A validation study for the extraction and analysis of DNA from human nail material and its application to forensic casework.

A validation study was conducted to demonstrate that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) could be successfully extracted from human nail material and analyzed using short tandem repeat (STR) profiling and/or mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequencing. This study involved the development of a DNA extraction protocol that includes a cleaning procedure designed to remove external contaminants (e.g., biological, chemical). This protocol was used to test human nail material that had been soaked in whole blood from a second donor and coated with gold-palladium to simulate scanning electron microscopic analysis. The results showed no indication of a mixture and were consistent with that of the nail donor. Fresh human nail material usually yielded both STR profiles and mtDNA sequence information; however, aged human nail material (approximately eight years old) yielded only mtDNA sequence information. Upon completion of the validation study, the extraction protocol was used for the analysis of a torn fingernail fragment recovered from the scene of a violent homicide in 1983. A partial STR profile and mtDNA sequence information indicated that the fingernail fragment was excluded as originating from the suspect and was, in fact, consistent with originating from one of the victims.     

From trust on intimacy: A new inventory for examining erikson's stages of psychosocial development

A new inventory for examining the first six of Erikson's psychosocial stages is described. The self-report questionnaire, developed in a pilot study of 97 adolescents and tested in a study of 622 adolescents, has 12 items for each subscale. Measures of reliability and validity are reported. It is concluded that the Erikson Psychosocial Stage Inventory (EPSI) is a useful measure for researchers interested in development from early adolescence and in mapping changes as a function of life events.This research was supported by a grant from the Education Research and Development Committee.Received Ph.D. from University of Melbourne. Current research interests are adolescent adjustment, ethnicity, and sex-role psychology.Received Ph.D. from University of Melbourne. Current research interests are effects of unemployment and adolescent adjustment.Received Ph.D. from Florida State University. Current research interests are sex-role psychology and adolescence.     

New identification criteria for the Chilean population: Estimation of sex and stature

In the analysis of human skeletal or otherwise unidentifiable remains the assessment of sex is an initial vital element when rendering a biological profile. As such other aspects of the biological profile are sex-specific (e.g. stature and age) and cannot be successfully determined without this preliminary assessment. In addition, the estimation of stature is an essential parameter of the biological profile, which is often used to confirm or exclude presumptive identifications.The purpose of this study is to present newly developed local identification criteria for the estimation of sex from the postcrania and stature for Chileans. Linear discriminant functions were derived for the humerus and femur. Sexing accuracies of 87%, 86%, and 82% were achieved. Furthermore, new univariate predictive stature equations are presented using a Bayesian approach for the humerus, femur and tibia.     

Contingent-Fee Lawyers and Their Clients: Settlement Expectations, Settlement Realities, and Issues of Control in the Lawyer-Client Relationship

One hallmark of Herb Jacob's analyses of criminal courts—extensive consideration of the interaction among actors–was less pronounced in his work on civil justice, which was more focused on institutions and the politics behind the laws that those institutions administered. In the research I report here, my emphasis is squarely on the actors in the civil justice process: the relationship between contingency-fee lawyers and clients, and how that relationship plays out in the settlement process. In Felony Justice, Herb, and his coauthor James Eisenstein, focus on the courtroom workgroup as a case-processing (and, largely, case-settling) machine; clients are relatively peripheral. In my account, clients, both current and future, are extremely important in how the lawyer works to settle cases. In the criminal court workgroup, lawyers do not worry about where future clients will come from because police secure them. In contrast, the contingency-fee lawyer has constant concerns about future clients, and I argue, this concern provides a control over lawyers that prior analyses of the contingency fee have largely missed. This dynamic also may explain why the courtroom workgroups, or court communities, found in the criminal courts do not appear to exist in the civil justice system.     

Politics and enlightenment: Kant and Derrida on cosmopolitan responsibility

Walter Benjamin once remarked of the enterprise of translation ‘that it is nowhere’: that the labour of transcribing the sense, inflection and difference of any particular language and text must always situate the translator in a space which is neither ‘of the original, nor ‘of the language into which it is to be transcribed. This ‘non‐position’ of the translator—between the original and its analogue, between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’, the difference and the acceptability of the text—marks the labour of translation as an ethical responsibility: that of communicating the significance of something—a gesture, a story, a custom, a tradition—which has appeared to this/our socio‐linguistic culture as strange and unfathomably alien; and to achieve this communication without annulling its strangeness, its alterity. The purpose of my comparison of Kant and Derrida's remarks on cosmopolitical responsibility therefore, is fourfold. First, I want to suggest that it is this ‘stricture’ of translation—this difficult responsibility of both judging and respecting the difference of foreign’ cultures—which marks the (non‐Kantian, non‐situated) ‘territory’ of cosmopolitical responsibility. Second, by using Kant's remarks on the relationship between the political evolution of European Enlightenment culture and a possible world confederation of sovereign states, I want to point up the hierarchies and secondarizations involved in the determination of universal standards of moral, ethical and political conduct (even if these standards are originally prosecuted as the legislative conditions of a ‘radical democracy'). Third, I want to look at the ways in which the stricture of translation has been articulated as a theory of ‘global’ responsibility—particularly in the divergent ethical and political approaches of Jurgen Habermas and Jean‐Francois Lyotard. Fourth, I want to suggest that it is Derrida's idea of a ‘dual responsibility’ of critical thought to the political and philosophical resources of European Enlightenment and to the difference of non‐European nations and cultures, that marks the difficulty (the stricture) of acting responsibly within the global economics of power, identity and legislation. I want, in other words, to show that the ‘nowhere’ of Benjamin's translator, is a ‘place’ whose possibility demands a certain ‘Kantian’ right of reflection; that is, the right to pursue the ‘transcendent’ principle of respect for the other.