Sex and Capacity: The Management of Monsters?

The first consideration by a civil court of the test of capacity to engage in sexual relations – X City Council v MB, NB and MAB – is as recent as 2005. This article places this and subsequent cases in the historical context of the way in which the law has constructed the sexuality of persons with intellectual impairment. The article argues that, beginning with a series of rape cases in the mid to late nineteenth century, which recognised the concept of consent given through the expression of animal instincts, the law has accepted and deployed a model of intellectual impairment which understands expressions of sexuality in terms of an increasingly unstable opposition between vulnerability and danger, understood as the presence or absence of instinct, and as indicating an underlying ‘monstrosity’. The article argues that the historical continuity apparent in the modern case law is unfortunate and should be rectified.     

File-sharing and downloading: goldmine or minefield?

Legal context: Major copyright owners have been slow to rise to the challengepresented by illegal file-sharing and downloading. In recentyears, they have scored a number of significant Court victoriesagainst file-sharers, but the recent decision in Promusicaev Telefónica, in which the ECJ held that the right tothe protection of industrial property does not necessarily outweighthe right to privacy, indicates that rights holders may benefitfrom a more creative and co-operative approach to file-sharing. Key points: The author provides an analysis of the Promusicae decision,along with a summary of the statutory position in the UK. Thisis also accompanied by a review of the recent internationallitigation landscape on file-sharing and a review of currentattitudes towards addressing illegal filesharing, includingrecent proposals from the British Government and the EuropeanParliament and new models of co-operation between rights holdersand file-sharing service providers. Practical significance: The Promusicae decision will disappoint copyright owners. TheECJ decision left it to Member States to determine whether thereshould be an obligation to disclose personal data in order toprotect copyright, so long as the interpretation of the lawattempts to reconcile the parties' competing rights and principlesand demonstrates proportionality. Copyright owners will, therefore,have to tailor enforcement strategies to individual Member States.This will hamper their ability to take action against individualinfringers efficiently. In addition to litigating against infringers,however, they may benefit from the new models of co-operationbetween copyright owners and file-sharing services which areemerging.     

Russia and Ukraine: Transition or tragedy?

Conclusion The political-criminal nexus that emerged in the post-Soviet period represents a transformation of the relationships which existed in the Soviet period. The division of the property of the Soviet state gave ample possibilities for the political-criminal nexus to obtain significant political assets. They were able to transform their power from one that was rooted in the managerial apparatus of the Soviet state and the consumer economy into one with international dimensions and control of very large shares of the domestic economy. The rise of the political-criminal nexus, while hardly surprising in light of the structure of power relations in the final decades of the Soviet period, precludes full democratization or the rise of a real market economy. In the initial years of the transformation process from a socialist to a post-socialist economy, insufficient attention was paid to the containment of the political-criminal nexus in both Russia and Ukraine. Most Western politicians and international organizations focused on the collapse of communism rather than the rise of these pernicious alternative power relationships. The prognosis for the containment of the political-criminal nexus in either country is rather limited at the moment. Ukraine, however, is at a comparative disadvantage because it has failed to sufficiently acknowledge the high costs of organized crime and its political links. This has been done at the highest levels of Russian government although precious little has been done to address the problem. The Ukraine situation is more difficult because its institutional resources are much more limited than Russia which inherited a disproportionate share of the Soviet Union's financial and institutional resources. With limited civil society and the economic precariousness of much of the population, little can be done to control the problem at its roots. The political-criminal nexus in Russia and Ukraine will remain a serious problem in coming decades. It cannot be ignored in appraising the development of the domestic political situation in either country or determining foreign policy in relation to these two newly independent states.     

Are they different? A comparison of risk in Dangerous and Severe Personality Disordered and Personality Disordered hospitalized populations

Abstract

There has been considerable interest internationally in the assessment and treatment of individuals who have a severe personality disorder and who might pose a high risk of future recidivism. In the UK, the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) programme was initiated to deal with just this group. It is unclear, yet, whether those admitted to these services are different from those admitted to conventional personality disorder (PD) services. In the present study, 60 patients admitted to DSPD services, under DSPD criteria, were compared with 44 patients admitted to personality disordered (non-DSPD) services within the same high secure psychiatric hospital, on risk measures, including (1) an index of predicted future violence, (2) previous offending behaviour and (3) ‘pre-treatment’ levels of institutional risk-related behaviour. Results indicated that DSPD patients do pose a greater clinical and management risk, have a higher number of ‘pre-treatment’ risk-related behaviour, and have a greater number of convictions and imprisonments after age 18, relative to PD patients. The implications and limitations of these results are discussed.     

Rejoinder—Personality and crime: Toward knowledge construction

In his response to “Personality and Crime,” Professor Gibbons took issue with several of our specific points. Several of these points are reviewed in this rejoinder, and we list our rationalizations for naming names (or for what Gibbons calls our “verbal thumping” of individual criminologists). More important, we find that Gibbons agrees on the need for a self-consciously “social” criminology to display greater respect for both evidence and human diversity. The paper closes with a specification of the criterion variable within the psychology of crime and with an appeal for an openness to the full range of potential covariates of that criterion variable, be they biological, personal, or social.     

Salvation or damnation?: Religion and correctional ideology

Fundamentalist affiliation and religious beliefs are generally related to more punitive attitudes toward criminals. Fundamentalists also tend to attribute criminality to individual dispositional factors, and in turn, such factors are related to punitiveness. Recently, it has also been found that compassionate dimensions of religion are related to treatment-oriented policies. It is still not clear which dimensions of religion are related to punitive or treatment ideology and what effects religious variables may have when tested against secular concerns about crime and crime attributions. In the present research, we test three models of punitiveness and one model of rehabilitation with demographic, secular, religious, and attributional factors. We found that those for whom religion is salient in their daily lives tend to believe that the death penalty should be reserved for older offenders and that those who believe in a punitive God tend to support harsher punishments.     

Privacy and Search Engines: Forgetting or Contextualizing?

This article considers the much‐criticized ‘right to be forgotten’ in the context of the European Court of Justice's judgment in the Google Spain case. It defends the ‘right to be forgotten’ as a metaphor that can provide us with a better understanding of the particular privacy concerns of the search‐engine age and their interaction with the freedom to access information, and draws on Goffman's idea of ‘information games’ and Nissenbaum's theory of ‘contextual integrity’. While supporting the principles that underpin the judgment, the article rejects the Court's binary approach of ‘forgetting’ versus ‘remembering’ personal information. Instead, it argues that the EU legislator should introduce more nuanced means of addressing modern privacy concerns. By establishing two remedies – ‘delisting’ or ‘reordering’, depending on the nature of the information – online information flows can be adjusted to preserve both the right to privacy and the freedom to access information in more contextually appropriate ways.     

Residential Mobility and Delinquency Revisited: Causation or Selection?

Objectives

To assess the role of selection in the observed association between residential mobility and delinquency among adolescents.

Methods

This study draws on a sample of adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We first examine whether adjusting regression models for several well-established determinants of moving attenuates the association between mobility and delinquency. We then employ propensity score methods to estimate the effect of residential mobility on delinquency among a sub-sample of movers and non-movers who had similar likelihoods of moving.

Results

The association between mobility and delinquency is significant and positive in regression models, although it is somewhat attenuated by additional control variables that are rarely considered in prior work. However, the distribution of mobility determinants differs substantially across movers and non-movers, potentially biasing these estimates. After covariate balance is achieved using a propensity score approach, we observe no differences in delinquency between groups.

Conclusions

Results suggest that certain adolescents are more likely to move than others, explaining the observed association between mobility and delinquency. Future research should therefore be mindful of selection when trying to account for differential outcomes between mobile and non-mobile adolescents.     

Academic patents and materials transfer agreements: substitutes or complements?

U.S. universities and academic medical centers long have been important performers of research in the life sciences, but their role as a source of patented intellectual property in this field has changed significantly in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The expanded presence of formal intellectual property rights within the academic biomedical research enterprise has occasioned numerous expressions of concern from scholars, policymakers, and participants. One widely expressed fear involves the effects of patenting on the conduct of the scientific research enterprise. There is also considerable concern over the possible role of Materials Transfer Agreements (MTAs) in raising research “transaction costs”. On the other hand, others suggest that the contractual structure provided by MTAs may reduce transaction costs and facilitate exchange. This paper undertakes a preliminary analysis of the role of MTAs in the biomedical research enterprise at the University of Michigan, a significant patenter and licensor of biomedical intellectual property. We examine the relationship among invention disclosures, patenting, licensing, and the presence or absence of an MTA. Although data limitations make any conclusions tentative, our analysis suggests that the increased assertion of property rights by universities through MTAs does not appear to impede the commercialization of university research through patenting and licensing.

PMS,psychosis and culpability: sound or misguided defense?

Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) is believed to affect up to 90% of women of reproductive age. A small subset of women have been identified who actually experience psychotic symptoms in the premenstrual phase of their cycles. Not surprisingly, PMS has made it into the courts where it has been offered as a defense for criminal acts. The defense has generally fared poorly in the United States, although it has been successfully used as a factor in supporting diminished capacity in Great Britain. The following paper sets out to review the medical literature on premenstrual syndrome with a particular focus on premenstrual psychosis. Available literature from both medical and legal sources is then utilized to investigate instances in which premenstrual psychosis has been invoked as a defense in the courts.     

Defence lawyers and probation officers: offenders' allies or adversaries?

The shift in recent decades towards an explicitly punitive agenda for criminal justice in Western jurisdictions has been well-documented in the criminological literature. People accused of offences and convicted offenders progress through a punitive criminal justice system replete with crime control values. Furthermore, in criminal justice policy development, the notion of victims' rights and the quest to rebalance the system in favour of victims now override concerns about rights. In the light of this state of affairs, it seems necessary to assess the role of practitioners within the criminal justice system who, by virtue of their professional mandates, can be expected to act as much needed allies for defendants as they progress through the system. These practitioners are defence lawyers and probation officers. Insufficient attention has been paid to the role of both and they have not previously been considered as two parts of a greater whole despite their obviously complimentary nature. In an effort to address this gap in knowledge, this article draws on two different studies to offer an exploratory discussion of how both practitioners interact with their clients and whether or not the practitioners can be viewed as effective allies of those implicated with the criminal process.     

Desistance and Attitudes Towards Sex Offenders: Facilitation or Hindrance?

In an ideal world, there would be a seamless relationship between interventions that focus on risk factors causally associated with sexual reoffending and the subsequent release of, and ongoing support for, offenders into the community. However, emotionally fueled and uninformed public responses to news of released sex offenders, and the legislation such responses have inspired, severely hinder this process. Our aims in this paper are to review findings of research on community attitudes about sex offenders within a desistance framework. More specifically, we provide a synthesis of the current research literature on attitudes towards sex offenders. Second, we consider in more detail those studies that include community member samples. Third, we review interventions aimed at promoting attitude change amongst professionals working with sex offenders and finally formulate some recommendations for promoting positive attitude change amongst the general public.     

Arsenic poisoning: acute or chronic? Suicide or murder?

The case of the death by arsenic poisoning of a 62-year-old white man is presented. One year prior to death, he developed intermittent bouts of severe gastroenteritis with vomiting and diarrhea, hyperpigmentation and keratosis of the skin, neutropenia, and Guillain-Barré-like neuropathy for which he was hospitalized several times. Urine test results 6 months prior to death indicating 36 mg/L arsenic were believed to be in error. At the patient's last admission, he appeared in the emergency room with severe gastroenteritis, hypotension, and dehydration. He died 3 days later. Antemortem as well as autopsy specimens revealed elevated arsenic concentrations. Arsenic micrograms/g analysis by neutron activation of hair pulled from the man's head revealed by centimeter segmental analysis proximal to distal: 226, 104, 28, 56, 41, 40, and 74. The wife of the decedent was charged with murder by arsenic poisoning of this, her fifth, husband. The defense alleged that the decedent had committed suicide. The judge awarded a directed verdict of "not guilty." Particulars of the medical, toxicological, and investigative findings are presented.     

Explicit inflation targets and central bank independence: friends or foes?

The paper studies the relationship between two institutional innovations in monetary policy of the past few decades: central bank independence (CBI) and explicit inflation targeting (EIT). The aim is to make inferences about the optimal institutional design of monetary policy, and the right sequencing of policy reform. Our reduced-form model unifies several approaches in the literature, and offers three novel institutional findings (that we square with existing empirical evidence). First, instrument-CBI is a complement to EIT, whereas goal-CBI acts as a strategic substitute for EIT in ensuring low inflation and policy credibility. Second, out of these two ‘commitment technologies,’ EIT is shown to be socially superior to goal-CBI. Third and controversially, countries that first implement goal-CBI are then less likely to adopt the desirable EIT regime. This is because independent central bankers may have less need to do so (their independence partly substitutes for EIT), as well as less willingness to do so (due to a higher degree of accountability associated with a transparently legislated target). Our analysis therefore implies that developing and emerging market countries should go down the New Zealand route—legislate EIT together with instrument-CBI, but stay clear of goal-CBI. Unfortunately, many transition countries have followed the opposite Fed/Bundesbank route, which we show may have adverse welfare consequences through several channels.     

White-Collar Crime and Police Crime: Rotten Apples or Rotten Barrels?

In the research literature on white-collar crime, there seems to be a tendency to claim individual failure rather than systems failure. Occupational crime is often emphasized at the expense of corporate crime. In the research literature on misconduct and crime by police officers, however, there seems to be a tendency to claim systems failure. It is argued that police crime is a result of bad practice, lack of resources or mismanagement, rather than acts of criminals. Based on two empirical studies in Norway of business and police crime, this paper is concerned with the extent to which the rotten apple theory versus the rotten barrel theory can explain crime in business organizations and police organizations.