Exam qusetion Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Exam qusetion - Essay Example Laws in common law however can be repealed and amended by parliament. Duress is a defence against all crimes with the exception of murder and attempted murder. The prevailing circumstances matter and determine when duress can be used to exonerate one of their wrongdoings. The threat must: be to death or serious injury, be directed against the defendant or his immediate family or someone close to him, neither emanate from actions the defendant voluntarily did nor circumstances that the defendant voluntarily put himself in and inescapable by any reasonable means. The crime against which one seeks to use duress as a defence must be a directly caused by the threats to the person. The above criteria present a lot of problems to the defence of duress. First is the subjective nature of most of the criteria. The perception of the actor is key to the actions they commit and what accounts as serious injury to one person may not be so to another. Levels of fortitude, self-sacrifice, altruism and perception of danger vary from individual to individual and have no reasonable measure or an objective benchmark. The requirement that the threat be of serious injury is of essentially ambiguous and thus may be valid or invalid depending on the individual under duress. This ambiguity and subjectivity also apply most of the other criteria and thus denying the defence of duress to any and all individuals without appealing to the prevailing circumstances is clearly unfair. The courts do not recognise duress if the court determines that the harm done is superior to the perception of harm to be caused by threats and this is tested in two ways; questioning whether the defendant acted as they did because they honestly believed the harm of the threat to be serious and questioning whether a reasonable person of typical courage and having similar characteristics to the defendant would have acted in the same manner. Clearly these two criteria do not

Discuss the role of the Emergency Manager and the Fundamentals of Essay - 1

Discuss the role of the Emergency Manager and the Fundamentals of Emergency Management - Essay Example In other words, disaster mitigation and risk-reduction measures are needed for a good response. However, one must realize (and be realistic enough) that most disasters cannot be seen in advance or forecasted with any degree of certainty. From an emergency response perspective, it can be said there are no real measures of success (if based on the number of lives saved or in the minimization of damage); but one should always look at each disaster as something unique that cannot be neatly categorized. What is meant here is that disasters are chaotic events and luck is a big part of the outcome. A disaster is not a linear-progression event that can predicted with high degree of precision and therefore is hard for anyone to control completely. Moreover, disasters can easily deteriorate into a catastrophe if the wrong response is employed (like in Japan). This portion talks about the role of the emergency manager and the fundamentals of any emergency management program. It is vital to know these two things for any disaster response to be effective in terms of limiting the damage, saving lives and in the recovery efforts after. Role of Emergency Manager – the primary role of the emergency manager is to prepare a populace for a disaster, whether man-made or natural disasters. In this regard, the manager must implement a disaster preparedness plan to help the people prepare, devise an early warning sign or system to notify people in advance (this is also to prevent panic resulting from rumors and the usual miscommunication in an emergency situation). For this, the manager must put into place a crisis communications plan as a preventive measure and at the same as a pro-active orientation. This team should be composed of the highest local official (or a designated alternate) who can make the decisions, members of the team who can be contacted and authorized to disseminate vital information and also designate a chief of an Incident Command System (ICS) put