Senator Opposition to Supreme Court Nominations: Reference Dependence on the Departing Justice

Research indicates that senators evaluate U.S. Supreme Court nominations on two ideological dimensions: the distance between themselves and the nominee, and the potential effect confirmation would have on the Court median. My analysis of nominations from 1968 to 2006 provides evidence that senators are also influenced by the ideological contrast between the nominee and the departing justice.     

West African Voices

A new literary programme has been started in the West AfricanService of the B.B.C., and this article is a reprint of oneof the talks. The Ibo speaker was formerly in the Customs, andqualified as a barrister last November: he is also the authorof numerous poems in English, and of a novel, The Prince ofUtete. The other two are schoolmasters working as Assistantsat the School of Oriental and African Studies. For technicalreasons, the orthography is not quite complete.     

Reducing lockup crowding with expedited initial processing of minor offenders

This article assesses the effects of one jurisdiction's attempt to control its lockup population through creation of a separate processing center designed to expedite initial processing of individuals charged with misdemeanors and minor felonies. In the new center, cases were screened and initial hearings held around-the-clock, seven days per week. “Before” and “after” samples of arrestees are compared on prosecutorial screening time, time to court, and time in custody. The results show significant reductions in case screening and length of time to initial court hearing. Individuals released on recognizance and those with no charges filed spent significantly less time in custody and saved considerable bed space for the jurisdiction. Individuals with bond set experienced no reductions in length of custody. Collateral consequences of the new facility included improved procedural justice, expanded detention capacity in the county, and an end to part of the federal litigation.     

Randomized experiments in criminology: What have we learned in the last two decades?

This paper aims to review randomized experiments in criminology with offending outcomes and reasonably large numbers that were published between 1982 and 2004. A total of 83 experiments are summarized, compared with only 35 published between 1957 and 1981: 12 on policing, 13 on prevention, 14 on corrections, 22 on courts, and 22 on community interventions. Randomized experiments are still relatively uncommon, but there have been more large-scale multi-site experiments and replication programs. There have also been several experiments in which 100 or more places were randomly assigned. Relatively few experiments (only 10 out of 83) were conducted outside the United States. Meta-analyses suggest that prevention methods, correctional therapy, batterer programs, drug courts, juvenile restitution and deterrent policing were effective in reducing offending, while Scared Straight and boot camp programs caused a significant increase in offending.     

JUVENILITY AND PUNISHMENT: SENTENCING JUVENILES IN ADULT CRIMINAL COURT*

The study outlined in this article addressed a key limitation of prior research on the punishment of juveniles transferred to adult court by employing propensity score matching techniques to create more comparable samples of juvenile and young adult offenders. Using recent data from the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, it tested competing theoretical propositions about the salience of juvenile status in adult court. Findings indicate that even after rigorous statistical matching procedures, juvenile offenders are punished more severely than their young adult counterparts. We found no evidence that this “juvenile penalty” is exacerbated by an offender's race or gender, but it does vary starkly across offense type and mode of transfer, being driven primarily by drug crimes and discretionary waivers. The import of these findings is discussed as they relate to the future of juvenile justice policy regarding the continued use of juvenile transfer to adult court.     

The use of the laser for determining the direction of the shots and the position of the victim's body in gunshot wounds

In this article a practical case is described when gunshot directions and position of a victim's body at the moment of each shot were determined by natural simulation using an LG-78 laser (made in the form of a gun).     

Dirty tricks of cross-examination

A mock jury study was conducted to test the hypothesis that perceptions of a witness can be biased by presumptuous cross-examination questions. A total of 105 subjects read a rape trial in which the cross-examiner asked a question that implied something negative about the reputation of either the victim or an expert. Within each condition, the question was met with either a denial, an admission, or an objection from the witness's attorney. Results indicated that although ratings of the victim's credibility were not affected by the presumptuous question, the expert's credibility was significantly diminished—even when the question had elicited a denial or a sustained objection. Conceptual and practical implications of these findings are discussed.This research was supported by funds provided to the first author by the Bronfman Science Center.     

The European Parliament and Comitology: On the Road to Nowhere?

The European Parliament has generally been deeply distrustful of the comitology system, primarily on the grounds that it allows the national administrations to undermine its supervisory role in the area of implementing legislation. Parliament has therefore sought to use the political, budgetary and jurisdictional means at its disposal to counteract the spread of comitology, or at least to promote the less intrusive forms of committee procedure. These initiatives have not, for the most part, been wholly successful; neither the interinstitutional agreements nor Parliament's arguments before the Court of Justice have produced the results it had hoped for. Parliament has been able, however, to use its Maastricht powers to influence the choice of committee procedure included in legislation adopted under codecision, and its budgetary tactics have forced the Commission to rationalise somewhat the annual expenditure on committees of all kinds and to bring a modicum of transparency into their operation. The imminence of the intergovernmental conference led to a suspension of hostilities towards the end of 1996.