Are Defendants Guilty If They Were Chosen in a Lineup?

Courts overbelieve witnesses who choose suspects in lineups. The extent of the problem depends on the probability of defendants who were chosen actually being guilty. According to Bayes' theorem, the probability of their guilt depends as much on the relative number of guilty who are chosen [p(C/G)] as on the number of innocent suspects [p(C/not G)]. Evidence is presented, based on both experimental data and archival reports of real eyewitness cases, that p(C/G) = 0.29 and p(C/not G) = 0.098 are conservative estimates. This leads to 0.247 being the probability of innocence if chosen (assuming no a priori presumption of guilt or innocence). The problem, then, is serious. Potential remedies are discussed.     

Fast spinning into oblivion? Recent developments in money-laundering policies and offshore finance centres

This article examines the growth of money-laundering in conjunction with the associated development of offshore finance centres (OFCs) located in small places such as islands or microstates in the Caribbean and elsewhere. The phenomenal growth of OFCs since the 1960s may be seen in terms of the 'four spaces'. Three of these 'spaces-the secrecy space (confidentiality); the regulatory space; and the political space-can be used to frame an analysis of the growth of offshore finance and the emergence of a suitable environment for international money-laundering. The article then examines recent policy developments concerning money-laundering and OFCs, such as the workings of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), and the regional Task Forces such as the Caribbean Task Force. Finally, the article explores the changing way 'offshore' is being constructed as exemplified by rising onshore pressure from the OECD, G7, the EU and, most recently, the UK government, with its growing concern demonstrated by the 1998 unprecedented Home Office and FCO reviews of both British Isles and Caribbean OFCs.     

Interpreting the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear incident: some questions for corporate criminology

The serious nuclear incident at Fukushima Daiichi, triggered by the tsunami following the Tohuku earthquake on 11th March 2011, has prompted a flurry of investigations and debates of various kinds, within Japan and beyond. In common with many other such disasters, the causation of which brings together technologies, human behavior, organizational and regulatory cultures, and physical settings in complex configurations, serious questions have been asked about whether corporate crime was involved in creating this nuclear disaster. Of course the failure was prompted by an enormously powerful natural phenomenon, but should the operating company and government bodies have been better prepared? If so, who was to blame? Do attempts to explain the disaster in terms of cultural categories amount to a ‘cop out’; serving to excuse responsible individuals for acts both of commission and omission? In this paper, we examine these questions, focusing on the inherent ambiguity of such untoward events, and the difficult political and legal conundrums to which they can lead.     

The mutuality of risk and community: the adjudication of community notification statutes

Although it has drawn significant attention in the legal literature, the adjudication of community notification statutes (often referred to as 'Megan's Law' in the United States) demonstrates a centrality of both risk and community that deserves attention from a governance perspective. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which concepts of risk and community are mutually constitutive, and how the adjudication of community notification statutes relies on particular visions of 'community' to engage particular ways of conceiving of 'risk', much of which relies on a rejection of expertise and a focus on 'common sense'. This focus on 'common sense', opens up new problematics of government: courts adjudicating community notification cases are working to define the particular mechanics of a state-civil society partnership, and thereby operationalize the preventive state without rendering the state redundant or obsolete, and without opening the state to new forms of legal and political accountability. While providing a case study in the move to advanced liberal governance in the area of criminal law, this adjudication also reveals the contingent nature of risk, and the ways in which judicial invocation of 'risk' and its management can constitute liberal subjects who continue to rely on the state, while no longer expecting the state to be accountable for crime or its control.     

Studying Law by Association: Bruno Latour Goes to the Conseil d'État

This essay provides an overview of actor-network theory (ANT) and its potential interest for sociolegal scholars. It focuses on Bruno Latour's 2002 ethnography of La fabrique du droit: une ethnographie du Conseil d'État [The factory of law: an ethnography of the Conseil d'État] (2002b), which provides an analysis of the workings of the French Conseil d'État. The essay seeks to introduce non-French-reading sociolegal researchers to this work and draws out methodological and theoretical implications for research on legal institutions, legal knowledge, and bureaucracies.