Prospective lawyers’ rape stereotypes and schematic decision making about rape cases

Abstract

Two studies explored stereotypic information processing in rape cases by prospective lawyers in Germany. In Study 1, 451 undergraduate law students rated rape scenarios varying with respect to defendant–complainant relationship and coercive strategy (force versus exploitation of the complainant's alcohol-induced defencelessness). Acceptance of rape myths was also measured. Likelihood of defendant liability was rated to be lower when there was a prior relationship between the parties and when the defendant exploited the complainant's defencelessness as compared to when he used force (except in the ex-partner rapes where blame was higher in the alcohol-related than in the force-related cases). Complainant blame was higher when there was a prior relationship between the parties and was higher in the alcohol-related cases than in the force-related cases, except in the ex-partner rape where the pattern was reversed. Participants with high rape myth acceptance held the defendant less liable and blamed the complainant more, especially when the two had known each other. Study 2 largely replicated these findings with 129 postgraduate trainee lawyers and showed that sentencing recommendations also varied as a function of defendant–complainant relationship and coercive strategy. Providing participants with the legal definition of rape did not reduce reliance on rape stereotypes.     

List of books to review

Abstract

Gandhi and British India are dead but not forgotten. Since his assassination in early 1948, Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi has continued to be analyzed, scrutinized, vilified, popularized, and sanitized. In fact, in recent years there appears to have been, if anything, an increase in interest in Gandhi's life and ideas at both the popular and academic levels. The British rulers of India have met a similar fate, and the past decade or so, especially, has seen the growth of both scholarly and popular interest in the British Raj. Part of the reason for this “return” of the Raj as a subject for novels, television, movies, and popular and academic history may have had to do with the rise of Thatcherism in Britain. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher and the British Conservative Party were involved in an explicit attempt to resurrect what they understood as Victorian virtues and regain some of the lost glory of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Pax Britannica. Their project, to reassert Victorian values and resurrect imperial pride, not surprisingly, came at the very time when Britain was in the throes of national decline; in ethnic, racial, and economic terms, the empire on which the sun never set has come home to roost.     

Political Order in Occupied Societies 1 : Realist Lessons from Germany and Japan

Abstract

The American occupations of Germany and Japan have many lessons to offer the United States today as it contemplates creating new political orders in Afghanistan and Iraq. The lessons that are to be drawn are not, however, the ones that are usually drawn by the current administration and others. First and foremost, a systematic comparison with the German and Japanese experiences clearly shows that the preconditions for democratization are not present in the contemporary cases, suggesting that the United States needs to recalibrate its objectives. Instead of seeking democratization, the United States should try first to create stability, even as it creates at least the institutional forms on which a more pluralistic political system can eventually be erected. The U.S. experience with state building in the Philippines and South Korea may be more relevant today than the German and Japanese cases. Other lessons that can be drawn from the German and Japanese as well as other past U.S. experiences with occupying countries include: the importance of finding a common threat that can unite enough indigenous elites that order can be established; integrating the new states into regional systems; and perhaps most importantly, using the instruments of transitional justice (trials, purges, censorship, etc.) in a fashion calculated to rehabilitate and incorporate supporters of the old regimes while delivering a modicum of justice.     

Objective ink color comparison through image processing and machine learning

Making changes or additions to written entries in a document can be profitable and illegal at the same time. A simple univariate approach is first used in this paper to quantify the evidential value in color measurements for inks on a document coming from a different or the same source. Graphic, qualitative discrimination is then obtained independently by applying color deconvolution image processing to document images, with parameters optionally optimized by support vector machines (SVM), a machine learning method. Discrimination based on qualitative results from image processing is finally compared to the quantitative results of the statistical approach. As color differences increase, optimized color deconvolution achieves qualitative discrimination when the statistical approach indicates evidence for the different source hypothesis.     

Forensic typing of autosomal SNPs with a 29 SNP-multiplex—Results of a collaborative EDNAP exercise

We report the results of an inter-laboratory exercise on typing of autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) for forensic genetic investigations in crime cases. The European DNA Profiling Group (EDNAP), a working group under the International Society for Forensic Genetics (ISFG), organised the exercise. A total of 11 European and one US forensic genetic laboratories tested a subset of a 52 SNP-multiplex PCR kit developed by the SNPforID consortium. The 52 SNP-multiplex kit amplifies 52 DNA fragments with 52 autosomal SNP loci in one multiplex PCR. The 52 SNPs are detected in two separate single base extension (SBE) multiplex reactions with 29 and 23 SNPs, respectively, using SNaPshot kit, capillary electrophoresis and multicolour fluorescence detection. For practical reasons, only the 29 SBE multiplex reaction was carried out by the participating laboratories. A total of 11 bloodstains on FTA cards including a sample of poor quality and a negative control were sent to the laboratories together with the essential reagents for the initial multiplex PCR and the multiplex SBE reaction. The total SNP locus dropout rate was 2.8% and more than 50% of the dropouts were observed with the poor quality sample. The overall rate of discrepant SNP allele assignments was 2.0%. Two laboratories reported 60% of all the discrepancies. Two laboratories reported all 29 SNP alleles in all 10 positive samples correctly. The results of the collaborative exercise were surprisingly good and demonstrate that SNP typing with SBE, capillary electrophoresis and multicolour detection methods can be developed for forensic genetics.