Insanity plea

Examining 484 consecutive criminal cases in which the NGRI plea was made, it was found: (1) a high degree of interexaminer agreement existed on the issue of the defendant's mental state in a nonadversary examination procedure; and, (2) court verdicts were highly congruent with the opinions expressed by examiners on the issue of insanity.     

Insanity plea: predicting not guilty by reason of insanity adjudications

Using 35 variables and discriminant analysis procedures, it was found that, of 133 male defendants entering the insanity plea in Colorado, 87 percent were classified correctly into the disposition groups "adjudicated insane" and "convicted." Most positively related to an insanity adjudication were a psychiatric evaluation of insanity and a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Negatively related to the insanity verdict were diagnoses of substance use and personality disorders.     

Knowledge and Insanity

This paper lies at the intersection of law and logic. Logical analysis is employed to attempt to make headway in what has proven to be an intractable interpretive debate over a defence provision of the Indian Penal Code.     

Juror reactions to child victim witnesses

Trial variables that might affect juror decisions were examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, the impact of (1) corroboration, (2) type of case (civil vs. criminal), and (3) victim age (6. 9, or 12 years) was examined. Participants (N=379) read a trial summary describing a wrongful injury or sexual abuse case and were asked to make decisions regarding the case. Results revealed a significant interaction between age and corroboration. Corroboration increased the number of guilty verdicts for the 6- and 12-year-olds, yet had little impact in the case with the 9-year-old. the type of the case did not interact with child age in affecting jurors' decisions. Experiment 2 examined the role of a child's age more systematically. The trial summary described the corroborated sexual abuse case (utilized in Experiment I) and varied the age of the victim from 6 to 14 years. Analyses revealed that number of guilty verdicts and credibility decreased with age, whereas amount of blame attributed to the victim increased with age. Reasons for the negative age bias are discussed.     

Administering a victim impact curriculum to inmates: a multi-site replication

While restorative justice has been the topic of much research, a specific type of program included in restorative justice, Impact of Crime (IOC) on Victims programs, has not been widely studied or assessed for effectiveness. This study examines IOC on Victims Curriculum Development Programs. Offenders from programs in California, Ohio, Tennessee, and Virginia were participants in this research. A four-state evaluation methodology was developed in order to assess the effectiveness of these programs in educating offenders about victims’ right and victim facts, as well as increasing their sensitivity to victims’ difficulties. The findings in this evaluation lend support to previous studies, indicating efficacy for IOC programs. Suggestions for future research are briefly discussed.     

Rape victim and perpetrator blame and the Just World hypothesis: The influence of victim gender and age

Abstract

Victims of rape are sometimes blamed for the assaults against them. Research has examined primarily female victims; much less is known about men as victims and whether victim age affects attributions of victim blame. Furthermore, the study investigated the effects of Belief in a Just World (BJW) on blame attributions. Employing a vignette-type experimental study with a 2 (gender of participant)×2 (victim's gender)×2 (victim's age)×2 (participant BJW score) between-subjects design and several measures of blame attributions towards victim and perpetrator as dependent variables, a community sample (n = 164) participated. The main results were as hypothesised, namely that young male victims were attributed more blame, particularly by participants scoring high on BJW. Overall, victim blame level was low and perpetrator blame was high, and BJW was a powerful predictor of blame attributions.     

Ecological considerations in victim reporting to the police

A review of recent criminological literature suggests that different systems of social control operate across the urban-rural dimension. Specifically, it is expected that victims in urban areas will report crimes to the police at a higher rate than victims in surburban and rural areas. Moreover, it is anticipated that urban, suburban, and rural victims will have different reasons for not reporting the crime. In this paper these issues are examined empirically using the National Crime Survey victimization data. These data show that, contrary to theoretical expectations, the extent of victim reporting does not vary across the urban-rural dimension for the crimes of rape, robbery, assault, and personal larceny. Characteristics of the offense, notably seriousness, are shown to be more important in victim reporting than the extent of urbanization. In addition, these data indicate that victim residence in conjunction with type of crime and victim-offender relationship has an influence on the reasons selected by victims for not reporting the crime to the police.     

Rape and the devalued victim

Numerous jurisdictions have made changes in their rape statutes in recent years. Five modifications that have commonly appeared in the amended rape legislations are aboulition of capital punishment as a sanction for rape, lowered sentence structure, a graduated continuum of offenses and penalties for rape, the reformulation of rape statutes to a sex-neutral definition of participants, and a change in terminology away from rape to such nomenclature as criminal sexual conduct. While the intent of the legal reforms was to insure fairness, we contend that the unintended effect of many of these changes is to trivialize the offense of rape and to devalue the victim.     

Valuing life: a plea for disaggregation

Each government agency uses a uniform figure to measure the value of a statistical life (VSL). This is a serious mistake. The very theory that underlies current practice calls for far more individuation of the relevant values. According to that theory, VSL should vary across risks. More controversially, VSL should vary across individuals -- even or especially if the result would be to produce a lower number for some people than for others. One practical implication is that a higher value should be given to programs that reduce cancer risks. Another is that government should use a higher VSL for programs that disproportionately benefit the wealthy -- and a lower VSL for programs that disproportionately benefit the poor. But there are two serious complications here. First, bounded rationality raises problems for the use of private willingness to pay, which underlies current calculations of VSL. Second, the beneficiaries of regulation sometimes pay only a fraction or even none of its cost; when this is so, the appropriate VSL for poor people might be higher, on distributional grounds, than market evidence suggests. An understanding of this point has implications for foundational issues about government regulation, including valuation of persons in poor and wealthy nations.