Prosecutorial Discretion and Judicial Review: An Analysis of Recent Canadian and South African Decisions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The question whether the functions performed by the prosecutor in the criminal justice system are subject to judicial scrutiny has been a matter for concern in common-law jurisdictions for quite some time. The courts in the Commonwealth generally agree that prosecutors must function independently; act fairly and responsibly in the interests of the public; and must be free from political interference. Their role in the administration of justice is to uphold the rule of law. Therefore, the exercise of prosecutorial discretion should ordinarily not be interfered with by the courts except in rare cases. However, the extent to which the courts, in respective Commonwealth jurisdictions, review prosecutorial discretions differs. A comparative study of the Canadian experience and the South African approach, where the judicial approaches to the review of prosecutorial discretion significantly differ, is a clear illustration. In Canada, the courts hardly interfere with, or review the manner in which the prosecutor performs his or her duties, except that prosecutorial discretion is not immune from all judicial oversight, since it is reviewable for abuse of process (see R v Anderson [2014] 2 SCR 167). In South Africa on the other hand, the exercise of the powers of the prosecutor and their ramifications are, like every exercise of public power, subject to the constitutional principles of legality and rationality. The recent judgments of the Full Bench of the Gauteng Division, Pretoria in Democratic Alliance v Acting National Director of Public Prosecutions 2016 (2) SACR 1 (GP) as affirmed by the Supreme Court of Appeal in Zuma v Democratic Alliance 2018 (1) SA 200 (SCA)—the so-called ‘spy-tape’ saga—are the latest illustrations of this approach.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".