Postmortem Computed Tomography in Firearm Homicides: A Retrospective Case Series,

Postmortem computed tomography (PMCT) is integrated into the evaluation of decedents in several American medical examiner offices and medicolegal death investigative centers in many other countries. We retrospectively investigated the value of PMCT in a series of firearm homicide cases from a statewide centralized medical examiner’s office that occurred during 2016. Autopsies were performed or supervised by board-certified forensic pathologists who reviewed the PMCT scans prior to autopsy. PMCT scans were re-evaluated by a forensic radiologist blinded to the autopsy findings and scored by body region (head–neck, thoracoabdominal, and extremities). Injury discrepancies were scored using a modified Goldman classification and analyzed with McNemar’s test. We included 60 males and 20 females (median age 31 years, range 3–73). Based on PMCT, 56 (79.1%) cases had injuries relevant to the cause of death in a single body region (24 head–neck region, 32 thoracoabdominal region). Out of these 56 cases, 9 had a missed major diagnosis by PMCT outside that region, including 6 extremity injuries visible during standard external examination. Yet all had evident lethal firearm injury. We showed that PMCT identifies major firearm injuries in homicide victims and excludes injuries related to the cause of death in other regions when a single body region is injured. Although PMCT has a known limited sensitivity for soft tissue and vascular pathology, it can be combined with external examination to potentially reduce or focus dissections in some of these cases depending on the circumstances and medicolegal needs.     

Overlooking Feigning Behavior May Result in Potential Harmful Treatment Interventions: Two Case Reports of Undetected Malingering

Clinicians tend to overestimate their ability to recognize feigning behavior in psychiatric patients, especially if it concerns patients who have been admitted for observation. Feigning can be either externally motivated (e.g., for financial compensation, known as malingering) or internally motivated (e.g., to assume the “sick role,” known as factitious disorder). Persistent presentation of severe symptoms is usually associated with the factitious disorder. We present two patients with strong external incentives who consistently and convincingly feigned severe psychiatric symptoms during a protracted period of inpatient observation in a specialized center; both were engaged in a procedure for medical asylum. The first case presented with the clinical picture of a psychotic depression with severe motor symptoms, and the second case showed symptoms of a chronic post-traumatic stress disorder with secondary psychotic symptoms. Both cases were thoroughly investigated but feigning was overlooked, and unnecessary and harmful treatment interventions were given. To prevent iatrogenic damage, we recommend a critical attitude that takes malingering as an option into account in settings where patients are often involved in high stake legal procedures. A clinical sign that might indicate feigning is therapy-resistant symptoms. To rule out feigning a comprehensive, multimethod approach is required, but an active stance toward collateral information is essential. Specialized psychological tests may be useful for preliminary screening, but for their use in culturally diverse populations as in refugee mental health more research is needed.     

Article 75 of the Rome Statute: Reparations and Their Implementation in the Dutch Legal System

Netherlands International Law Review - Unlike the ICTY and ICTR Statutes, the Rome Statute of the ICC provides in Article 75 for various forms of court-ordered reparations for the victims of...     

Positive and Negative Emotions: Differential Associations with Sleep Duration and Quality in Adolescents

Despite positive and negative emotions being equally important predictors of adolescent wellbeing, research examining positive emotions is limited. In 4582 adolescents (69.4% females; age M?±?SD?=?14.55?±?1.74 years), we used structural equation modelling to examine associations between self-reported sleep duration and quality with positive affect, negative affect, and happiness, controlling for age and sex. Overall, sleep quality displayed stronger associations with all measures of emotions compared to sleep duration. Shorter sleep was more specifically associated with lower positive emotions (happiness, followed by positive affect), whereas poorer sleep showed stronger associations with negative affect. Protecting sleep duration may promote positive emotions and enhancing sleep quality may reduce mood disturbances. Future research could incorporate both positive and negative emotions to better understand adolescents’ wellbeing.     

Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism

A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.     

Small winners and big losers: strategic party behaviour in the 2017 Dutch general election

Abstract

This article analyses party strategies during the campaign for the Dutch general election of March 2017, making use of issue-yield theory. It investigates whether parties strategically emphasise high-yield issues, by juxtaposing the issue opportunities provided by voters with parties’ issue emphasis during the campaign. More specifically, it asks whether parties strategically emphasised issues that were expected to reward them electorally. Analysing voter preferences and party campaign data, it is found that parties and most of their constituencies show high ideological consistency, that parties emphasise mostly positional issues and thus choose a conflict-mobilising strategy, and that most parties emphasise high-yield issues rather than following the general political agenda. Four small parties that won significantly behaved strategically while the social democrats – who severely lost – hardly did. The findings imply that the issue-yield framework can help to explain the election result in the fragmented Dutch multi-party context.     

Fact Checking and Information in the Age of Covid

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed and accelerated an information crisis as well as a health one. What we discover about Covid 19, how it spreads, to whom and why and how best to mitigate it—all depend on information. The essays in this special section, which this article introduces, explore the importance of information and the fundamental role of fact checkers in understanding how information flows, why mistakes are made, and how to counteract them. Fact checking as an idea and a practice emerged in the early twenty-first century, developed as a positive beacon to counteract a growing sense that information could no longer be trusted. Now, more than a decade after its creation, fact checking sits within a far more complex and chaotic media context, and its expertise and understanding has never been so important. We need to understand what fact checkers do because they are grappling with how to tether us to reality.