Traditional Organized Crime in Chicago

For 78 years the Chicago Outfit or Mob has been the focus of the Chicago Crime Commission's1 efforts to combat organized crime. Indeed, the perception of organized crime in Chicago, as well as much of the city's reputation, stems from the notorious, and often inappropriately glamorized, activities of the Outfit from Al Capone in the 1930s through John DiFronzo in the 1990s. While the Outfit is most certainly still alive, much of the organized criminal activity presently targeting Chicago and its suburbs is perpetrated by new and emerging criminal enterprises. These groups range from local burglary rings to highly sophisticated international criminal organizations headquartered in Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and South America, involved in corporate kidnapping and extortion, murder-for-hire, high-tech crime and drug trafficking. All require public attention and relentless law enforcement scrutiny. This paper deals with traditional organized crime in Chicago. Emerging Organized Crime will be dealt with in a forthcoming paper.     

Analyzing Multiple-Item Measures of Crime and Deviance II: Tobit Regression Analysis of Transformed Scores

The purpose of this article is to inform criminological researchers about tobit regression, an alternative regression model that deserves more attention in this field. Tobit regression is intended for continuous data that are censored, or bounded at a limiting value. The tobit model may be a particularly good match to measures of self-reported offending, provided they have been transformed to reduce skewness. We present empirical analyses that evaluate the match of self-report measures to the assumptions of ordinary least square (OLS) and tobit regression models and that assess the consequences of any violations of assumptions. The analyses use a fourteen-item, self-report measure of delinquency from the Monitoring the Future study, a national survey of high school seniors. These analyses provide clear evidence that (1) transformations to reduce skewness improve the match of OLS to the data but still leave considerable discrepancies, and (2) the tobit model is well suited to the transformed measure. We conclude by assessing the purposes for which tobit offers greater and smaller advantages over OLS regression.     

Special Masters in the Pretrial Development of Big Cases: Potential and Problems

This article explores the advantages and disadvantages of referring discovery matters in complex cases to special masters. In the first section Brazil explains how the results of his earlier research into the discovery system exposed problems that the appointment of masters might help solve. He then describes the kinds of pretrial tasks and roles federal courts have assigned to special masters and the ways that using a master can expedite and rationalize the case development process. In the second half of the article, the author assesses the major objections to delegating judicial responsibilities to masters and the problems that frequent appointments might cause. Along the way, Brazil offers practical suggestions to judges about how to avoid potential difficulties and how to maximize the effectiveness of this increasingly popular procedure.     

Referring Discovery Tasks to Special Masters: Is Rule 53 a Source of Authority and Restrictions?

The author concludes that federal judges who want to appoint special masters to perform duties related to civil discovery may not look to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for authority to do so. By examining the historical backdrop against which the original rules were written, as well as the minutes of the proceedings of the first Advisory Committee, Brazil demonstrates that neither Rule 53 nor any other rule was designed to grant federal trial courts power to assign pretrial discovery tasks to special masters. In fact, the evidence the author marshalls shows that the original Advisory Committee explicitly rejected the idea that the Federal Rules should authorize even a limited role for special masters in connection with discovery depositions.
Finding no authority for such appointments in the Federal Rules, the author turns to the judiciary's "inherent power." Drawing principles from the seminal Supreme Court opinion in this area, Brazil infers that in some circumstances the courts' inherent authority is a sufficient premise for delegating discovery tasks to special masters. Noting that the reported cases contain no clear guidelines about when or how federal judges should use this authority in making pretrial appointments, Brazil concludes by calling for a new federal rule covering this important subject.     

Prospects for the international migration of U.S. sex offender registration and community notification laws

Sex offender registration and community notification laws have proved enormously popular in the U.S. This is so even though the avowed sexual violence preventive benefits of the laws remain largely untested and unproven; indeed, it remains an open question whether the laws actually have anti-therapeutic and criminogenic effect. This article examines why this data deficit has characterized the social and political evolution of the laws and considers the prospects for their migration to other nations.     

Autopsy Reenactment – A Useful Technique in the Evaluation of Adhesive Tape Asphyxia

A 19‐year‐old woman was found dead with her face and head wrapped in plastic adhesive tape in a cupboard beside an opened helium cylinder. Despite the alleged presence of a suicide message on a social networking website, the unusual circumstances raised the possibility at the time of autopsy of either accidental death from sexual asphyxia or homicide. A carefully monitored reenactment demonstrated, however, that the type of commercial adhesive tape that had been used did not cause complete airway obstruction and that it was possible to wrap a considerable length of tape around the head and neck with the breath held. All of the features at autopsy were, therefore, compatible with self‐infliction. Asphyxial death was attributed to the combined effects of smothering from tape and anoxia from helium, an extremely rare combination in young females.