Guidelines for postmortem protocol for ocular investigation of sudden unexplained infant death and suspected physical child abuse

Postmortem examination is a cornerstone in identifying the cause of unexplained sudden death in children. Even in cases of suspected or known abuse, an autopsy may help characterize the nature of the abuse, which is particularly important in the forensic autopsy of children in the first 3 to 4 years of life when inflicted neurotrauma is most common. Forensic examinations are vital in cases that might otherwise be diagnosed as sudden infant death syndrome. The ocular autopsy in particular may demonstrate findings that were not appreciated on antemortem clinical examination. This protocol for postmortem examination of the eyes and orbits was developed to promote more consistent documentation of findings, improved clinical and forensic decision making, and more replicable and coherent research outcomes.     

Online victimization risk and self-protective strategies: developing police-led cyber fraud prevention programs

ABSTRACT

The prevalence and impact of cyber fraud continues to increase exponentially with new and more innovative methods developed by offenders to target and exploit victims for their own financial reward. Traditional crime reaction methods used by police have proved largely ineffective in this context, with offenders typically located outside of the police jurisdiction of their victims. Given this, some police agencies have begun to adopt a victim focused, crime prevention approach to cyber fraud. The current research explores with a sample of two hundred and eighteen potential cyber fraud victims, the relationship between online victimization risk, knowledge and use of crime prevention strategies. The study found those most at risk of cyber fraud victimization despite accurate perceptions of risk and knowledge of self-protective behaviors in the online environment underutilise online prevention strategies. This research has important implications for police agencies who are designing and delivering cyber fraud education. It provides guidance for the development of effective prevention programs based on practical skills development.     

The Role of Law in Temporal Reasoning: An Interview with Annelise Riles

On 17 May 2016 Lucy Welsh interviewed Annelise Riles about her work on the relationship between law and time as part of Welsh’s involvement with the AHRC Regulating Time network. Annelise Riles is the Jack G. Clarke Professor of Law in Far East Legal Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell, and is Director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture. Her work examines the transnational dimensions of laws, markets and culture across the fields of comparative law, conflict of laws, the anthropology of law, public international law and international financial regulation. Most recently Professor Riles has been examining the nature and meaning of the settlement made on the so-called Comfort Women, and what impact that has for locating events in the past. The Comfort Women were Korean women who were essentially captured and forced to work as sexual slaves for the Japanese army during World War Two. In 2015, Japanese and South Korean ministers agreed a settlement (comprising an apology and financial payment to provide for the women) in what they regarded as an irreversible and final settlement of the issue. Welsh and Riles exchange over their mutual interests in time and routinisation in this interview as they discuss what the story of the Comfort Women has to tell us.     

Locking up my generation: Cohort differences in prison spells over the life course

Crime rates have dropped substantially in the United States, but incarceration rates have remained high. The standard explanation for the lasting trend in incarceration is that the policy choices from the 1980s and 1990s were part of a secular increase in punitiveness that has kept rates of incarceration high. Our study highlights a heretofore overlooked perspective: that the crime–punishment wave in the 1980s and 1990s created cohort differences in incarceration over the life course that changed the level of incarceration even decades after the wave. With individual-level longitudinal sentencing data from 1972 to 2016 in North Carolina, we show that cohort effects—the lingering impacts of having reached young adulthood at particular times in the history of crime and punishment—are at least as large (and likely much larger) than annual variation in incarceration rates attributable to period-specific events and proclivities. The birth cohorts that reach prime age of crime during the 1980s and 1990s crime–punishment wave have elevated rates of incarceration throughout their observed life course. The key mechanism for their elevated incarceration rates decades after the crime–punishment wave is the accumulation of extended criminal history under a sentencing structure that systematically escalates punishment for those with priors.     

Unfree labour in immigration detention: exploitation and coercion of a captive immigrant workforce

This paper focuses on labour within immigration detention in the United Kingdom, offering an original national case study as well as a new conceptual framework for analysing such practices. It does so through an innovative engagement with recent literatures on forced labour, unfreedom and hyper-precarity, particularly amongst irregular migrants. We advance two key arguments in this paper. First, that the available data on labour within immigration detention indicate that detainees should legally be considered employees and granted access to labour protections, including the national minimum wage. Second, that work in immigration detention is an example of state-sanctioned exploitative, coercive and unfree labour amongst a hyper-precarious group of the population. This case has implications for other country contexts where immigration detention is used.