Mediation in the criminal procedure of the United States

Due to restorative work held by public and religious associations dealing with the criminals, in the USA there began to appear various conciliation programs for the criminal justice in the 70s of the previous century. It not quite just to state that the program happened to be a total novelty in the 70-80s of the XXth century; it would be more correct to say that by the close of the XXth century this model gained status of a restorative justice program, while the Native Americans (e.g. Lakota and Dakota people) had been using a similar model for quite a long period of time. Despite the fact that the restorative justice programs were not quite a novelty, they have traveled a long way to recognition and legislative consolidation. Currently we lack a comprehensive list of all mediation programs used by the mediators. There is not even a common scheme to regulate a mediation program operation, and there are hundreds of various programs performed under various names, though using a common approach, just the one implemented by the very first program of the victim and the criminal conciliation. This article reviews the mediation programs used for criminal justice in such American states as Ohio and North Carolina. The conciliation programs' peculiarity is the fact that the program is implemented at the criminal process stage when the materials are already submitted to the Court and a successful mediation may substitute the judicial examination but not the criminal process in general. The article states the confidentiality principle as well the Court's favoring prompt arrangement of a conciliation settlement, furthermore the possible reasons for the term prolongation are mentioned independently. Moreover we have considered people to attend the mediation, as well as their rights and reasons to restrain their participation. The author has assumed that the described mediation model could also be naturalized in our country being a judicial investigation alternative. All the more so as in certain regions of the Russian Federation there are Regional Conciliation Services established, already performing various restorative programs in cooperation with the Committees for the Affairs of the Minors and Protection of Their Rights.