Seminar on criminal appeals in the United Kingdom

Conference Report

Seminar on criminal appeals in the United Kingdom     

A Problem with Double-Blind Photospread Procedures: Photospread Administrators Use One Eyewitness's Confidence to Influence the Identification of Another Eyewitness

In Experiment 1, photospread administrators (PAs, N = 50) showed a target-absent photospread to a confederate eyewitness (CW), who was randomly assigned to identify one photo with either high or low confidence. PAs subsequently administered the same target-absent photospread to participant eyewitnesses (PWs, N = 50), all of whom had viewed a live staged crime 1 week earlier. CWs were rated by the PAs as significantly more confident in the high-confidence condition versus low-confidence condition. More importantly, the confidence of the CW affected the identification decision of the PW. In the low-confidence condition, the photo identified by the CW was identified by the PW significantly more than the other photos; there was no significant difference in photo choice in the high-confidence condition. In spite of the obvious influence exerted in the low-confidence condition, observers were not able to detect bias in the photospread procedures. A second experiment was conducted to test a post-hoc explanation for the results of Experiment 1: PAs exerted influence in the low-confidence condition because they perceived the task as more difficult for the eyewitness than in the high-confidence condition. Independent observers (N = 84) rated the difficulty of the confederate's task as higher in the low-confidence condition compared with the high-confidence condition, suggesting that expectations of task difficulty might be driving the effect observed in Experiment 1. Results support recommendations for double-blind photospreads and emphasize that the same investigator should not administer photo lineups to multiple eyewitnesses in an investigation.     

The unheeded present and the impossible future: temporalities of relocation after Typhoon Haiyan

Recovery plans were developed for both the Philippines and Tacloban City in particular. They framed Haiyan as a climate change emergency, and sought to respond to future risks to the city and country. This focus on future recovery came at the expense of attention to the transitional needs of those worst affected by the Typhoon. International humanitarian organizations were co-opted into the government’s refusal of transitional assistance to Tacloban City shoreline residents. This was because they construed their mandate of apolitical assistance in a particular way. An alternative framing of emergency deployed by a local organization produced a very different result. In order to respond to the range of temporal needs in post-disaster situations, humanitarian actors need to be cognizant of the range of epistemic frameworks available to them.     

Correlates of Behavioral Outcomes in Sexually Abused Children

The present study attempted to identify individual and contextual factors associated with outcomes in a group of 63 latency-aged children disclosing sexual abuse (SA). Children reporting SA were found to display greater internalizing and externalizing behavioral difficulties as well as more sexualized behaviors relative to same-age non-abused peers. Mothers also reported these children as less socially competent than their peers. Family contextual factors appeared to be associated with behavioral difficulties and made a unique contribution to the prediction of externalizing and sexualized behaviors. Of the personal variables, avoidance coping was found to be linked to poorer outcomes. In examining possible factors linked to ‘resilient’ outcomes in a 6-month time-frame, family conflict and avoidance coping were found to be associated to clinical status in children reporting SA.