ISSUES IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

ISSUES IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE - Essay Example 21). In the event that such a situation arises, the judges must ensure proper interpretation of the statute before applying the statute in a case. The interpretation of such statutes is important to ensure proper identification and elimination of any ambiguity in the statute before applying the law in deciding a given case. However, this has never been an easy undertaking to many judges. As a result, in interpreting any statute, they must follow certain rules and procedures contained in the Interpretation Act of 1978. Apart from following the rules and procedures contained in the Interpretation Act of 1978, judges also have certain rules that help them in interpreting a statute with an ambiguity or error. The first rule that judges must apply in the interpretation of any given statute is the literal rule. Normally, under the literal rule, the judges to a case are required to give the statute its ordinary meaning without any amendment. This implies that the statute is taken the way pa rliament has made it without making sense of the law as applied in the case of R v Harris (1836) 7 C & P 446 (Gifford 1990, p. 14). In this case, the defendant was accused of biting the nose the plaintiff’s nose. ... The judges attributed this to the fact that the words stab cut or wound in their literal meaning means there is the use of an instrument. This resulted in the squashing of the defendant’s conviction, as noted by (Sullivan 2007, p.38). The same literal rule was applied in the interpretation of ambiguity, in statute, in Fisher v Bell [1961] 1 QB 394. In this case, the statute the defendant displayed a knife at the window of his shop with a price tag indicating that it was for sale. This is notwithstanding the fact that the statute law criminalized any offer for sale of a flick knife. However, the court quashed the defendant’s conviction on grounds that displaying goods in a shop does not constitute to an ‘offer,’ rather an invitation to treat. The judges also applied the literal rule in the interpretation of Whitely v Chappel (1868) LR 4 QB 147(Solan 2010, p.31). The judges can also apply the golden rule in the interpretation of a statute. The golden rule is mainly applied in the interpretation of a statute where the judges feel that the use of the literal rule may result in absurdity or inconsistency. As such, the event that the judges are convinced that applying the literal rule may result in inconsistency or ambiguity then they are allowed to proceed and apply a secondary meaning of the statute. The application of the golden rule has been demonstrated in a number of cases in the past. One such was in R v Allen (1872) LR 1 CCR 367 in which the defendant was accused of bigamy (Solan 2010, p. 28). The statute at that time prohibited bigamy by maintaining that any person already married cannot marry another person as long as the other partner is still alive. When deciding the case, the judges noted an ambiguity as