The Effects of Rehabilitative Voir Dire on Juror Bias and Decision Making

During voir dire, judges frequently attempt to “rehabilitate” venirepersons who express an inability to be impartial. Venirepersons who agree to ignore their biases and base their verdict on the evidence and the law are eligible for jury service. In Experiment 1, biased and unbiased mock jurors participated in either a standard or rehabilitative voir dire conducted by a judge and watched a trial video. Rehabilitation influenced insanity defense attitudes and perceptions of the defendant’s mental state, and decreased scaled guilt judgments compared to standard questioning. Although rehabilitation is intended to correct for partiality among biased jurors, rehabilitation similarly influenced biased and unbiased jurors. Experiment 2 found that watching rehabilitation did not influence jurors’ perceptions of the judge’s personal beliefs about the case.     

Mother Abuse: A Matter of Youth Justice,Child Welfare or Domestic Violence?

International evidence suggests that in advanced welfare states the abuse of parents, most particularly mothers, by their (most frequently male) adolescent children is increasingly prevalent. In the United Kingdom, however, child‐to‐mother abuse remains one of the most under‐acknowledged and under‐researched forms of family violence. Although it is an issue shrouded in silence, stigma, and shame, the authors' work in the youth justice sphere, focusing on interventions to deal with anti‐social behaviour, suggests that adolescent violence toward mothers is a topical and prevalent issue. We identify different ways of conceptualizing it in the policy realms of youth justice, child welfare, and domestic violence. The behaviour of both child/young person and mother is constructed in ways which inform the assignment of blame and responsibility. The paper highlights the silence that surrounds the issue in both the policy and wider academic spheres, hiding the failure of service providers to respond to this very destructive form of intimate interpersonal violence.     

Working with personality disordered women in secure care: the challenge of gender-based service delivery

Abstract

Working with women in secure services is an infrequent subject of research and discussion in the forensic mental health literature. There are several reasons for this, which will be considered in the introduction to this paper. However, a consequence of this situation is that there remains a lack of clarity in key areas of practice in relation to working with women in secure services, and working with women with personality disorder specifically: how women with personality disorder may present in secure services compared to men, therefore, the particular skills required of the practitioners who work with women and the main design features of the services within which they are managed. The body of this paper attempts to summarise important issues in each of these areas in order to inform future debate and developments in the field.     

Stress and police officer performance: An examination of effective coping behavior

Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology -     

Nutritional status of deceased illicit drug addicts in Stockholm, Sweden--a longitudinal medicolegal study

Autopsy investigations, toxicological analyses, and calculation of body mass index were performed in 1180 deceased illicit drug addicts (IDAs) in Stockholm. Sweden during 1988-2000, i.e., during a period of time when the general population in numerous countries showed a dramatic increase in the prevalence of overweight. Nutritional deficit in IDAs has been pointed out as a threat to their health as well as to their quality of life. The prevalence of overweight in deceased IDAs increased from 27.4% in 1988 to 45.5% in 2000. The prevalence of overweight among all heroin users, heroin injectors, methadone, cocaine, and amphetamine users was 36.0, 38.4, 43.1, 45.0 and 50.9%, respectively, the lowest prevalence being among users of cannabis alone and HIV-positive IDAs (22.0 and 16.1%, respectively). In conclusion, Stockholm's IDAs are affected by the past decade's dramatically increased prevalence of overweight, at least to the same degree as the general population. The increased body weight seems not to influence the danger of dying upon heroin administration.     

Fatal head trauma of an infant. Part II: Biomechanical reconstruction

An 18-month-old child was hit on the head by a falling wooden sculpture (c 60 kg) and sustained a fatal craniocerebral trauma. The kinetics of the trauma could be accurately reconstructed. The child's skull was then modelled using the finite-element-method. The material parameters known from the literature were assigned to the elements. The dynamic reconstruction performed on the basis of the kinetics calculated before was able to reproduce the destruction of the skull and the brain by simulating the impact-related topographical distribution of the intracranial pressure and the von Mises stress field.