ABSTRACT
Scandals in criminal justice in the Western liberal democracies today tend to be linked not only with high-profile miscarriages of justice, with outspoken comments by eccentric or controversial judges, with false convictions and the imprisonment or execution of the innocent, but also with standing abuses such as the inappropriate judicial treatment of the mentally ill, or the unfair aspects of standard trial procedures, when they are said to be inherently biased or discriminatory against women or ethnic minorities. Such problems are serious, but the agenda of the theories critical of modernity in criminal law is more probing than this. It is not just that the idealised theory of equal justice for all sometimes comes into conflict with the practice in the criminal courts. Radical critics claim that even in theory the system of criminal justice in modern legal systems does not stand up to examination, because it rests on internally inconsistent foundations and flatly contradictory attitudes towards justice. This constitutes a fundamental challenge to the principles of criminal justice as discussed over the last three chapters. In this final chapter, I will critically assess this challenge.
