Prof. Mouaid Alqudah
Professor of Criminal Law
Faculty of Law – Yarmouk University – Jordan
Dr. Mamoun Abu Zeitoun
Associate Professor of Criminal Law
College of Law – University of Sharjah – UAE & Faculty of Law – Yarmouk University – Jordan

Abstract:

This paper is an evaluative, critical, and comparative review of sentence suspension system under the criminal laws of Jordan and UAE. It intends to explore the correlation between this system, and both the aims of punishment and victim of crime rights and interests in achieving justice as it involves a judge’s decision suspending a defendant’s serving of a sentence after he or she has been found guilty.
Pursuant to the central argument of this paper, it has been shown that the current state of law on this system in both laws is not in line with the aims of punishment, and undermines the right of the victim in seeing justice being served through punishing the accused.
It has been also demonstrated that although the adoption of such system is justified by the need to protect the accused from the negative consequences associated with the execution of short-term sentences, yet the sentence of contraventions and some aspects of the monetary penalties fall outside its scope under both laws.
The analysis in this paper indicates that there is severe limits on the role of the victims of crime regarding the application of this system, and points out towards some possible deeper structural law reforms to remedy such legislative imbalances.

Keywords: victims of crime, sentence suspension, aims of punishment, conciliation, short-term sentence.

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