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Adversarial vs. accusatorial

Adversarial vs. accusatorial

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Which procedural system do you favour, or is there little material difference?

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Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
Which procedural system do you favour, or is there little material difference?
I prefer advertorial.

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don't the french have judges who perform their own investigations?

don't the middle east countries give more weight to the victim's family's opinion when handing down a sentence?

legal systems seem kind of ossified. they could probably stand a lot of improvement.

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Adversarial seems to make more sense, but I suppose accusatorial must have some advantages.

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Adversarial allows competition of ideas and which makes more sense. Accusatorial is too top-down and automatically pits the accused against an entire system.

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do either claim to produce a consistently more 'just' result?

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Originally posted by eljefejesus
Adversarial allows competition of ideas and which makes more sense.
Perhaps. To a certain extent. But any suggestion that "competition" invariably leads to "truth" is a fallacy. It's a fallacy that leads to injustices and errors in all walks of life. Economics, for example.

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Originally posted by kmax87
do either claim to produce a consistently more 'just' result?
In the accusatorial system, as far as I know, the judge controls the procedure. Therefore the lawyers have less incentive to grandstand, waste time, twist facts outrageously and so on. It seems more efficient from that perspective.

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Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
In the accusatorial system, as far as I know, the judge controls the procedure. Therefore the lawyers have less incentive to grandstand, waste time, twist facts outrageously and so on. It seems more efficient from that perspective.
So as long as you can't buy off your judges and they show a reasonable degree of competence and consistency then alls well. At least its not dependent on the money you can cough up for your defense....

Is innocence presumed under either system?