Performing Aboriginal Rights in 1951: From Australia's Top End to Southeast

In 1951, performers from Daly River and Tiwi Islands Aboriginal communities staged a corroboree strike. The musicians and dancers had routinely entertained visiting cruise ships in the Darwin Botanic Gardens, but now joined dockside workers to protest the jailing and exiling of two Aboriginal agitators Lawrence Wurrpen (Urban) and Fred (Nadpur) Waters. In Melbourne, the Australian Aborigines' League expressed solidarity with the Darwin strikes and protested the exclusion of Aboriginal voices from the Jubilee of Australian Federation. The League's leaders Doug Nicholls and Bill Onus produced a new work of musical theatre featuring east coast Aboriginal performers Fred Foster, Margaret Tucker, Georgia Lee, Harold Blair, and others in ‘Out of the Dark — An Aboriginal Moomba’. In this paper we examine political uses of performance in Australia's assimilation era, and show how Aboriginal agitators used music and dance to connect struggles for rights across Australia, and to keep cultural identity alive. In doing so we show how performance operated both as work and as assertion of cultural sovereignty.     

Putting Conflict Where It Belongs: A Response to “Creating Shared Responsibility through Respect for Military Culture: The Russian and American Cases”

Professor Dale R. Herspring argues that civil‐military relations should move beyond a preoccupation with civilian control; instead, he says, the focus should be on the degree and nature of conflict within civil‐military interactions. This alternative theoretical view adds much to the extant literature and allows future work to concentrate both on a more nuanced account of the effects of civil‐military relations and, as Professor Herspring does, on the determinants of a “healthy” degree of civil‐military conflict. This piece responds to Professor Herspring’s alternative view, arguing that future work building on his framework could incorporate much from within public administration.     

Using subsampling to estimate the strength of handwriting evidence via score-based likelihood ratios

The likelihood ratio paradigm has been studied as a means for quantifying the strength of evidence for a variety of forensic evidence types. Although the concept of a likelihood ratio as a comparison of the plausibility of evidence under two propositions (or hypotheses) is straightforward, a number of issues arise when one considers how to go about estimating a likelihood ratio. In this paper, we illustrate one possible approach to estimating a likelihood ratio in comparative handwriting analysis. The novelty of our proposed approach relies on generating simulated writing samples from a collection of writing samples from a known source to form a database for estimating the distribution associated with the numerator of a likelihood ratio. We illustrate this approach using documents collected from 432 writers under controlled conditions.     

Expressed sexual assault legal context and victim culpability attributions

Legal scholars have argued that laws have an expressive function, specifically that sexual assault laws may convey social-level messages that victims are culpable for crimes against them. In a university sample, we conducted the first experimental test of legal scholars' proposal, hypothesizing that legal messages-specifically their clarity and effectiveness in conveying that sexual assault is a crime-affect victim culpability attributions. Results demonstrated that greater culpability was attributed to a victim of sexual assault within a context expressing unclear and ineffective sexual assault law than within a context clearly and effectively expressing that sexual assault is a crime. We also garnered empirical support for a mediation model, that is, negative affective reactions to a victim statistically accounted for the relationship between expressed legal context and victim culpability attributions. Implications for future psycholegal research and potential legal reforms are discussed.     

The impact of juveniles' ages and levels of psychosocial maturity on judges' opinions about adjudicative competence

This study investigated whether defendants' ages and levels of psychosocial maturity would affect judges' ratings of juveniles' adjudicative competence in juvenile and criminal court. Three hundred forty two judges reviewed a forensic psychological report about a hypothetical defendant; only the defendant's age (12-17) and maturity level (mature, immature) varied across reports. Results revealed a main effect of age, with older juveniles generally deemed more competent, and a main effect of maturity, with mature juveniles generally deemed more competent. No interaction was found. Results suggest that age and maturity play major roles in judicial determinations of juvenile competency.     

Unusual skin lesions mimicking bruises caused by Pseudomonas septicemia secondary to undiagnosed peripheral T-cell lymphoma in a young woman

We present a case of a 30-year-old woman with learning difficulties who was found dead at home by her mother. Her body was partially naked and covered in a number of unusual skin lesions with a targetoid appearance with red erythematous centers and well-delineated halos of pallor. These lesions were initially thought to be bruises by the police and by a forensic postmortem instigated. Postmortem examination also identified hepatosplenomegaly, severe lymphadenopathy, and focal patchy colonic ulceration. Histologic examination of the skin and bowel ulcers showed the lesions to be areas of infarction caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa vasculitis. Pseudomonas was also cultured from the swabs of the abdomen, the spleen, and the blood cultures. Histologic findings of the lymph nodes showed complete effacement of the normal architecture by a population of pleomorphic small lymphoid cells. Immunohistochemistry confirmed the predominant cell type to be T-cells. The diagnosis of peripheral T-cell lymphoma was made. The cause of death was given as Pseudomonas septicemia secondary to immunocompromise resulting from the undiagnosed peripheral T-cell lymphoma. The pathogenesis of Pseudomonas and its association with malignancy is discussed along with a brief review of peripheral T-cell lymphomas. This case report demonstrates the characteristic macroscopic appearance of cutaneous Pseudomonas-associated lesions and how they can be misinterpreted as bruises.     

Lessons learned from the implementation of two randomized trials in a criminal court setting

Randomized trials represent the most rigorous type of research design to measure the impact of a social policy intervention. However, such designs are difficult to implement and require the consent of multiple parties, including researchers and non-researchers. Unique challenges arise when seeking to implement such a design in a criminal court setting, due to the need to revise legal procedures, uphold due process for defendants, and obtain the direct, ongoing participation of judges and attorneys, among other stakeholders. The current principals recently conducted two randomized trials concerning the court response to intimate partner violence: one testing the impact of court-ordered batterer programs in the Bronx, New York, and a second testing the impact of intensive judicial monitoring in Rochester, New York. Key lessons involved forging collaborative stakeholder relationships, critically assessing the experimental intervention and its contrast with the control condition, ensuring legal due process for defendants, addressing victim safety, setting realistic timetables, adopting a skeptical view towards estimates of study volume, and anticipating substantial variation from original design to final plan, especially in regards to randomization protocols and defendant eligibility criteria. These lessons may prove invaluable in informing future research in court-based and other social settings where random assignment is pursued.     

Hyperthermia,Thermal Injuries,and Death from a Forced Convection Heat Source: A Case Report and Experimental Model

Heat‐related deaths of children are most often encountered in the context of enclosed vehicles in summer months. Deviating from this, a 16‐month‐old boy was found unresponsive in a stroller that was placed adjacent to a space heater during mid‐winter. The cause of death was hyperthermia and thermal injuries. Manner of death determination was difficult due to alleged surrounding circumstances. To understand the time‐course of this child's injuries, a child death scene investigation was performed; the stroller and space heater were recovered. In a re‐enactment of the events, a slaughtered pig approximating the child's size was warmed using a water bath and placed in the stroller beside the space heater. Cutaneous temperature measurements showed rapid initial temperature rise with subsequent steady increases. Tanning of the skin was seen on periodic direct observations. Internal temperature monitoring illustrated steady increases. This experiment was essential in classifying the manner of death as homicide.     

Trait Anger,Physical Aggression,and Violent Offending in Antisocial and Borderline Personality Disorders

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) are common conditions in forensic settings that present high rates of violence. Personality traits related to the five‐factor model personality domains of neuroticism and agreeableness have shown a relationship with physical aggression in nonclinical and general psychiatric samples. The aim of the present investigation was to examine the association of these personality traits with violence and aggression in ASPD and BPD. Results revealed that trait anger/hostility predicted self‐reported physical aggression in 47 ASPD and BPD subjects (β = 0.5, p = 0.03) and number of violent convictions in a subsample of the ASPD participants (β = 0.2, p = 0.009). These preliminary results suggest that high anger and hostility are associated with physical aggression in BPD and ASPD. Application of validated, self‐report personality measures could provide useful and easily accessible information to supplement clinical risk assessment of violence in these conditions.