Interpreting Services in AMerican Criminal Courts: A Violation of the Due Process Clause

摘要

Political development is generally recognized as including greater access by a growing number of individuals to public institutions. Political development is a continuum, with no fixed final objective. All nations are, in this sense, in varying stages of political development, and no nation has completed the process. At the subnational level the concept is particularly applicable to the agencies, organizations, and institutions that make up the system of criminal justice. One major area within this country's criminal justice system has been left exclusively in the hands of those facing the problem on an ad hoc basis: I am referring to the handling of individuals, be they victims, perpetrators, or witnesses of crimes, whose mother tongue is not English and who are unable to function in the language used by government. It would not be totally unfair to say that, until recently, criminal justice system practitioners and theoreticians have 'looked the other way' while non-English speaking individuals surfaced all around them. Those who were directly faced with the language barrier, police officers in Brooklyn, probation officers in Boston, judges in Los Angeles, or correction personnel in Albuquerque, were left to their own individual devices materially and intellectually.