Harmless error analysis: How do judges respond to confession errors?

In Arizona v. Fulminante (1991), the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door for appellate judges to conduct a harmless error analysis of erroneously admitted, coerced confessions. In this study, 132 judges from three states read a murder case summary, evaluated the defendant's guilt, assessed the voluntariness of his confession, and responded to implicit and explicit measures of harmless error. Results indicated that judges found a high-pressure confession to be coerced and hence improperly admitted into evidence. As in studies with mock jurors, however, the improper confession significantly increased their conviction rate in the absence of other evidence. On the harmless error measures, judges successfully overruled the confession when required to do so, indicating that they are capable of this analysis.     

Cross-Classified Multilevel Models: An Application to the Criminal Case Processing of Indicted Terrorists

This study provides an application of cross-classified multilevel models to the study of early case processing outcomes for suspected terrorists in U.S. federal district courts. Because suspected terrorists are simultaneously nested within terrorist organizations and criminal court environments, they are characterized by overlapping data hierarchies that involve cross-nested ecological contexts. Cross-classified models provide a useful but underutilized approach for analyzing such data. Using the American Terrorism Study (ATS), this research examines case dismissals, trial adjudications and criminal convictions for a sample of 574 terrorist suspects. Findings indicate that diverse factors affect case processing outcomes, including legal factors such as the number of counts, number of co-defendants, and statute of indictment, extralegal factors such as the ethnicity of the offender, and incident characteristics such as the type of terrorism target. Case processing outcomes also vary significantly across both terrorist groups and criminal courts and are partially explained by select group and court characteristics including the type of terrorist organization and the terrorism trial rate of the court. Results are discussed vis-à-vis contemporary research on terrorism punishments and future directions are suggested for additional applications of cross-classified models in criminological research.     

Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That: The Effect of Personalized Appeals on Marriage Equality Campaigns

An increasingly predominant strategy used by organizations seeking to increase support for gay marriage is to personalize the issue by focusing on individuals in the LGBT community. However, competing theoretical traditions (e.g., Allport??s contact theory, group threat, implicit bias) raise questions about whether this strategy has the desired effect. This paper presents results from an original field experiment conducted in coordination with a marriage equality organization. Callers who self-identified as a member of the LGBT community were less effective in soliciting donations compared to callers who did not self-identify, suggesting that personalization has a negative effect on persuasion efforts. The findings cut against the grain of the Allport (The nature of prejudice, 1954) hypothesis and have important implications for social advocacy organizations in terms of rhetorical and message strategy.     

Australian Internment Life Stories: Recapturing Salvatore Ragonesi between the Public Record and Family Memories

Since the Archives Act of 1983 Australia's Second World War internees have had access to their wartime files, yet little attention has focused on whether they and their families have consulted these records, or on their responses to them. From the early 2000s historians and archivists began discussing the need for combining private oral testimony with official records as part of a wider discourse on the importance of life stories for deepening knowledge about the past. This article explores the impact of a father's official internment records on his son, through the son's sharing of memories, lived experience and his reactions to official documents, in order to provide a more complete story of his father's internment and life than either the public record or the oral testimony alone can produce. We argue that Sam Ragonesi's oral testimony, especially concerning his encounter with Salvatore Ragonesi's official records, contributes to a greater shared understanding of experiences of war on the home front by integrating social, cultural and family dimensions hidden from Salvatore's public history. In this way intergenerational experiences help both to contest the collective image of internment and create a more complex picture of the War.     

A bouncy house? UK select committee newsworthiness, 2005–18

ABSTRACT

Traditionally, legislative committees have been regarded as quite unimportant in the UK. Some scholars contend that recent reforms have substantially increased the powers of select committees, rendering them genuinely important to policy and the scrutiny of government; others see little sign of change. We examine House of Commons select committees in regard to exactly one indicator of significance, their newspaper coverage. We detect significant gains in salience of some committees, as compared to the period just before the Wright reforms (2005–10). But committees vary dramatically in coverage levels and trends, and it is unclear if their newspaper profiles continue to grow.     

Evaluating the Efficiency of Primer Extension Capture as a Method to Enrich DNA Extractions,

In this study, we sought to document the efficiency of primer extension capture (PEC) as a method to enrich DNA eluates of targeted DNA molecules and remove nontarget molecules from pools containing both. Efficiency of the method was estimated by comparing number of “copies in” to “copies out” by quantitative polymerase chain reaction. PEC retention of DNA targets ranging 109‐288 base pairs (bps) in length was 15.88–2.14% (i.e., loss of 84.12–97.86% of target molecules). Experimental modifications of the PEC method resulted in no significant improvements. However, the benefit of PEC was revealed in its ability to remove most nontarget DNA molecules (99.99%). We also discovered that many (56.69%) of the target molecules are “lost” prior to their immobilization on the streptavidin‐coated beads. These estimates of methodological efficiency are directly comparable to previous ones observed following “fishing” for DNA, an alternative method for DNA enrichment.     

Asia-Pacific news

This column provides a country-by-country analysis of the latest legal developments, cases and issues relevant to the IT, media and telecommunications’ industries in key jurisdictions across the Asia-Pacific region. The articles appearing in this column are intended to serve as ‘alerts’ and are not submitted as detailed analyses of cases or legal developments.