Process
Usually the sentence comes after a process in which the deciding organ is put in condition to evaluate whether the analysed conduct complies or not with the legal systems, and eventually which aspects of the conduct might regard which laws. Depending on respective systems, the phases that precede the sentence may vary relevantly and the sentence can be resisted (by both parties) up to a given degree of appeal. The sentence issued by the Appeal court of highest admitted degree immediately becomes the definitive sentence, as well as the sentence issued in minor degrees that is not resisted by the condemned or by the accusator (or is not resisted within a given time). The sentence usually has to be rendered of public domain (publicatio) and in most systems it has to be accompanied by the reasons for its content (a sort of story of the juridical reflections and evaluations that the judging organ used to produce it).
A sentence (even a definitive one) can be annulled in some given cases, that many systems usually pre-determine. The most frequent case is related to irregularities found ex-post in the procedure, the most éclatant is perhaps in penal cases, when a relevant (often discharging) proof is discovered after the definitive sentence.
In most systems the definitive sentence is unique, in the precise sense that no one can be judged more than once for the same action (apart, obviously, from appeal resistance).
Sentences are in many systems a source of law, as an authoritative interpretation of the law in front of concrete cases, thus quite as an extension of the ordinary formal documental system.
The sentence is generally issued by the judge in the name of (or on the behalf of) the superior authority of the state.
Read more about this topic: Sentence (law)
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.... Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”
—Joseph Heller (b. 1923)
“Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.”
—Robert Bly (b. 1926)