Determining the efficacy of the American criminal justice system in upholding and protecting the rights guaranteed under the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution is problematic for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the notion of a singular American criminal justice system is untenable. What we think of as the American criminal justice system is actually many different criminal justice systems, from federal to local, that all work under the same minimum guarantees of rights but that do not necessarily all operate under the same interpretations and enforcement methodologies. Additionally, some of these different systems may have created enhanced minimums that offer more protections than those found under the above mentioned amendments to the U.S. Constitution. A further complication is that the conceptualization of any criminal justice system as a singular system masks the complexity that each individual criminal justice system is actually several systems that operate under different goals and authority to protect society via the enforcement of criminal laws and the punishments imposed for breaking those laws.
The protections guaranteed under the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution apply to the actions of the federal government. Through the Fourteenth Amendment, these protections have been extended to apply to all government actors in the United States, including state, territorial, and local governments. These protections, and the line of court cases interpreting them, create a minimum level to which all government actors must adhere when seeking to investigate, prosecute, and punish violations of the criminal law. What these minimum protections do not do, however, is create a singular American justice system. Rather, they are the principles that inform the variety of criminal justice systems that operate in the states, territories, protectorates, etc. of the United States.
The individual states may have greater protections built into their own constitutions and/or statutes. Further, individual city/town charters and ordinances may also have enhanced protections. So, not only do these different entities of government have their own criminal justice systems, these systems must adhere to not only the minimum protections of the U.S. Constitution, they must follow any enhanced protections that may exists within their own direct hierarchy. Furthermore, these different systems may include differing interpretations as to how particular situations fall under the protections offered in that system, as well as differing means of enforcing the applicable protections. That the U.S. Constitution and federal court decisions give these systems a common baseline for what is protected and for the implementation of those protections does not create a single criminal justice system – it creates the principles to which the individual criminal justice systems must minimally adhere
To further complicate matters, each criminal justice system is not itself a singular system. Each one is several systems that have different responsibilities and powers, some of which are not necessarily in concert with other related systems. Law enforcement, prosecution, the judicial system, and the correction system are all part of a given criminal justice system, but they do not operate as a single, unified system. Each one plays a vital role in protecting the interests of society against malfeasance, the purpose of the criminal law, while also protecting the accused, at least to the minimum level guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution; however, each of these has their own goals and authority. Additionally, in any given criminal justice system, the different systems within it may not share interpretations of how and when the minimum protections will apply, or even the extent of the protections themselves, in that particular criminal justice system.
The sheer complexity of what we might call the American criminal justice system makes determination of the efficacy of the protections found under Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution a difficult task. Some individual criminal justice systems may do well protecting the federally guaranteed minimums, as well as having enhanced protections that are in place, while others may have problems in applying the minimum protections under the U.S. Constitution. And some individual systems may have issues with law enforcement pushing or even circumventing the boundaries of the protections while others may have a judicial system that interprets the protections differently from how they are interpreted in other systems.
Because these systems are not integrated into a singular American criminal justice system, the attempt to determine the overall efficacy of the variety of criminal justice systems in America in following the protections guaranteed by the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution becomes problematic. The failures, or even the successes, of any one system should not be imputed to all systems operating under the same guiding principles.
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