Characterization of human DNA in environmental samples

Environmental samples from indoor surfaces can be confounded by dust, which is composed largely of human skin cells and has been documented to contain roughly tens of micrograms of total DNA per gram of dust. This study complements previous published work by providing estimates of the quantity of amplifiable human DNA found in environmental samples from a typical indoor environment, categorized by the intensity of human traffic and visible quantity of dust. Dust was collected by surface swabbing standard 576 cm² areas in eight locations, and evaluated for total DNA quantity, presence of human DNA (mitochondrial and nuclear loci using conventional PCR), quantity of human nuclear DNA using quantitative PCR, and STR analysis. The total DNA content of 36 dust samples ranged from 9 to 28 ng/cm², and contained 0.2–1.1 pg/cm² of human DNA. Overall, human DNA was detected in 97% of 36 dust samples and 61% of samples yielded allele distributions of varying degrees of complexity when subjected to STR analysis. The implications of this study are twofold. First, the presence of dust in evidence can be a significant contamination source in forensic investigations because the human DNA component is of sufficient quality and quantity to produce allele calls in STR analysis. This can be effectively managed by implementing stringent protocols for collection and analysis of potential biological samples. A second implication is the use of dust as a source of evidence for identification of inhabitants within a defined location. In the latter case, a number of additional studies would be necessary to identify relevant pretreatments for environmental dust samples and to develop the necessary deconvolution techniques to separate the composite genotypes obtained.     

Suicide by blasting caps: a case study of rare cranial trauma

Suicide is a deliberate act of ending one's life. Suicide by use of any explosive device, when not involved in a terrorist act, is quite rare in occurrence when compared with other methods routinely utilized. In this paper, we present to the medicolegal community a case of an adult male who committed suicide with blasting caps and the subsequent extensive damage to the cranial hard tissue. Although the cause and manner of death were relatively straightforward, consultation with forensic anthropologists was requested for an anthropological trauma assessment of the highly fragmented skull. After the skull was cleaned and reconstructed, the analysis revealed similarities between blasting cap trauma to the head and high velocity gunshot trauma to the head. Therefore, in a case where some evidence may have been removed or destroyed, forensic analysis involving trauma of this magnitude could result in a misinterpretation of the true mechanism responsible for the osseous damage. In this case, cooperation among the law enforcement agency, coroner's investigators, the forensic pathologist, and forensic anthropologists provided a comprehensive death case analysis.     

When Deterrence and Death Mitigation Fall Short: Fantasy and Fetishes as Gap‐Fillers in Border Regulation

Drawing on fieldwork and political theory with Lacanian psychoanalytic influences, this article analyzes how fantasy and fetishes help sustain strategies shown to be no solution to U.S. border control problems. More than a decade after the official launch of the border control paradigm of “prevention through deterrence,” predicated on the assumption that ramping up walls, barriers, policing, and the human costs of border crossing would deter, there has been scant evidence of deterrence and much evidence of diversion of migrants to more dangerous crossing points where death rates have soared. Attempts to mitigate the cost to life have also proved ineffective but have persisted alongside the policy of diversion. The article is based on research in a region where the reality of diversion and death instead of deterrence was lived but where people still pursue projects of barrier‐building and death mitigation that they know to be ineffective. The article analyzes how fantasy fuels action despite knowledge and occludes a traumatic element around which the symbolic order of border law is structured: the foundation of “good life” with its bounty of rights, privileges, and opportunity on the exclusion of basic life denuded of the entitlements that make the good life sweet. The article also examines how fetishes are used to cope with unrealized hopes and to diffuse the impact of the traumatic knowledge that good life is undergirded by the exclusion and even death of basic life.     

High quality criminal justice education and the role of the community college

Summary We are entering a new era where the demands for quality will include higher expectations of faculty, students, and practitioners. Now is the time for action and decision. Criminal justice education has rapidly matured; rather than being complacent about the progress we’ve made, we should take the lead and become acknowledged as pacesetters for high educational standards. Recommendations for improving the quality of higher education must be considered with sincerity and diligence. The capability for excellence is present in the conscientious faculty residing in each and every criminal justice program. With proper nurturing and support, these faculty would flourish and this excellence come into full bloom. Furthermore, the task of achieving quality education in all fields will not and must not fall to one group for action. We are faced with the necessity of bringing all factions together—teacher, administrator, student, and practitioner—to develop and implement solutions to today’s education problems, not as a last resort, but in recognition of change as a constant reality. The time for change is always now.     

The growing importance of Ukraine as a transit country for heroin trafficking: U.S.-Ukraine research partnership

This research was funded by the U.S.-Ukraine Research Partnership project, which began in November of 1999 when an agreement was signed between the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the Ukrainian Academy of Law Sciences (UALS). This partnership program was an integral part of the Gore-Kuchma Binational Commission, established in September 1996 to solidify the close ties between Ukraine and the United States. The increasingly global character of crime has created a mutual incentive for cooperation between the United States and Ukraine. In June of 1999, requests for proposals in the United States and Ukraine were concurrently announced by both NIJ and UALS. The proposals were to address the following crime areas: organized crime, corruption, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and economic crimes. The proposals were competitively reviewed by an expert working-group made up of both U.S. and Ukrainian representatives. The result was five U.S.-Ukrainian research teams, composed of twenty-two Ukrainian and five U.S. members. The size of each individual U.S.-Ukrainian team ranged from ten to three researchers. These teams met for the first time in November 1999 at a “kick-off” conference in Kiev, Ukraine. The greatest accomplishment of the conference was that researchers began the process of overcoming communication barriers and divergent methodological approaches to formulate a joint plan for their research. For this research, Layne worked with two Ukrainian research partners to jointly develop this paper. Khruppa was responsible for collecting Ukrainian data for the report and Muzyka supplied legislative expertise and background. Layne traveled to Ukraine (Kyiv and Kharkiv) four times over the course of two years and her Ukrainian counterparts came to the United States once. It was a challenge to collaborate across distance and language barriers, but a warm, collegial relationship developed and was maintained despite these obstacles.     

The Unexpected: Bionic Woman at the Millennium

Wilfred Bion's A Memoir of the Future provides a point of departure for feminist thinking about the millennium. Bion problematizes hopes for the future and associates thought with catastrophic change. Women play an unexpected role in Bion's experimental autobiography, posing provocative questions and unsettling the status quo . Since Bion has little to say about women in his clinical writings, A Memoir sheds light on his thinking and on the post-Kleinian culture of the 1970s. Book I of A Memoir depicts a class- and sex-nightmare played out between men and women, and women and women, in an age of anxiety whose setting appears to be the fascist 'pacification' of Middle England during an unspecified period. In this hallucinatory drama, all encounters are reduced to a brutal fiction of dominance and submission. The violence of the action suggests the primitive mental world of psychosis. Book II of A Memoir satirizes 'the brilliance of masculine thought' through the voices and criticisms of women. But this is the purgatorial movement of Bion's autobiography, inhabited by 'idées mères' (untransformed beta-elements) and haunted by the ghosts of Bion's traumatic war-time experience. A monstrous plot is hatched to kill primitive, fascistic Man, who retaliates and takes the female spoils. Is this the prelude to catastrophic change? Book III stages a country-house debate between different characters who represent aspects of Bion's personality, recapitulating the concerns of his later writing. The debate includes a meditation on childbirth as compared to war trauma, but Bion takes his distance from feminine intuition or common sense. Women fight on both sides of the barriers in the Bionic revolution - becoming, however, figures for the 'unexpected' and precursors of emotional upheaval. The gendering of millennial thought in Bion's Memoir provides an opportunity to scrutinize our own unthought fantasies of change.