The Faculty of Law, University of Karbala, discussed the doctoral thesis tagged “Control of Judicial Conscience – A Comparative Study”, the thesis submitted by the student “Zainab Muhammad Mahdi”.
The thesis aimed to show that criminal judgments are based on certainty and certainty, not on conjecture and speculation.” Certainty is a mental or rational state that confirms the existence of the truth. However, this does not mean that the judge’s opinion of the facts is left to his absolute freedom and control without an officer or censor. Conviction is a psychological tendency. For a person, but it differs from a mere personal belief based on feelings and fleeting impressions, as the conviction begins with objective premises that are supposed to be researched, scrutinized, and appreciated to derive their logical conclusions, that is, it is based on logical thinking to find a mental link between known and unknown facts.
The thesis showed that conviction is not a purely automatic logical process, based on the presence of certain premises that benefit certainty about a certain matter, but rather it remains a psychological – relative personal – which in the end depends when issuing his judgment on the conscience of its owner and what it contains of personal motives and tendencies.
In conclusion, the researcher reached a number of conclusions and recommendations, the most important of which is that conviction is an objective approach in forming a personal opinion, so the control that will be exercised on it must focus on the effect that the evidence has on the conscience of the criminal judge, and that is by presenting the case and ruling on it to another judicial body, In order to put the degree of certainty reached by the judges of the first degree under examination, if the result of the test coincides with what the judges who are examining the case concluded for the first time, meaning the unification of the effect that the evidence leaves on the conscience of more than one judge, then the subjective and relativistic attributes, which are considered as the danger in the approval of This system (persuasive evidence), then we are in front of what is called (firm certainty).