‘Reasonable Offers’ As a Defence to Unfair Prejudice Petitions: Prescott v Potamianos

It is long established that a ‘reasonable offer’ for a petitioner's shares can defeat an unfair-prejudice petition. Lord Hoffmann gave guidance about such offers in O'Neill v Phillips. Now, in Prescott v Potamianos, the Court of Appeal has set out three factors that help to determine in general whether an offer is ‘reasonable’. Those factors are: the value offered; the likelihood of implementation; and the proximity to the unfairly prejudicial conduct. The Court's guidance is useful for lawyers and their clients, as well as being broadly favourable for petitioners. But the Court emphasised that the unfair-prejudice jurisdiction is based on fairness and so requires a considerable degree of flexibility. Such flexibility impairs the certainty that Lord Hoffmann was seeking to promote, and may create difficulties for parties making or receiving offers.     

Bruise dating using deep learning

The bruise dating can have important medicolegal implications in family violence and violence against women cases. However, studies show that the medical specialist has 50% accuracy in classifying a bruise by age, mainly due to the variability of the images and the color of the bruise. This research proposes a model, based on deep convolutional neural networks, for bruise dating using only images, by age ranges, ranging from 0–2 days to 17–30 days, and images of healthy skin. A 2140 experimental bruise photograph dataset was constructed, for which a data capture protocol and a preprocessing procedure are proposed. Similarly, 20 classification models were trained with the Inception V3, Resnet50, MobileNet, and MnasNet architectures, where combinations of learning transfer, cross‐validation, and data augmentation were used. Numerical experiments show that classification models based on MnasNet have better results, reaching 97.00% precision and sensitivity, and 99.50% specificity, exceeding 40% precision reported in the literature. Also, it was observed that the precision of the model decreases with the age of the bruise.     

Criminal personality profiling

In this work we examine outcome and process differences in criminal personality profiling among groups of profilers, detectives, psychologists, and students, using closed police cases—one sex offense and one homicide. Two major questions guide this research: (1) Are professional profilers more accurate than nonprofilers in generating personality profiles and correctly identifying offender features from crime scene details? and (2) Is the process that the profilers use qualitatively different from that of the nonprofilers? In the written profile task, the task that is most representative of what profilers actually do, profilers write richer, more detailed, and more valid profiles than the nonprofilers for both the sex offense case and homicide case. An analysis of correct responses concerning the known offender for the sex offense case revealed that the profilers scored significantly better than the other three groups in a variety of measures; similar results were not revealed for the homicide case. Profilers, however, do not appear to process this material in a way qualitatively different from any other group.