Taking Smacking Seriously:
The Case for Retaining the Legality of Parental Smacking in New Zealand
Rex Ahdar & James Allan* |
Section 59 of the Crimes Act 1961 currently permits parents to administer moderate corporal punishment to correct their children's misbehaviour. Various groups contend that corporal punishment should be abolished. It is, they charge, ineffective, if not harmful. They invoke the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in support. Rex Ahdar and James Allan argue that the abolitionists' case is decidedly weak. The arguments for banning corporal punishment are philosophically suspect, linguistically strained and not supported by the rather limited research evidence. The authors conclude that the present law on parental smacking should remain.
*Faculty of Law, University of Otago.
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Defence Disclosure in Criminal Cases
Kevin Dawkins* |
Reciprocal pre-trial disclosure regimes in criminal cases have recently been introduced or proposed in the United Kingdom and several Australian jurisdictions. Under threat of sanction, these regimes require the defence to show its hand before trial in response to prosecution disclosure. While this is claimed to promote the pursuit of truth and the more efficient conduct of criminal trials, Kevin Dawkins argues that the evidence is not convincing. In principle, mandatory defence disclosure is also difficult to reconcile with the nature of the adversarial process and a defendant's right not to be conscripted into aiding the prosecution. Rather than compelling the defence to reveal all, he suggests that a greater degree of voluntary pre-trial disclosure could be encouraged by the introduction of a comprehensive code on prosecution disclosure. In view of the inadequacies in the existing disclosure rules, this reform is the more pressing.
*Faculty of Law, University of Otago.
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2001 Issues 
