Of Normal Human Sympathies and Clear Consciences: Comments on Hyman Gross’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Crime and Punishment: A Concise Moral Critique</Emphasis>

Contemporary criminal justice systems are extraordinarily unfair. Focusing on Hyman Gross’s Crimes and Punishment: A Concise Moral Critique, however, I identify ways in which scholarly criticisms of these criminal justice systems tend to miss their target. In particular, I argue against the assumption that in order to criticize these criminal justice systems we need to cast doubt on the very practice of blaming people and on the notion of desert, or that we need to reject wholesale retributive rationales for punishment. Quite the contrary: an important reason why contemporary criminal justice systems are unfair is that they punish many people undeservedly.     

Polymorphism of four X-chromosomal STRs: DXS7423, DXS7424, DXS8378 and DXS6809 in a North Italian population sample and their use in kinship testing

The present study analyses three tetranucleotide (DXS7423, DXS8378, DXS6809) and one trinucleotide (DXS7424) X-linked STRs loci in a population sample of North Italy to evaluate their efficiency in forensic applications. The four loci were also used to solve a case of deficiency paternity, in which the question was to establish whether two women were half sisters.