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Relevance of Free Will in the Criminal Justice

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Relevance of Free Will in the Criminal Justice System
Ja’Nea M. Jenkins
North Carolina Central University

According to the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, free will is the freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention. However, free will is the power of self-determination; one’s ability to choose between courses of action is not completely determined by circumstances. The author personally believes that all human beings have free will; however, this particular issue has become a debate over the years among other authors. Cotton inferred that the criminal law is based on the idea that an individual is responsible for their own actions unless the force was out of their control (Cotton, 2005). Every person has the right to make choices at their own free will; unless someone is threatening another or using force to harm them. In 1988, the court case, Smith v. Armontrout states that the Supreme Court expresses the fact that a “universal and persistent” element of our law the “belief in freedom of the human will and a consequent ability and duty of any normal individual should have the ability to distinguish the difference between good and evil” (Cotton, 2005). Whether or not any human being influences another to act a particular way in violation of the law when the individual knows the difference between right and wrong, both of them should be responsible, due to free will. The allegiance of courts and legislatures to free will has not necessarily reflected their conviction that it is an accurate description of the cause of human behavior (Cotton, 2005). However, they also initiated that any acceptance of determinism could ultimately lead to complete displacement of free will in the criminal law. On the other hand, there are some individuals who believe free will does not exist; however, they behave better if they think it does. Free will is such an important concept in criminal justice because it becomes a factor when sentencing individuals in the court of law. People commit crimes for various reasons and

those reasons lead up to whether or not it was committed by free will or by force. In a Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Journal, the questions asked are: “if we are mechanisms, controlled by our mechanistic brains, then how can we have free will? And if we do not have free will, how can we be held responsible for our own actions? Individuals rely on their mental state for almost everything they do and regardless of free will or not there is an explanation of everything we do (Rhodes, 2008). A psychiatrist, Daniel Wegner believes that free will is an illusion and it isn’t what it seems. Basically, our feeling of consciousness arising into action is normally two different processes; the action and the feeling of the willing to action (Rhodes, 2008). It’s like a second mind in the back on one’s head telling them to do one thing or another, often called a second instinct. Wegner thinks that our thoughts are not the causes of our actions, but rather both our actions and our thoughts are the result of other underlying unconscious mental processes. Instead of being the cause of our actions, our thoughts are previews of our action, a feeling that has played an important part in social interaction as it gives us a perception of ownership. “The thoughts we find coming to our minds in frequent coordination with what we do may be produced by a special system whose job it is to provide us with ongoing verbalizable previews of action (Rhodes, 2008).” Personal individual thoughts are only to show what we will physically do. Since it is unlikely that all living Christians will agree on the issue of free will, we will have to promote unity on this issue as much as possible. This does not involve overlooking important differences, but keeping differences in perspective. Free will has always been an issue set apart from the criminal justice system and within the criminal justice area where there will be many views on it. At the end of each day, regardless of free will, choices will be made.
References
Cotton, M. (2005). A foolish consistency: Keeping determinism out of the criminal law. Public interest law journal, 15, 1-48.
Rhodes, K. (2008). The criminal prosecution of juveniles: a philosophical reappraisal of adolescent agency. Lethbridge undergraduate research journal, 3(2), Retrieved from www.lurj.org

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