Judicial Discretion on Issuance of Criminal Warrants

Discretion is one of the concepts which has been prominent as a result of arriving empirical studies into criminal justice. Discretion is a set of powers that authorities on criminal justice utilize them in order to perform their duties. Such phenomenon often occurs because of legal shortcomings or legislative vagueness and sometimes through crossing the law borders despite its existense. Discretion is available in different phases of criminal process, ranging from the police entrance to implementaion of court orders. One of the issues that the criminal procedure act of 1392 only has been asserted its basic principles and judges have a relative discretion towards them is Criminal Warrants exept in detection. Although discretion is a neutral concept, it can bring about various positive and negative consequences for ciminal justice agencies. Drawing on qualitative method and deep interviews with a group of judges, this paper tries to study the concept of discretion. The finding in this paper is that judges actively use this discretion, which has lead to various, and sometimes conflicting, warrants and bails for the same crimes, which in turn can cause disorder and prevent justice from perfoming for the same charges. Amending the legislations, considering the discretion in the process of training the judges, and improving the regulatory mechanisms are considered as the possible ways for managing the discretion.