Fatal workplace accident involving ethyl acetate: a distribution study

The tissue distribution of ethyl acetate and ethanol in a case of acute intoxication by ethyl acetate is presented. The victim was a 39-year-old man who was found dead lying on his abdomen in the interior of a tank containing ethyl acetate. Confirmation of ethyl acetate was obtained with static headspace gas chromatography with mass spectrometry. In blood, rapid biotransformation of ethyl acetate occurs by plasma esterases resulting in acetic acid and ethanol. Quantitation of ethyl acetate and ethanol in the postmortem samples was performed using static headspace gas chromatography with flame ionization detector. N-butanol was used as internal standard. Separation of the compounds was obtained on a Supelcowaxtrade mark-10 Fused Silica capillary column. The method was linear over the specific ranges investigated and showed a within-run accuracy of 99.8 and 101.0% and a precision of 0.5 and 2.0% for ethanol and ethyl acetate, respectively. The postmortem samples were analyzed in duplicate or triplicate. Coefficients of variation were < or =4.51% for ethyl acetate and < or =0.52% for ethanol. The low ratios of the ethyl acetate concentration to the ethanol concentration found in the postmortem tissue samples confirmed the rapid in vivo biotransformation of ethyl acetate. The highest concentration of ethyl acetate was found in the testis indicating that postmortem percutane absorption may have occurred. To our knowledge, this is the first reported tissue distribution study of ethyl acetate and ethanol in a case of acute intoxication by ethyl acetate.     

Perspective and procedural justice: Attorney and litigant evaluations of court procedures

A comparison of the procedural justice judgments of attorneys and those of lay people judging the same procedures offers an opportunity to generate new information on what factors affect judgments of fairness. In a survey of reactions to conventional and innovative procedures in a United States district court, attorneys and lay people involved in tort and contract cases were asked to judge the overall fairness of court procedures and the fairness of specific procedures used in arbitration hearings. The respondents were also asked for their judgments concerning the favorability of the procedure's outcome, the opportunity to have the case heard and decided by an impartial third party, and their side's control over what happened in the case, all of which are factors found in previous studies to affect procedural fairness judgments. The results showed that, while attorneys gave higher overall fairness ratings than did litigants, the difference was not affected by the procedure assigned to the case. In addition, attorneys and litigants appeared to use the same standards to evaluate the fairness of procedures, although they disagreed about where the procedures they experienced fell on these dimensions. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.     

Short reviews

Abstract

In an attempt to publish some reviews sooner after material comes out, the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars has added this section of short reviews of individual books, movies, TV series, and so on. For more information about short reviews as well as review essays, see the introduction to the list of books to review on p. 92 of this issue.