The German criminal code is a little booklet which can easily be read and understood in one afternoon, while the criminal code section of the United States is made up of numerous thick volumes of books. That criminal code referred to is only for the United States federal level; the states and even the local councils controls their own layers of criminal codes that complicate the system even more. In Germany, only the federal government issues a criminal and civil code.
In the United States legal system you can be tried, sentenced, and punished twice for the same crime, first by the state and then by the federal system. This practice is mostly used in drug cases and is very rare however; drug law is strange in that United States. State laws are usually (compared to other things) soft when it comes to drug possession, where as federal laws are very harsh. Law-breakers caught in the United States hope and pray that the federal lawyers would not be interested in their case. In Germany, possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use is usually not prosecuted in the …show more content…
Police in the United States are allowed to utilize undercover operations. Police can act as "agent troublemakers", for instance they can offer to sell drugs, act as prostitutes, or pretend to be teens looking for sex in Internet chat rooms. In Germany, undercover operations can only be used in extreme cases of organized crime. German police are not allowed to deceive a suspect into revealing incriminating evidence. However, in Germany evidence that has been obtained illegally may be used in criminal trials (the government has repeatedly bought and used illegally obtained information about tax evaders), while this is not possible in the United States (Krubner,