between two or more different parties. Basically the main purposes of the court are: upholding the law (the court have an obligation to support, preserve and protect the law), to protect individuals (defend the people 's rights and preserve their liberties), to resolve disputes (clear up disagreements between two private citizen – civil category – or between the government and a person breaking the law – criminal category), and to reinforce social norms (support or strengthen social issues that are not included in the law, but are the standard behaviors) . A court will have the following characteristic in order to be considered a court: Legal Authority by the constitution or a statute, be part of the judicial system and the power to decide without any binding regarding of the case. The United States have a court system that can be characterized as “civilized” to resolve issues of human situations. During the pre-historical ages, a lot of different civilizations, instead of having a government regulated court, they resolved these matters privately, sometime with violence.(Siegel L.J., Schmalleger F., Worrall J.L. 2011) The U.S.
government is a federal state divided by the State and the Federal power. This means that the laws in the U.S are principally made by the federal government, but at the same time the U.S. Government gives freedom to the states to create their own laws. The court system works the same way, with a dual court system, separating the federal courts from the state courts. Sometimes this dual system can create confusion when both laws cross each other. Some examples of state courts are traffic courts, trial courts, appellate courts, and supreme courts. The federal court system has trial courts, appellate courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court. (Siegel L.J., Schmalleger F., Worrall J.L.
2011) The U.S. legal system has been influenced by older systems that were created long before America was discovered. The legal system has been around for centuries, and the oldest legal code that is known was written in 1760 B.C. That code was created by a Babylonian king named Hammurabi and its stronger ideology was “eye for an eye”. In 450 B.C the Roman law created the first non-religious code named the Twelve Tables, and this code also was a savage one. These code are not similar to the one used in in the modern era, but are important to mention them because these civilizations, with the need of a formal direction imposed by a political power, created a system that later on was modified, civilized and transformed into the system that is used in the current time. (Siegel L.J., Schmalleger F., Worrall J.L. 2011) The modern court system in the U.S. was strongly influenced by the creation of the common law. Common law is defined as “something” that happened before, had a resolution in court and has been written down and disseminated to other courts. The common law was originated during the Norman conquest in A.D. 1066 when King William took control over the legal system of the colonized territories. Between 1154 and 1189, King Henry II introduced the national law, a group of judges, selected by the king, that made the decisions all over the country. These judges started to spread their recorded court resolutions and this decisions started to be used by other cases seen in court. This is what is known as precedent, a decision influenced by something that was already decided on a different case. How all of these apply to the United States? America was colonized by the English, and when they arrived to the U.S. they brought, among other things, the common law. In today 's court system, all courts used this system, following other previous decisions or making a decision based on that previous one. (Siegel L.J., Schmalleger F., Worrall J.L. 2011) On today 's court system, the use of the common law is a must, but now the legal code has more regulations, and also the constitution.
The U.S. Code has the federal law, and the states have their own laws. The constitution gives structure on how the government will operate and also gives guidelines on the civil rights. The U.S. has a federal constitution and each state has its own constitution. The Role of the court on these times has two task: adjudication – the process of seeing a case to decide who will be responsible for an alleged criminal offense, and to resolve if this suspect is guilty or not; also other courts will make sure that the lower courts made the right decision (appellate courts)– and oversight the work of the criminal justice system (for example, the police job on the streets). (Siegel L.J., Schmalleger F., Worrall J.L.
2011)

The court system evolved from being a savage “eye for an eye” to being a more complex and develop one. All the previous legal code were fundamentals on how the system works today. Maybe the system is not fair on some cases, definitely is not perfect, but with the years and centuries, the main idea of the current system is to preserve the civil rights of the people and to ensure that the law created by the human is followed by all the citizens, so the order in the civilization can be conserved. On the case of George Zimmerman at the end, the decision was made by a process that has been around for years: the court system; many people is not happy with it, and because the system have upper levels of courts, this case can be seen in one of those levels to ensure that the right decision was made.

References

Larry J. Siegel, Frank Schmalleger, John L. Worrall. (2011) Courts and Criminal Justice in America (1st Edition)