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:
“A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.”
—James Conant (1893–1978)
“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)