Originally posted by Lace Neil Singer
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While there are a number of philosophical answers I could give to this, based on the political philosophy of rule of law and the theory of legal positivism, I'm going to be lazy tonight.
The simplistic answer is that lack of conformity in how we treat crimes creates problems that allow valid convictions to be overturned based on procedural variation with various jurisdictions. For instance, previous to the adoption of such uniformity, you could have a case where the alleged rapist's name was held anonymous and the rapist was convicted. However, in the appellate court, the procedure is for the rapist's name to be made public, and the conviction is overturned on appeal on that basis.
Issues like this is why the Supreme Court developed the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the Federal Rules of Evidence. After the promulgation of these various uniform procedure codes, they were adopted by the separate state and local courts for the same reason.
(Then there is the whole concept of "equality before the law" too, but that's a different discussion.)
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