3 December 2012 Court Proceedings The best part about criminal procedures here in the United States is that criminal defendants have a lot of protections and guarantees. They have the guarantees of due process, equal protection under the laws, the right to have legal counsel present, the right to confront witnesses, the right to a jury trial, and the right to not testify against themselves. In the movie and in real life we see this all the time.
For example the way due process was portrayed in the movie was the way that all the information that was against the boys they had the right to have the documents that had the information against them. All defendants get the same protection regardless of the acts they have committed, in the movie the boys had the right to have a lawyer, they just couldn’t afford one so that’s why Billy had to call his uncle.
Confronting witnesses was the exact act that Uncle Vinny did when he was almost out of hope, he managed to cause doubts in the jury’s eyes when he showed them that the old woman was nearly blind and when the other two men also began questioning what they had really seen. The boys also had the right to trial by jury, which just means that the judge doesn’t convict the defendant, the jury does instead.
The last right defendants have is the right to not testify against themselves, in the movie that was the first thing the boys shouldn’t have done because right away they admitted to a crime that they did not do. Moving on to some of the key points and the purpose, criminal procedure deals with the set of rules which the government enforces law.
