Chapter 3 Criminal Law

All the law is divided into two parts: civil law and criminal law.

Civil law is the kind of law we have been discussing in the preceding chapters of this book. It
concerns the enforcement of contracts among individuals and the civil wrongs that individuals
commit against each other. In brief, civil law deals primarily with the legal controversies that
arise from the activities of individuals in their relationships with other individuals.

The Nature of Criminal Law

In this chapter we are going to discuss criminal law. Through the years legal experts have tried
to define criminal law but, as yet, have no definition that everybody can agree upon. One
authority defines criminal law as “any act which is forbidden by law”. That is a satisfactory
definition of criminal law to a lawyer, but it doesn’t tell those who have not been trained as
lawyers much abaout the real nature of criminal law.

One of the other reasons that makes criminal law so hard to define is the fact that there are
some acts which human beings commit against each other that may be both criminal and civil.
This occurs in the category of civil wrongs or torts which we studied in the previous chapters.

Example: Your are Mayor of Centerville. Al Houghton, the editor of the Centerville Astonisher, the
hometown newspaper, accuses you of accepting a bribe in return for a political favor. You sue
him for libel and prove that his charges are untrue. You are awarded $5000 for the damage to
your reputation. Your suit against Houghton is a civil suit, and the action which your lawyer files
for you is an action in tort for the civil wrong that Houghton has commited against you. But libel
is also a criminal act. Hence, the prosecuting attorney for the county in which Centerville is
locatied can also bring an action against Houghton for the criminal act of libel. If he is successful,
Houghtonmay also have to spend some time in prison. There are some acts which can be both
civil in nature and are also punishable as crimes. This is one of the difficulties of defining criminal
law.

Instead of attempting to define criminal law, let’s devote this chapter to a discussion of the law
of crimes. A richer understanding of the nature of criminal law will be acquired in this way.

One of the chief differences between civil and criminal law is the fact that mostof the criminal
law inthis country today is codified, or written. That is, it is written into what is called the
criminal code, either of the state or the federal government. Stating it another way, there are
probably few commo-law crimes in any of our states today. The common law is often the basis
for a judge’s decision in a civil case but seldom in criminal case. This does not mean that the
common law didn’t have anything to say about crimes. Itdid, and many of our written stateand
federal laws have their origin in English Common Law.

When the early lawmakers of this nation sat down to draw up our laws, they were conscious of
the wrongs they had suffered from George III, King of England, and they knew about the other
oppressive rulers who had preceded him. They were resolved that the rights of the individual in
America would be protected from the rule of the government. In order to do this, they insisted on
writting out the crimes for which the individual could be punished by the state, or government.
In this way, no ruling power could convict a man for a crime which wasn’t clearly set forth in the
written law of the land. Thus, it was to protect the individual against the possible dictatorship of
the government that our laws relating to crimes have all been written. No agency of government
and no man acting in behalf of the state can prosecute an individual for a crime that isn’t
included in the written criminal law of the state or the federal government.