死刑案件上诉复核:"死刑非比寻常"——促进死刑制度的合法与公正

各国的死刑实践,实际上也就是各国司法在死刑制度中的作用,取决于该国历史以及政治格局。这个问题之所以备受关注,是人们充分认识到死刑无可挽回并且其刑不可测的自然结果;也就是说死刑非比寻常。中国最高人民法院院长在对人民代表大会所做的一份报告中也表达了类似情感:"人命关天。死刑核准权的行使绝对不能草率。"由于"死刑非比寻常",因此,死刑也突显出法律伦理的重要性。约束法官行为的众多伦理原则在死刑问题上显得龙为重要。     

ASSESSING FOR ALIENATION IN CHILD CUSTODY AND ACCESS EVALUATIONS

In-depth child custody evaluations can be critical in forming an accurate understanding of families in which alienation of children is a concern. By integrating interview and psychological test data of parents and children along with collateral information the evaluator can differentiate an alienated child from children with other forms of parental rejection and can form a thorough understanding of the multiple contributants to the alienation. This comprehensive and integrated understanding is then used to develop a clear and specific intervention plan.     

HOW COURTS HELP YOU HELP YOURSELF

This note is the result of an in-depth analysis of existing state judiciary websites and how they have and will continue to affect self-represented divorce litigants in the United States. It surveys all existing state court websites and examines what resources they provide to pro se litigantsd. It also touches on private divorce-related websites and offers some comments about their utility to pro se litigants as an alternative and a supplement to court-based websites. This note calls for courts to adopt programs and policies that facilitate the process of getting a divorce for those who choose to represent themselves, and make those programs and policies available to the pro se litigant via the Internet.     

Measuring the effects of the guilty but mentally Ill (GBMI) verdict

We studied effects of guilty but mentally ill (GBMI) legislation on use of the insanity defense in Georgia using data on all defendants entering an insanity plea before (1976–1981) and after (1982–1985) the introduction of the GBMI verdict. In contrast to earlier studies, our results indicated that GBMI did decrease the likelihood of an insanity verdict and affected the composition of those found not guilty by reason of insanity. Defendants pleading insanity and found GBMI were typically white males with a serious mental disorder, charged with murder or robbery in which an unrelated female victim was involved. The data also indicated that defendants who pleaded insanity and were found GBMI received harsher sentences than their guilty counterparts. We conclude that the GBMI verdict will make the insanity plea a less appealing option for mentally ill defendants.     

Indigeneity and Trends in Recognizing Māori Environmental Interests in Aotearoa New Zealand

Valuing indigeneity is a recent phenomenon despite a long tradition in Aotearoa New Zealand of mechanisms that recognize Māori rights and interests. Political pressure to acknowledge indigeneity has been a prerequisite to greater recognition of Māori rights and interests in environmental policy. Māori involvement is now a feature of the state resource management system; however, more substantive forms of power-sharing is sought to secure tribal authority, to reaffirm Māori culture, and to ensure that land continues to shape the identity of Māori people.     

The Acute and Enduring Consequences of Exposure to Violence on Youth Mental Health and Aggression

The bulk of “neighborhood effects” research examines the impact of neighborhood conditions cross-sectionally. However, it is critical to understand whether the effects of neighborhood context are situational and whether they endure over time. In this study, we take seriously the notion that there are enduring consequences of exposure to deleterious neighborhood conditions. Using a rich set of longitudinal data on adolescents from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, we estimate the effect of exposure to violence on both internalizing (depression and anxiety) and externalizing problems (aggression). We find that exposure to violence has both an acute and enduring effect on aggression, yet no effect on anxiety-depression, net of individual, family, peer, and neighborhood influences. Part of the enduring effect of violence exposure is explained by changes in social cognitions brought on by the exposure, yet much of the relationship remains to be explained by other causal mechanisms.     

Matilda sturge: ‘renaissance woman’ 1

Abstract

This article notes the virtual exclusion of women from accounts of the ‘Renaissance’ within late nineteenth-century British Quakerism. A focus upon a hitherto neglected figure, Matilda Sturge (1829-1903), author and Quaker minister, reveals her long-standing involvement in the aspects of Quakerism crucial to the Quaker Renaissance and as an active participant in the debates which preceded it. But Matilda Sturge also was active in the Home Mission movement, a project of Evangelical Friends, which has generally been represented as antithetical to the liberals of the Quaker Renaissance. Foregrounding women's experience introduces new perspectives on late nineteenth-century British Quakerism.     

Adjusting for Confounding with Text Matching

We identify situations in which conditioning on text can address confounding in observational studies. We argue that a matching approach is particularly well-suited to this task, but existing matching methods are ill-equipped to handle high-dimensional text data. Our proposed solution is to estimate a low-dimensional summary of the text and condition on this summary via matching. We propose a method of text matching, topical inverse regression matching, that allows the analyst to match both on the topical content of confounding documents and the probability that each of these documents is treated. We validate our approach and illustrate the importance of conditioning on text to address confounding with two applications: the effect of perceptions of author gender on citation counts in the international relations literature and the effects of censorship on Chinese social media users.