意大利：高龄生育首亮红牌

孩子抚养权的丧失事情发生在2011年8月的一个深夜,在意大利北部皮埃蒙特小镇一条僻静的小马路上,停靠在人行道旁的一辆小车里不时传出一个婴孩的阵阵啼哭声。一位邻居循声出门,只见在小车里,仅1个月零3天的诺莎哭得小脸通红。她赶紧去敲隔壁孩子的家门,孩子父亲开了门,他无不歉意地解释道,     

Brain Death - Too Flawed to Endure, Too Ingrained to Abandon

The concept of brain death has become deeply ingrained in our health care system. It serves as the justification for the removal of vital organs like the heart and liver from patients who still have circulation and respiration while these organs maintain viability. On close examination, however, the concept is seen as incoherent and counterintuitive to our understandings of death. In order to abandon the concept of brain death and yet retain our practices in organ transplantation, we need to either change the definition of death or no longer maintain a commitment to the dead donor rule, which is an implicit prohibition against removing vital organs from individuals before they are declared dead. After exploring these two options, the author argues that while new definitions of death are problematic, alternatives to the dead donor rule are both ethically justifiable and potentially palatable to the public. Even so, the author concludes that neither of these approaches is likely to be adopted and that resolution will most probably come when technological advances in immunology simply make the concept of brain death obsolete.     

Too Much, Too Late: The Advocacy Act in Ontario

This paper examines the concept of government‐based social advocacy on behalf of vulnerable people in the community. It uses as a case example the Ontario Advocacy Act, a statute that was surrounded by controversy through its short life. The more general question raised is whether the ideas of government‐based advocacy are fundamentally conceptually untenable, or whether the fault lay with the specifics of the act and its implementation. As governments globally cut back on social supports for vulnerable people, the need for advocacy and support are self‐evident. This paper explores the broader viability of this one, specific type of response.     

Too Little, Too Late: Prosecutors' Pre-court Preparation of Rape Survivors

Little research has been conducted on the behaviors of prosecuting attor-neys and their interactions with rape survivors between charging and court events. Yet this period, during which prosecutors prepare rape survivors for their witness roles, may be crucial for obtaining successful convictions. Using intensive interviews with 32 rape survivors and background interviews with prosecutors, victim witness advocates, and rape crisis workers, I evaluated the nature of directives and information given to rape survivors and the frequency with which directives were conveyed before preliminary hearings and court events. I concluded that prosecutors employ 20 modes of preparation to construct rape survivors as credible victims for judges and jurors. They orient the rape survivor to the scope of the witness role and her place in the interaction with legal actors, direct her to enhance the credibility of her story, and enhance the credibility of her self'presentation. Research showed that prosecutors prepared respondents more thoroughly for trials than for preliminary hearings, but little overall. A large minority of respondents, consequently, reported dissatisfaction with the preparation they received. On the basis of the findings, I call for an extension of Martin and Powell's "politics of victim's needs," attention to the importance of maintaining a perception of procedural justice among rape survivors, and further research into pre-court preparation.     

Why performance appraisals fail

Our faith in the effectiveness of performance appraisal derives in part from its planned redundancy, in the interplay of employee, appraiser and reviewer. But this very safeguard, as Dr. McGuire points out, means that each party is trying too hard to satisfy the others' needs and expectations, both real and imagined.     

Why professionals fail to catch liars and how they can improve

In the first part of this article, I briefly review research findings that show that professional lie catchers, such as police officers, are generally rather poor at distinguishing between truths and lies. I believe that there are many reasons contributing towards this poor ability, and give an overview of these reasons in the second part of this article. I also believe that professionals could become better lie detectors and explain how in the final part of this article.     

Designed to fail: Self-control and involvement in the criminal justice system

This study investigates self-control theory using official and selfreported criminal records of 500 adult offenders. Four items derived from rapsheets (aliases, date of birth, place of birth, and social security number) are used as indicators of the self-control construct. Negative binomial regression models indicate a significant inverse relationship between self-control and escape arrests, failure to appear violations, probation and parole violations, felony convictions, and prison sentences. Since system involvement entails discipline, tenacity, and responsibility, offenders with low self-control are more likely to experience a criminal justice system failure.     

规划管理局构成不履行法定职责吗

案件起因2003年6月21日,南通市民朱瑞珍向南通市规划管理局(以下简称“规划局”)举报其北邻倪某在自宅西南端距其住宅1米余处违法建造小楼一幢,侵犯其相邻权益,要求予以拆除。规划局于同年6月23日接举报后责成规划监察部门查处,并于7月9日、10日分别立案并制作《现场检查笔录》。8月10日,规划局向倪某送达通规监(2003)告字第2037号《行政处罚事先告知书》。2003年12月23日,朱瑞珍以规划局在接到举报后60日内没有作为为由向港闸法院起诉,要求判令规划局履行法定职责。2004年1月2日,规划局向倪某送达于2003年12月31日制作的通规监港(2003)罚字…     

Effects of preconceptions on deception detection and new answers to why lie-catchers often fail

Abstract

This study investigated the extent to which crediting and discrediting background information, given to observers before they watched three video-taped interviews with the same witness, affected their veracity judgments. Our analyses show that the observers' distribution of truth/lie-judgments were more affected by crediting than discrediting background information. We also mapped the subjective cues given to justify the truth/lie-judgments, and found that the most frequently used cue was whether or not the three statements were consistent over time. In addition, our analysis revealed two types of inter-observer disagreements. One type referred to how different cues were perceived (e.g., forty observers perceived the three statements as being inconsistent over time while an equal number perceived the same three statements as being consistent over time). The second type referred to how different cues were used (e.g., the fact that the witness was perceived as not being confident in his testimony worked against him equally as often as it worked for him).     

Fatal big cat attacks

Two cases of fatal attacks by large cats are presented. In the first case, a 30-year-old female zoo worker was attacked by a jaguar that had escaped its cage. In the second case, a 2-year-old girl was fatally injured by her father's pet leopard. The pattern of injuries in these cases is nearly identical to those of these cats' prey in the wild.     

Too Real? The Future of Virtual Reality Evidence

Immersive virtual environments (IVEs), or virtual reality, could soon follow other visual technologies from the culture at large to the courtroom. The unprecedented realism of IVEs may be thought to pose peculiar risks of prejudice and confusion that would militate against their use as demonstrative evidence. In particular, some believe that jurors will be unable to distinguish IVEs from reality, and that IVEs are so involving that they will transform jurors from disinterested judges of, into witnesses to, or even participants in, litigated events, impairing their objectivity. This article analyzes these concerns and shows them to be overstated. The article also discusses other judgmental risks and benefits presented by the use of IVEs in court, and concludes that the admissibility of IVE evidence should be determined on a case-by-case basis.