Child witnesses and the confrontation clause

InMaryland v. Craig, the United States Supreme Court relied heavily on a brief prepared by a committee of the American Psychology-Law Society on behalf of the American Psychological Association (APA). The APA brief concluded that sexually abused children may be particularly vulnerable to distress in the legal process, especially when forced to confront the defendant face to face, and that such acute distress may be inconsistent with the state's interests in promotion of reliable testimony and child welfare. APA also argued that psychological theory and research provide foundations for individualized determination of the need for measures to protect children from face-to-face confrontation. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** AFE06051 00002     

Race and the Recall: Racial and Ethnic Polarization in the California Recall Election

In the 2003 recall election in California, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante received more than 1.25 million fewer votes in the replacement election than votes cast against the recall of Gray Davis. A much smaller group voted "yes" on the recall but voted for Bustamante. The principal underlying explanation is racial and ethnic polarization. Using L.A. Times exit poll data, we compare the characteristics of voters who displayed the two unusual behavioral patterns with those who voted in more conventional ways. We find that Latinos and African Americans are far less likely than non-Hispanic whites and Asian Americans to have defected from Bustamante given a "no" vote on the recall, and far more likely to have voted for Bustamante given a potentially strategic "yes" vote on the recall. The patterns of defection are consistent with racial polarization on Proposition 54, lending further credence to our claim that race and ethnicity persists as an important factor in vote choice, even in environments with a history of minority electoral success.     

The politics and mythology of organized crime: A Philadelphia case-study

Although much criticized, the “Cosa Nostra” theory of organized crime continues to exert considerable influence over lawmakers and law enforcement officials. This theory has been extensively studied on a national level, but few local case studies trace the transition from the multiethnic organized crime of the 1930s and 1940s to the (supposed) Italian hegemony of the years since 1960. Philadelphia provides an excellent opportunity for such a study, as the base of a strong Jewish-dominated structure before 1960 and a “Mafia town” thereafter.A major concern of this article is the manner in which the history of crime in the city was retroactively rewritten during the 1970s, in order to provide a basis for contemporary theories and bureaucratic needs.     

Mark Swatek-Evenstein: A History of Humanitarian Intervention

Liverpool Law Review -     

Michael P. Scharf,Milena Sterio & Paul R. Williams: The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 378 pp, £85 hardback,ISBN: 9781108491532

Liverpool Law Review -     

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.     

Is Antifa a Terrorist Group?

Starting in 2016, a number of protests and physical confrontations aimed at individuals and groups associated with right wing politics in the United States have been attributed to an ill-defined entity called “antifa”: short for anti-fascist. A high profile example took place in Charlottseville, Virginia on August 11-12, 2017. During two days of conflict and violence, anti right wing protesters clashed with right wing supporters. During the second day of the confrontation, a right-wing supporter drove a car into a crowd of protesters, killing one person and injuring 35 others. While many antifa supporters see it as a defense against right wing extremism, some on the right view supporters instead as terrorists. I tackle these issues in this essay by applying the guidelines of the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) to determine whether the actions by antifa supporters during the Charlottesville incident consitute terrrorism. I conclude that while the events share many characteristics of terrorist attacks, they do not include all of the elements of terrorism required by the GTD. I also question whether antifa can be considered to constitute a “group” at this point in time. My essay highlights how complicated it is to distinghish terrorism from other forms of illegal violence.