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Police Discretion
April 20th , 2008

One aspect of the criminal justice system that has been debated for many years is that of police discretion. Police discretion is defined as the ability of a police officer, a prosecutor, a judge, and a jury to exercise a degree of personal decision making in deciding who is going to be charged or punished for a crime and how they are going to be punished. This basically is saying that there are situations when these law enforcement officers have to use their own personal beliefs and make choices coming from their own morals and ethics. The subject of police discretion was discovered in 1956 by the American Bar Foundation and has been an important problem in criminal justice since that time. When it first started out police discretion was rejected by many people and agencies saying that anything that was not in the rule book was extralegal or a form of police corruption. As the years went on it became something that agencies could deal and......

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Approximate Word Count: 2736
Approximate Pages: 11 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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