Kangaroo court is an informal pejorative term for a court that ignores recognized standards of law or justice, carries little or no official standing in the territory within which it resides, and is typically convened
ad hoc.[1] A kangaroo court may ignore
due process and come to a predetermined conclusion. The term is also used for a court held by a legitimate judicial authority, but which intentionally disregards the court's legal or ethical obligations (compare
show trial).[2]
A kangaroo court could also develop when the structure and operation of the forum result in an inferior brand of adjudication. A common example of this is when institutional disputants ("repeat players") have excessive and unfair structural advantages over individual disputants ("one-shot players").[3]
Etymology
The term is known to have been used in the United States in 1841: an article in
The Daily Picayune,
New Orleans quotes the Concordia Intelligencer reporting several
lynchings "upon various charges instituted by the Kangaroo court", asking "Don't comprehend: What is a Kangaroo court?"[4] The term is not attested to have been used in Australia, native land of the
kangaroo, or elsewhere before then.[5]
The term kangaroo court may have originated in England. In the late 1700s, English courts began sentencing people convicted of various crimes to "transportation" to Australia. In the 1800s this was sometimes referred to as the "Kangaroo Jump". It's possible that those sentenced to transportation may have protested that they had been convicted and sentenced by a kangaroo court. Some sources suggest that the term may have been popularized during the
California Gold Rush of 1849 to which many thousands of Australians flocked. In consequence of the Australian miners' presence, it may have come about as a description of the hastily carried-out proceedings used to deal with the issue of
claim-jumping miners.[5]
The derivation of the term is not known, although there has been speculation. It could be from the notion of justice proceeding "by leaps", like a kangaroo[6] – in other words, "jumping over" (intentionally ignoring) evidence that would be in favour of the defendant. An alternative suggestion is that, as these courts are often convened quickly to deal with an immediate issue, they are called kangaroo courts since they have "jumped up" out of nowhere, like a kangaroo. Another possibility is that the phrase could refer to the pouch of a kangaroo, meaning the court is in someone's pocket.[7][8][9]
Etymologist
Philologos suggests that the term arose "because a place named Kangaroo sounded comical to its hearers, just as place names like Kalamazoo, and Booger Hole, and Okeefenokee Swamp, strike us as comical."[10]
The term is sometimes used without any negative connotation. For example, many
Major League Baseball and
Minor League Baseball teams have a kangaroo court to punish players for
errors on the field, being late for a game or practice, not wearing proper attire to road games, or having a messy locker in the
clubhouse. Fines are allotted, and at the end of the year, the money collected is given to
charity or used for a team party at the end of the season.[13]
A notable example includes in 2008,
Mariano Rivera, then closer for the
New York Yankees, was fined by his teammates after Rivera assisted division rival
Roy Halladay in developing Halladay's cut fastball, Rivera's signature pitch.
Historical examples
Some examples of quasi-judicial proceedings that could be described as kangaroo courts are:
In 1835, a so-called "
vigilance committee" in
Nashville, Tennessee, United States, ran a show but legally meaningless trial, by which they convicted
abolitionist minister
Amos Dresser of distribution of abolitionist publications; he repeatedly claimed innocence. He was publicly whipped 20 lashes, after which he left Tennessee as soon as he could do so safely.[15]
In August 1979, the
People's Revolutionary Tribunal, in
Cambodia, tried
Pol Pot and his brother Ieng San. After a lengthy trial with a duration of five days, both were sentenced to death in absentia on 19 August 1979.[16] Conclusive evidence showed that the verdicts and the sentencing papers had been prepared in advance of the trial.[17] Relying on this evidence, the United Nations proceeded to de-legitimize the tribunal, stating that it did not comply with standards of international law.[16]
During the
Romanian Revolution in 1989, President and Communist Party General Secretary
Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife
Elena Ceaușescu were
sentenced to death by a kangaroo court consisting of members of the military: two military judges, two colonels, and three other officers of lesser ranks. The prosecutor was
Dan Voinea; two lawyers represented the defendant. All the members of the court were part of the
Romanian People's Army, which had recently switched to the side of the revolutionaries.
In July 1987, five individuals (most prominently
Anatoly Dyatlov,
Viktor Bryukhanov, and
Nikolai Fomin) implicated in the 1986
Chernobyl disaster were put on trial in what was widely recognized as a show trial with pre-determined verdicts.[18] Despite strong evidence that serious design flaws in the Soviet
RBMK nuclear reactor were largely to blame for the accident, all defendants were sentenced to hard labor in
Soviet labor camps.
^Scharf, Michael P. (2006). "The United States and the International Criminal Court: A Recommendation for the Bush Administration". ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law. 2: 385.
^Stempel, Jeffrey W. (December 30, 2007).
"Keeping Arbitrations from Becoming Kangaroo Courts". Nevada Law Review. 8. UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law Legal Studies: 251. Research Paper 08-05.
Archived from the original on August 23, 2023. Retrieved June 30, 2023.
^Dresser, Amos (1836). The narrative of Amos Dresser : With Stone's letters from Natchez, an obituary notice of the writer, and two letters from Tallahassee, relating to the treatment of slaves. New-York, NY:
American Anti-Slavery Society. — Link is to a
"reprinting". 1836.
Archived from the original on August 23, 2023. Retrieved July 30, 2021. in the collection Slave Rebels, Abolitionists, and Southern Courts
^Chandler, David (2008). "Cambodia deals with its past: Collective memory, demonisation, and induced amnesia". Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions. 9 (2–3): 355–369.
doi:
10.1080/14690760802094933.
S2CID143128754.
^Plokhy, S. (2020). Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. Basic Books.