Executive impunity and parallel justice? The United Kingdom debate on secret inquests and inquiries

At the beginning of 2008, the United Kingdom Government rolled into the Counter-Terrorism Bill some controversial proposals to reform coronial inquest processes, namely clauses that would provide for "secret inquests". The provisions were heavily criticised both inside and outside Parliament, and took a rocky passage through both the House of Commons and the House of Lords before eventually being abandoned by the government. In 2009 the government again tried to introduce "secret inquests" with the Coroners and Justice Bill, instead ultimately succeeding in establishing what critics have termed a "parallel" system of justice through provisions around "secret inquiries". This move has been seen as subverting the principles of transparency and open justice in the investigation of contentious deaths. This article examines the government's efforts to introduce "secret inquests" and thereafter "secret inquiries" in the context of the United Kingdom's coronial law and purpose, human rights obligations and the ongoing issues around sensitive intelligence, and examines the clash of laws that gave rise to the controversial proposals.     

Offenders’ uncoerced false confessions: A new application of statement analysis?

Purpose. Deception detection research has mainly studied denials and distortions given by students. This study examined true and false confessions as told by offenders. It was hypothesized that the statement analytic techniques Criteria‐Based Content Analysis (CBCA) and Reality Monitoring (RM) would discriminate truths and lies. Methods. Truthful and deceptive confessions to crime were given by 30 offenders (both women and men) in a within‐subject design. The participants were in prison at the time of data collection, and told the truth about a crime they had committed and been sentenced for. In addition, they made up a lie about a different crime after a few minutes of preparation. The transcribed statements were scored for CBCA and RM criteria. Results. Results showed that neither total CBCA nor total RM scores differentiated between lies and truths. Some individual CBCA criteria, however, showed differences: more self‐deprecations and doubts about own testimony in the told lies, and more unexpected complications in the truths. Conclusions. The results are discussed in relation to statement analysis of offenders’ accounts, individual CBCA criteria, as well as the development of criminal experience and familiarity with the event and setting. Implications for triers of fact and suggestions for future research are considered.     

The Believability of Hearsay Testimony in a Child Sexual Assault Trial

Two experiments investigated how mock jurors react to hearsay testimony in a case involving child sexual assault. Participants read a fictional criminal trial summary involving the sexual assault of a 4-(Experiment 2 only), 6-, or 14-year-old female. The summaries were presented in one of four conditions: (a) child condition—the alleged victim testified; (b) hearsay condition—the alleged victim did not testify, but an adult hearsay witness did testify; (c) multiple condition (Experiment 1 only)—both the alleged victim and the adult hearsay witness testified; and (d) no-witness condition—neither the alleged victim nor the hearsay witness testified. The hearsay testimony was believed to a considerable degree, and this testimony led to an increase in the perceived guilt of the defendant. Moreover, these results were comparable to those of conditions in which the alleged victim testified. The results are discussed in terms of the psychosocial factors affecting the perception of hearsay testimony in a child sexual assault trial.     

The Unmaking of Citizens: Banishment and the Modern Citizenship Regime in France

As a means to shed light on modern citizenship, this article explores the history of the practice of banishment, deportation and the revocation of citizenship in the transition from the old regime to the new in France. Despite the acknowledged novelties in the understanding of citizenship ushered in with the French Revolution flowing from the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, it is evident that there was an important continuity with old regime principles, namely, the notion of citizenship as a privilege. Indeed, not only did the French state maintain its power to revoke citizenship and expel its members, but the new republican understanding of citizenship along with a more disciplined international environment led to the transformation of the practices in ways more severe and debilitating for the convicted. This history of expulsion and revocation of citizenship rights is used to illustrate a basic tension in modern understandings of citizenship between an inclusive understanding of citizenship committed to an ideal of universal rights and the political and civic criteria for belonging that have in practice been used to police members by revoking the very privileges on which their protection of basic rights depended. The study then gestures to a way of resolving the tension, namely, a consideration of the idea of a fundamental right of citizenship itself.     

Antecedents of adolescent initiation into stages of drug use: A developmental analysis

The social psychological antecedents of entry into three sequential stages of adolescent drug use, hard liquor, marihuana, and other illicit drugs, are examined in a cohort of high school students in which the population at risk for initiation into each stage could be clearly specified. The analyses are based on a two-wave panel sample of New York State public secondary students and subsamples of matched adolescent-parent and adolescent-best schoolfriend dyads. Each of four clusters of predictor variables, parental influences, peer influences, adolescent involvement in various behaviors, and adolescent beliefs and values, and single predictors within each cluster assume differential importance for each stage of drug behavior. Prior involvement in a variety of activities, such as minor delinquency and use of cigarettes, beer, and wine are most important for hard liquor use. Adolescents' beliefs and values favorable to the use of marihuana and association with marihuana-using peers are the strongest predictors of initiation into marihuana. Poor relations with parents, feelings of depression, and exposure to drug-using peers are most important for initiation into illicit drugs other than marihuana.This research is supported by Grant DA-00064 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and by the Center for Socio-Cultural Research on Drug Use of Columbia University.Revised version of a paper presented at the Conference on Strategies of Longitudinal Research on Drug Use, San Juan, Puerto Rico, April 1976. Authors' names are listed alphabetically.Received Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University in 1960. Current research interests are adolescent socialization, longitudinal approaches to the study of human behavior and psychopathology, and processes of interpersonal influence.Received Ph.D. in sociology from New York University in 1975. Major interest is quantitative sociology.Received Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University in 1975. Current research interests include adolescent socialization and deviant behavior.