Cleveringa lecture 2016

It takes a village to get someone into prison

Le Comité Cleveringa de Montréal organise une nouvelle commémoration du célèbre discours du professeur Cleveringa du 26 novembre 1940.

Organisée à l'initiative de Jo-Anne Wemmers et avec la collaboration du CICC, du CRDP, de l'Université de Leiden et du CAANS, la conférence Cleveringa aura lieu le lundi 21 novembre 2016, à 17h00, au Carrefour des arts et des sciences (Salle C-3061, Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, 3150 rue Jean-Brillant).

Pauline Schuyt, professeure de droit pénal à l'Université de Leiden, prononcera une conférence en anglais intitulée « It takes a village to get someone into prison» suivie d'une discussion menée par le professeur émérite Robert Kok.

Pour écouter cette conférence.

Summary:

Criminal Law is about two things: an action that can be qualified as a criminal offence and an accused person, who is criminally liable for that action. When sentencing, the judge has to do justice to both aspects. Two recent, seemingly contradictory, developments show that it is not easy for judges to do justice to both of these aspects. On one hand, there is a development to increase consistency in sentencing, resulting in sentencing guidelines for the public prosecutors and judges. These are mainly based on characteristics of the criminal action and the severity of the crime. On the other hand, judges seem to pay more and more attention to the fact that an accused person is more than just someone who did something wrong: He is a person, someone who may or may not have a job, a family, social ties, often with medical- psychological and/or developmental problems. And those characteristics may have contributed to his delinquent behavior. More and more judges try to take into account those specific characteristics of the accused person, when choosing a sentence and create, within the boundaries of the law, a sentence that contributes to solving the problems that may cause his criminal behavior. From that point of view, the severity of the crime is less important than the personality of the accused person. In this lecture, Prof. Pauline Schuyt will talk about these two developments and she will answer the question what this means for the three last phases of the criminal procedure: choosing a sentence, executing the sentence and the lives of those who served their sentence.

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