Well, its method of executions is certainly more dramatic than ours. 
Posted on 03/24/2007 1:57:22 PM PDT by theothercheek
Saddam Hussein’s trial for crimes against humanity began before the Iraqi Special Tribunal on October 19, 2005. On November 5, 2006, the former Iraqi dictator was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Hussein’s appeal was rejected on December 26, 2006 and he was ordered executed within 30 days. On December 30, 2006, Hussein was hanged. The Iraqis bungled the hanging, but justice was carried out in less than 15 months.
Compare Hussein’s trial – and remember, he had the blood of tens of thousands of people on his hands – with the trial of GA rape suspect, Brian Nichols, who confessed on video tape to taking a gun from a courthouse guard, then killing a judge, a court reporter and two others. The case has cost the public defender system $1.4 million - leaving no funds to handle most of its other 72 capital cases. Consequently, Superior Court judge Hilton Fuller has postponed jury selection until Sept. 10, and the state legislature is debating a $9.5 million cash infusion to keep the public defender system solvent through the fiscal year, which ends in June.
How did one case bankrupt the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council? Here’s how: Nichols’s defense team includes three private lawyers. Judge Fuller justified the expenditures in a March 5 order, because Nichols is charged with 54 felony counts and the prosecutor has five lawyers working the case.
GA State Senator Preston W. Smith (R), who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, tells The New York Times that opponents of capital punishment want to make death penalty cases unaffordable:
"You’re building in an incentive to destroy the death penalty by building in a financial nuclear weapon … There’s one cynical view that says this isn’t at all by accident." ...
Mr. Smith asked to review a breakdown of the billing for Mr. Nichols’s defense but was rebuffed by Judge Fuller, who said that might reveal the defense team’s strategy and compromise the fairness of the trial. …
Judge Fuller’s supporters note that Mr. Nichols has offered to plead guilty to all charges in exchange for a sentence of life without parole, but Paul Howard, the Fulton County district attorney, has refused to take the death penalty off the table. …
Senator Smith has accused the Office of the Capital Defender of spending money like "drunken sailors on shore leave" to provide an "O. J. Simpson-style defense, all on the taxpayer’s dime." He has supported a resolution that would re-evaluate the way the public defender system operates.
GA is not the only state in which this tactic has been used. CO is on the verge of abolishing the death penalty after spending $40 million over the past 30 years to execute just one inmate and put two others on death row, and Maricopa County, AZ, may forego the death penalty in some capital cases to save money.
If Hussein had been tried in the U.S., tens of millions of taxpayer dollars would have been spent on his defense, the appeals would have dragged on for years and the ACLU would have filed an eleventh-hour lawsuit contending that hanging is cruel and unusual punishment. Hussein would have died of old age before the Iraqis got justice.
NOTE: In case I did not put all the links in correctly, please refer to the original source.
It's not so much a matter of it being more efficient, it is a system that is not bogged down by loy-ahs. Given a few more years of Democracy they too will no doubt be cursed with 10 year stay's on death row.
Saddam:
Tried by jury, convicted, hung, buried in under one year (liberals whined)
Tookie Williams:
Tried by jury, convicted, (sat on ass for twenty years writing chilrun books while waiting for justice to catch up with him), die by lethal injection (liberals whined)
Any other questions???
It's all about the death penalty. Never about the victims, many of whom were tortured in depraved and horrific ways before succumbing to death.
They don't have an ACLU (or should I say ICLU?)
The Iraqi legal system is not better than ours, because it is based on the Napoleonic Code rather than Common Law.
I'm afraid that it will go down as one of J. Paul Bremer's biggest blunders that he did not wipe their legal system clean and replace it with Common Law. It means that their economic recovery and long term prosperity will be crippled somewhat by a deficient legal code.
Yes, in the short term, and for serious criminal offenses it will show some advantages. But in the long term it will impede business and be more oppressive to honest citizens than it should be.
What honest citizens? Their main pastime seems to be killing people who belong to the other branch of Islam they don't belong to. Maybe they need to be opressed. Maybe Saddam was just the leader they deserved.
Our legal system was originally based on English common law because our founders new it, it had been established over hundreds of years. Most of our legal system is now based on statutory law although common law has not been entirely displaced.
Iraq had no history of common law to base a judicial system on.
Where did you hear that the Iraq system is based on the Napoleonic Code? The only place I know where the Napoleonic Code still holds any sway is in Louisiana, and even there it has mostly been supplanted by statutory law.
Nonsense! They didn't bungle anything...he's dead isn't he?
So true, so true.
\ THAT is an efficient system. We used to have it.
Was the ACLU invented back then?
Roman and later Napoleonic Law is pretty standard in "old Europe", including most of the West. Britain still has its Common Law basis, and the Norse countries have their legal origins in Viking Law. Further East are the remains of old Soviet Law, but that never did work very well.
Oddly enough, Italy switched its legal code from Napoleonic Law to Common Law not too many years ago, and for an odd reason: Perry Mason re-runs. Much to the surprise of the judges, the typical Italian knew more about Common Law trials than about their existing system. Clients were demanding that their attorneys object (which was not allowed), and that they vigorously cross-examine (which had very strict limits). Even some attorneys were absent-mindedly referring to the arbiters as "Your Honor" and "judge".
Practically speaking, Napoleonic, Common and Viking Law are so ingrained into their respective societies that when the Brussels government tried to create a wholly Napoleonic-basis constitution, it was doomed to fail. In Britain (which also has Scots and Welsh Law), and in the Norse countries, much of what is demanded makes no sense at all.
Well, its method of executions is certainly more dramatic than ours.
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