A field study of adult witness interviewing practices in a Canadian police organization

Purpose. The current study examined witness interviewing practices in a Canadian police organization. The effect of interviewer, interviewee, and interview characteristics on those practices was also examined. Method. Ninety witness interviews from a Canadian police organization were coded for the following interviewing practices: types of questions asked (i.e. open‐ended, probing, closed‐ended, clarification, multiple, leading, opinion/statement, and re‐asked), the number of interruptions, percentage of words spoken by interviewer, type of pre‐interview instructions (consequential vs. generic), and whether or not a free narrative was requested (and when requested during the interview). Characteristics pertaining to the interviewer (e.g. primary interviewer's age), interviewee (e.g. witness gender), and interview (e.g. crime type) were also coded. Results. Results showed that closed‐ended and probing questions were the most widely asked questions, and that open‐ended questions were asked relatively infrequently. It was also found that the 80–20 talking rule was violated in 89% of the interviews, interviewers rarely interrupted the witnesses, and free narratives were requested often. Overall, the effect of interviewer, interview, or interviewee characteristics on interviewing practices was minimal. Conclusions. The finding that scientifically prescribed interviewing practices are employed rarely by Canadian police officers highlights a need for increased professional interviewing training. The finding that practices are largely unaffected by personal and situational factors suggests that such training would be equally beneficial for all types of interviewers, interviewees, and contexts.     

Interviewing Witnesses: The Effect of Forced Confabulation on Event Memory

After viewing a crime video, participants answered 16 answerable and 6 unanswerable questions. Those in the "voluntary guess" condition had a "don't know" response option; those in the "forced guess" condition did not. One week later the same questions were answered with a "don't know" option. In both experiments, information generated from forced confabulation was less likely remembered than information voluntarily self-generated. Further, when the same answer was given to an unanswerable question both times, the confidence expressed in the answer increased over time in both the forced and the voluntary guess conditions. Pressing eyewitnesses to answer questions, especially questions repeated thrice (Experiment 2), may not be an effective practice because it reliably increases intrusion errors but not correct recall.     

Cautioning jurors regarding co-witness discussion: the impact of judicial warnings

Abstract

The research seeks to identify the most common problem areas and associated treatment needs of incarcerated and recently released offenders, to determine the importance of prison-based treatment and to assess the motivation of offenders towards treatment. Interviews were scheduled with representatives of three participant categories: drug-involved incarcerated offenders (n=18), recently released prisoners (n=15) and treatment staff members (n=18), resulting in 1971 statements. Using the qualitative software package WinMAX98, these expressions were categorized in a tree structure, after a codification process of the raw material. The results suggest that there is a difference in opinion between offenders and service providers with regard to the most important problems related to incarceration and re-entry. The findings further indicate that released offenders struggle more often than incarcerated offenders with problems concerning their psychological status. Therefore, the need for continuous through-care and aftercare is apparent, as is the necessity to assess the participants’ support expectancies and their individual needs. Motivating offenders to take part in (prison-based) treatment initiatives and aftercare is a major challenge, which can be accomplished by cooperation and partnerships between the criminal justice system and community-based treatment providers.     

Investigating the relationship between justice‐vengeance motivations and punitive sentencing recommendations

Purpose. The present research investigated the relationship between underlying justice and vengeance motivations and sentencing recommendations made by expert clinicians, semi‐experts, and lay‐people. It was hypothesized that the semi‐experts would recommend significantly different sentence lengths from those recommended by the expert and lay‐person groups, in line with previous research findings. It was also hypothesized that justice and vengeance motivations would be related to punitive sentencing recommendations, and that these would not be the same across the three levels of expertise. Method. An independent groups design was utilized in the main analysis, with participants belonging to three distinct levels of clinical experience (experts, semi‐experts, and lay‐people). A questionnaire was administered, with participants being measured on levels of justice and vengeance motivations, and asked to recommend appropriate sentence lengths based on nine separate crime‐scenarios. These covariables were correlated and the correlation coefficients were compared across the three levels of expertise. Results. The former hypothesis was not upheld. Findings do, however, support the latter hypothesis, with the key finding indicating that for both justice and vengeance motivations in punitive judgement, it is the lay‐participants who appear distinct from the experts and semi‐experts. Conclusions. The current findings emphasize that while expert and lay‐person judgements may often appear to be the same, different processes and motivations underlying clinical judgements are occurring at the different stages of expertise. With the differences in the relationships between justice and vengeance motivations and judgements found in the current research, it is argued that expert and lay judgements that appear to be the same are, in fact, distinguishable and are related to quite different underlying motivations and decision‐making processes.     

Islamic courts and corrections

This paper explores Islamic Criminal Law and Procedure. There are some differences among Islamic states but these differences are relatively minor. Muslims are tried in Sharia Courts for offenses found in the Quran. Non‐Muslims can not be held to the same standard (Apostasy). All people are subject to the jurisdiction of Mazalim Courts which handle taxation, traffic, and other administrative functions.

Islamic Law has three major divisions of crime: 1. Hadith Crimes (most serious); 2. Quesa Crimes and Diya (restitution); and 3. Tazir Crimes (least serious).

Islamic Law has many similar “defenses to crime” as the Common Law nations. They use puberty of a juvenile as the age of accountability. Police must obtain a search warrant for property. The punishment philosophies are similar to western views in theory, but they do apply these ideas in much different ways. Many punishments are public and done as a deterrent for others. Islamic judges have more freedom for sentencing options than western judges. They have mandatory sentences for only a few of the most serious Hadith Crimes. Some in the popular media point to the harshness of Islamic Law, and conclude that it must be wrong. They have very low crime rates and few social problems. We conclude that Islamic Law is not wrong, only different.     

Thirty-seven degrees frigid: US-chilean relations and the spectre of polar arrivistes, 1950–59

After its 1948 proposal to internationalize Antarctica had been rejected, the United States accepted the Chilean Escudero Plan as a necessiry for avoiding further political disputes among the seven nations that had balked at the proposal's call to renounce their sovereign rights. US and Chilean officials proceeded to discuss revisions that might enhance the Escudero Plan's acceptabiliry to the other nations, all of which shared the goal of excluding the Soviet Union. Before there had been any substantial progress, the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year legitimated the USSRs presence in the far south, and already tense US-Chilean relations entered a phase of heightened apprehensiveness. This article explores the diplomatic and contextual nuances of this bilateral interaction that proved central in bringing the Antarctic Treary of 1959 to fruition.     

Medical professionals convicted of accessing child pornography--presumptive lifetime prohibition on paediatric practice? Health Care Complaints Commission v Wingate

Health Care Complaints Commission v Wingate [2007] NSWCA 326 concerns an appeal from the New South Wales Medical Tribunal regarding its findings on professional misconduct outside the practice of medicine in relation to a doctor convicted of possessing child pornography. The latest in a number of cases on this issue in Australia, it highlights the complexity of such decisions before medical tribunals and boards, as well as the diversity of approaches taken. Considering both this case and the recent Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria case of Re Stephanopoulos [2006] MPBV 12, this column argues that Australian tribunals and medical boards may not yet have achieved the right balance here in terms of protecting public safety and the reputation of the profession as a whole. It makes the case for a position statement from Australian professional bodies to create a presumption of a lifetime prohibition on paediatric practice after a medical professional has been convicted of accessing child pornography.     

Consequences of an Anti-Corruption Experiment for Local Government Performance in Brazil

Decentralization reforms, implemented to improve efficiency and service provision, pose a challenge for federal governments that would like to ensure that federal resources are used appropriately by local governments. To overcome this challenge, some federal governments have implemented costly oversight programs aimed at improving municipal governance. For instance, in 2003, the Brazilian federal government introduced a randomized auditing program with the goal of improving municipal performance by exposing episodes of corruption and mismanagement. Yet, we know little about whether these types of programs actually lead to improvements in local outcomes, especially in terms of service delivery. We argue that audits provide opportunities for learning that should improve performance outcomes. To test this argument, we examine municipal performance in over 5,000 Brazilian municipalities from 2001 to 2012. We utilize the random assignment of audits and estimate difference-in-differences regressions. We find that audited municipalities experience greater improvements in performance overall compared to unaudited municipalities, though the effect size is modest. We also find evidence that the auditing program indirectly improves municipal performance. These results indicate that top-down oversight programs, such as the Brazilian one, are useful not only for improving transparency and accountability, but also for the provision of public services as well.