Investigation into "normal" background DNA on adult necks: implications for DNA profiling of manual strangulation victims

Others have investigated the role that DNA profiling could play as a method for identifying the perpetrator of manual strangulation. These studies have demonstrated that it is possible to collect offender DNA from the skin surface of a victim following physical contact. It is not known whether nonself biological material is normally present on the skin surface due to adventitious transfer occurring during innocent everyday interactions. To test the hypothesis that detectable amounts of nonself DNA are normally present on the skin surface of healthy adult individuals due to the adventitious transfer of DNA occurring during normal day-to-day social interactions, we designed an experiment in three phases. Phase 1 was used to deduce which DNA collection, extraction, and amplification methods were suited to investigating this question. During phase 2, the neck surface of 24 healthy adult volunteers was swabbed. DNA was extracted using the QIAamp DNA mini kit and amplified using the SGM Plus PCR amplification kit, using 28 PCR cycles. The work carried out during phase 3 involved a simulated assault to investigate primary and secondary transfer of DNA during physical contact. It was found that 23% of neck areas swabbed during phase 2 of this investigation showed nondonor alleles in the resulting DNA profile, with 5% of areas showing six or more nondonor alleles. The results of phase 3 showed that primary, secondary, and zero transfer of victim and/or offender DNA could be observed after physical contact and that alleles from an unknown source could still be detected in this more controlled experiment. The data presented in this paper demonstrate that DNA profiles generated after swabbing the skin surface of healthy adults can include components of an unknown source, present due to adventitious transfer. These components, if present in large quantities, have the potential to interfere with DNA profile interpretation of swabs taken for the investigation of physical assault by DNA profiling.     

Dining with Sam Orr: Nation Review and the Restaurant Reviews of Richard Beckett

In Australia in the 1970s, restaurant dining became a popular middle-class pastime, and restaurant criticism began to play an important role in the shaping of Australian tastes. Richard Beckett was one of the most prolific Australian food writers of the 1970s and 1980s and one of the first to write a regular column devoted to restaurant reviews. Writing as Sam Orr, a satirical character invented to suit the ethos of the irreverent Nation Review, Beckett produced highly original reports of his dining experiences. He aimed to both educate and entertain his readers and to subvert the perception of restaurant dining as an elitist pastime. Beckett’s contribution as a tastemaker was disparaged at the time and has been largely neglected since. Through a consideration of the role of Nation Review, Beckett’s reviews, published responses to Sam Orr by both his critics and his fans and unpublished correspondence from readers, this article offers a reassessment of Richard Beckett’s role in the shaping of Australia’s tastes in restaurant dining through his endorsement of the distaste of taste.     

Race and Gender Recidivism Differences Among Juvenile Mental Health Court Graduates

Grounded in the theory of therapeutic jurisprudence, this research explores whether recidivism differs by race, ethnicity, or gender among juvenile mental health court graduates (N = 63). Mean number of pre‐program offenses were compared to the mean number of offenses committed by program completion. Results showed statistically significant reductions in recidivism by both males (p < .001) and females (p < .003). Racial and ethnic minorities demonstrated larger reductions when compared to Whites (p < .001 for Hispanics and p < .01 for combined ethnicities). These results contribute to the literature on effective intervention models for diverse juvenile offender populations.     

‘This fair lady,in her laces’: Margaret Howie Strang Hall,the first woman in Scotland to try to become a lawyer

ABSTRACT

Margaret Howie Strang Hall was the first woman in Scotland, and the youngest woman in the UK, to try to become a lawyer through the same formal process open to her male contemporaries. This examination of Hall’s attempt aims to set it in context, using contemporary court documents and newspaper reports, while expanding on what is known of her life. Hall’s story is an important one in the struggle for equal professional opportunities and her experience in the Scottish legal system provides a counterpoint to the better-known English examples.     

Vicarious Annihilation: The Effect of Mortality Salience on Perceptions of Hate Crimes

Previous research has found that reminding participants of their mortality creates a need for individuals to maintain and defend subjective cultural worldviews. As a result, mortality salient participants typically strive to uphold legal sanctions and also react negatively to individuals who espouse alternative worldview beliefs, exhibiting behaviors toward those targets ranging from verbal derogation to physical aggression. This paper extends this line of research by examining perceptions of hate crimes. Hate crimes represent a unique class of crime where both the perpetrator and victim may be viewed as worldview violators. Study 1 revealed that mortality salient participants were more supportive of hate crime legislation than were control participants when hate crimes were described in abstract terms and no specific victim was mentioned. In Study 2, a specific victim who posed a potential worldview threat was identified. In this case, mortality salient participants were less punitive toward offenders who attacked these specific worldview-threatening victims.     

Safeguarding Children's Welfare in Non‐Contentious Divorce: Towards a New Conception of the Legal Process?

This article considers the working of the current procedure intended to ensure the welfare of children when their parents divorce but are not seeking any orders relating to them. It shows that the process is ineffective in safeguarding children's welfare and is not geared to ensuring that their wishes and feelings are taken into account. It argues that the focus of policy should shift away from assuming that the legal system can handle the problems of divorce, towards using the legal process as a point of contact through which families can be offered the full range of services they may need during relationship breakdown.     

Local governance under the Conservatives: super-austerity,devolution and the ‘smarter state’

Through their ambitious devolution programme, the Conservatives show a new assertiveness in relation to restructuring the local state, in contrast to the laissez-faire approach of the previous Coalition government. Although the Coalition piloted devolution, its signature policies of ‘localism’ and the ‘Big Society’ focused on non-state actors, providing rights and opportunities for communities to challenge local government and establish their own services. The Conservatives are promoting devolution as a strategy to stimulate economic growth based on greater sub-regional autonomy and increased competitiveness across and between English localities. ‘Combined authorities’ have the opportunity to champion local identities and acquire new economic development powers from Whitehall. But devolution could be a strategy to decentralise austerity, shifting responsibility to the local level for deeper cuts (56% by 2020) and inevitable service reductions. Local government confronts ‘super-austerity’, where new cuts come on top of previous ones, compounding original impacts and creating dangerous (and unevenly spread) multiplier effects. The Conservatives’ ‘smarter state’ policies, aimed at delivering ‘more for less’, amount to little more than a recycling of new public management diktats. The emerging patchwork of ‘devolution deals’ challenges the redistributive assumptions of the grant regime and could leave disadvantaged areas at particular risk of failure. ‘Metro mayors’ are intended to provide visible and accountable leadership; but roles for locally elected councillors, and prospects for community and citizen engagement, remain unclear. The public has yet to be adequately engaged in what is in danger of becoming a technocratic transfer of power.     

Frances gillam holden and the children's hospital dispute, 1887: woman's sphere,feminism and nursing

This paper examines the confrontations of a late nineteenth-century ‘lady superintendent’ with men and masculinity. It analyses the problematical links between femininity, feminism and ‘reformed’ nursing, in a period when the latter two were emerging from the first. A central focus is the extent to which the discourse of ‘woman's sphere’ was meaningful for such single, employed, middle-class women as the subject of this paper, Frances Gillam Holden, in the specific context of hospitals and professional health care. This paper argues that such a discourse informed her challenges to male/medical professional power and her bids for authority and recognition in her workplace. Ultimately this challenge failed, in that male/medical power was vigorously reasserted. However, such attempts suggest the gradual shifts in late nineteenth-century constructions of femininity and domesticity towards the possibility of feminism, not only in the familiar suffrage struggles, but also in such obscure locations as the Children's Hospital in Sydney