Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
The Law of Energy for Sustainable Development , edited by Adrian J. Bradbrook, Rosemary Lyster, Richard Ottinger and Wang Xi , published by Cambridge University Press, 2005, 630pp, £75.00, hardback.
Fresh Water and International Economic Law , edited by Edith Brown Weiss, Laurence Boisson de Chazournes and Nathalie Bernasconi-Osterwalder , published by Oxford University Press, 2005, 506pp, £70.00, hardback.
Handbook of Global Environmental Politics , edited by Peter Dauvergne , published by Edward Elgar, 2005, 560pp, £125.00, hardback.
Emerging Forces in Environmental Governance , edited by Norichika Kanie and Peter M. Haas , published by United Nations University Press, 2004, 320pp, US$36.00, paperback.
Economic Globalization and Compliance with International Environmental Agreements edited by Alexandre Kiss, Dinah Shelton and Kanami Ishibashi , published by Kluwer Law International, 2003, 352pp, £85.00, hardback.
German Environmental Law for Practitioners , edited by Horst Schlemminger and Claus-Peter Martens , 2nd edition, published by Kluwer Law International, 2004, 833pp, £119.25, hardback.
The International Climate Change Regime: A Guide to Rules, Institutions and Procedures , Farhana Yamin and Joanna Depledge , published by Cambridge University Press, 2004, 730pp, £40.00, paperback.     

Postmortem interval estimation by creatinine levels in human psoas muscle.

A new method was tested for estimating time after death in the middle range of postmortem interval (weeks). Creatinine muscular concentration in human cadaver is positively correlated to postmortem estimation. Temperature should be mainly related to the creatinine transformation rate. A stronger correlation was found at 11 degrees C up to 30 days and at 20 degrees Celsius up to 15 days.     

Voters and roll call voting: The effect on congressional elections

The subject of this research is whether ideological preferences play a major role in explaining voters' refusal to reelect some members of the U.S. House of Representatives. If ideological control is important, one would expect to find a large difference between the voting record of a rejected incumbent and his or her replacement. In distinction, whenever voters must replace a congressman or congresswoman because that person had died in office or chose to run for higher office, the hypothesis of ideological tracking implies that the newly elected member of Congress will resemble his or her predecessor. The data confirm these hypotheses and show, as well, that ideological control exists within parties and not only between them; that the degree of voters' ideological control is as great over senior congressmen and congresswomen as over junior ones; and that voters' concern about ideology has increased over the last two decades.     

Winners and losers and Why: A Study of Defamation litigation

This article summarizes the results of a study of 534 reported defamation cases decided over a period beginning in 1976 and ending just before the Hutchinson and Wolston decisions of mid-1979. A major aspect of the study was the comparison of media and nonmedia defamation cases, which appear quite different. Each case was studied to identify, among other things, the plaintiff and the defendant, the statement that provoked the suit, the context of that statement, the role of state and federal law in resolving the case, and the procedural stages at which each case was resolved. A follow-up study to identify changes since Hutchinson and Wolston is in progress.     

Suicide by nitrous oxide poisoning

Fatal nitrous oxide poisoning usually occurs accidentally during the administration of general anesthesia. It seldom occurs during autoerotic behavior or in acute drug abuse. We report an unusual case of a health professional who committed suicide by inhaling nitrous oxide.     

Further evidence of the validity of the Suicide Risk Assessment Scale for prisoners

The Suicide Risk Assessment Scale (SRAS; nine items) is useful in correctional settings but needed further validation. First, 44 inmates originally screened as suicidal with the SRAS were evaluated by institutional psychologists according to five criteria: suicidal urgency, risk, appropriateness of referral, need for short- or long-term watch. On the whole, the SRAS was judged to be as effective as a more elaborate test. Second, 242 suicidal and non-suicidal inmates were tested with the SRAS. Their results correlated better with suicidal risk (.71) than with urgency (.50). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis even showed that the SRAS performed better than a more elaborate test in predicting risk.     

Population data of Y-chromosomal STRs in Russian males of the Primorye region population

Data of eight Y-chromosomal STRs, the so called "minimal core set", were obtained from 152 unrelated males of the Primorye region of Russia. The allelic frequencies correspond to other European populations. The background is a settlement of males from the European part of Russia, Ukraine and other states which were included in the former western part of the Soviet Union. On the other hand the distribution of the most frequent haplotypes differs to the Ukraine and Russian population. The most frequent haplotype was obtained five times in the population corresponding to 3.3%. The haplotype data reported here have been included into the Y-STR database maintained at the Institute of Legal Medicine, Humboldt-University, Berlin.     

Can electronic monitoring reduce crime for moderate to high-risk offenders?

Electronic monitoring (EM) of offenders has been in use for just over two decades and motives for using it remain diverse. Some agencies that use EM attempt to deliver humane and affordable sanctions while others seek to relieve jail crowding or to avoid the construction of new jails. Nonetheless, all EM programs aim to suppress the criminal behavior of offenders being monitored and its advocates have always hoped EM could be instrumental in reducing long-term recidivism. This review investigates the history of EM and the extent to which EM empirically affects criminal behavior in moderate to high-risk populations. All available recidivism studies that included at least one comparison group between the first impact study in 1986 and 2002 were considered for the review. Although variants such as GPS tracking and continuous testing for alcohol in perspiration have recently emerged, no studies of these technologies were found that met the review’s inclusion criteria. Studies are examined and combined for meta-analysis where appropriate. Given its continued and widespread use and the dearth of reliable information about its effects, the authors conclude that applications of EM as a tool for reducing crime are not supported by existing data. Properly controlled experiments would be required to draw stronger conclusions about the effects of EM.     

The causal relationship between gang joining and violent victimization: A critical review and directions for future research

Purpose

This article provides a critical review of the state of research on the gang membership-violent victimization relationship.

Methods

This study examines a comprehensive list of published quantitative studies that have assessed the relationship between gang membership and violent victimization.

Results

By examining strengths and weaknesses of the design features of various studies, this article identifies theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and statistical issues that should be considered when interpreting the causal effect of gang membership on violent victimization. Some of the methodological and design issues discussed include, but are not limited to, consequences of failing to establish temporal order, failure to conduct sensitivity analyses to determine treatment effects, use of bootstrapping methods with propensity score analysis, measurement of violent victimization, and corrections for dependence in matched samples of gang and non-gang members.

Conclusion

Suggestions for future research are provided that will help advance the empirical study of the gang membership-violent victimization nexus.     

Fatal tolperisone poisoning: autopsy and toxicology findings in three suicide cases

Tolperisone (Mydocalm) is a centrally acting muscle relaxant with few sedative side effects that is used for the treatment of chronic pain conditions. We describe three cases of suicidal tolperisone poisoning in three healthy young subjects in the years 2006, 2008 and 2009. In all cases, macroscopic and microscopic autopsy findings did not reveal the cause of death. Systematic toxicological analysis (STA) including immunological tests, screening for volatile substances and blood, urine and gastric content screening by GC-MS and HPLC-DAD demonstrated the presence of tolperisone in all cases. In addition to tolperisone, only the analgesics paracetamol (acetaminophen), ibuprofen and naproxen could be detected. The blood ethanol concentrations were all lower than 0.10 g/kg. Tolperisone was extracted by liquid-liquid extraction using n-chlorobutane as the extraction solvent. The quantification was performed by GC-NPD analysis of blood, urine and gastric content. Tolperisone concentrations of 7.0 mg/l, 14 mg/l and 19 mg/l were found in the blood of the deceased. In the absence of other autopsy findings, the deaths in these three cases were finally explained as a result of lethal tolperisone ingestion. To the best of our knowledge, these three cases are the first reported cases of suicidal tolperisone poisonings.