Kangaroo court
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A kangaroo court is a form of public trial that is, from the outset, an inside sham as the outcome is fully known before the trial begins.
Generally, kangaroo courts will limit the defendant's rights to witnesses, limit his time with his attorneys, provide him with inept attorneys (in situations where the state provides the attorney), or generally deny him the civil rights of due process.
Notable kangaroo courts include:
- The European witch-hunts and Salem witch trials.
- Sharia trials on issues such as adultery in Islamic fundamentalist nations.
- Political trials under dictatorships and totalitarian regimes.
- Pretty much any trial in North Korea.
- Trials in which a regime rids itself of associates who have become inconvenient, such as Josef Stalin's Great Purge of the Soviet Union's Communist Party in the late 1930s.
- Most every trial against a black man in the South from 1900-1960s.
- Senate hearings on the partial birth abortion ban, in 2003.
- The 2014 trial of three Al Jazeera jounalists in Egypt.