Accidental sharp force fatalities--beware of architectural glass, not knives.

In a retrospective evaluation of 799 consecutive autopsies of victims of sharp force performed between 1967 and 1996 in Münster and Berlin, only 18 cases (2.3%) were classified as accidents. A typical pattern was present in 15 cases: inebriated adults (1.4-3.6g/l BAC) fell into an architectural glass surface in the form of a door or window (12 cases), an aquarium, a mirrored wardrobe or a telephone cell. Another man fell into a large drinking glass. Many victims in this group showed multiple scratches, abrasions and superficial incisions as well as one or more deep tear/cut/puncture injury. The wound margins can be clean-cut or irregular and abraded. Death was mostly caused by exsanguination except for one case of air embolism and one case of cerebral injury. The fatal injuries were produced by large and dagger-like slivers of glass, by sharp-edged fragments of glass remaining inside the frame or by a portion of glass which fell down and acted in a way similar to a guillotine. Ordinary types of flat glass were involved in all cases and it is not until the impact that sharp fragments or cutting edges are produced. So the motion of the person commonly provides the force necessary for a fatal injury. This was also true for the remaining two cases not involving architectural glass. A farmer suffered cerebral injury from a fall into the long prong of a pitch fork, and the wounding agent was a knife in only one case. A man who stated that he had fallen into the knife in his hand died from pneumonia after inadequate therapy following a single stab injury to the periphery of the left lung and liver. Accidents where the victim is killed by his own knife therefore appear to be extremely rare.     

Incumbency Dominance in Letters to the Editor: Field Experimental Evidence

This article reports the results of a randomized field experiment conducted three weeks before the 2017 federal election in Germany. Four different versions of a letter to the editor were sent to all the German daily newspapers that handle letters to the editor independently. The versions differed in the subject matter of the letter, the chancellor Angela Merkel versus the main challenger Martin Schulz, and in the evaluation of this subject, positive versus negative. The experiment was designed to test for three different types of media bias: political bias, negativity bias, and incumbency dominance. We find no political bias in the decisions to print letters, and no statistically significant negativity bias. We do observe incumbency dominance: letters about the chancellor were 40% more likely to be printed.     

Promotion of contentious agency as a rewarding movement strategy: evidence from the MST-paper industry conflicts in Brazil

The recent scholarship on social movement outcomes has called for explanations about how movements influence economic outcomes. This article demonstrates in practice how a dynamic and relational approach, coupled with a Bourdieuian analysis of social, symbolic, and territorial space, can be utilized in explaining the influence of movements in contentious politics around investment projects. Based on participant observation and comparison across the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) groups in areas of paper industry expansion, I assess the different movement strategies and their influence on pulp project outcomes. I reinterpret the ideal ‘MST model’ as constructed by specific strategies promoting contentious agency: organizing and politicizing, campaigning by heterodox framing, protesting, networking, and embedded autonomy vis-à-vis the state. A Qualitative Comparative Analysis comparing the expansion of 13 pulp holdings between 2004–2008 shows how these strategies influence investment pace. When both contentious and conventional strategies were used, movements managed to slow pulpwood plantation expansion.     

Sovereign Commitment and Property Rights: the Case of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution

Conventional wisdom in new institutional economics suggests that property rights become more secure following sovereign commitment. The article tests this axiom in the crucial case of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. I show that despite the wide-ranging constraints imposed after the Revolution on the upper executive, the security of property rights declined. Theoretically, the article argues that the link between sovereign commitment and secure ownership hinges on vertical accountability in the state apparatus. While institutionalizing commitment by the presidency, the Revolution simultaneously exacerbated principal-agent dilemmas within the bureaucracy. Methodologically, the article contributes by triangulating available historical narratives and cross-national quantitative studies. Instead, the focus on one contemporary developing country and the use of qualitative process tracing dissects sovereign commitment and shows the mechanisms through which it can be subverted at lower administrative levels. Sixty-four semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs and government officials from six Ukrainian regions, as well as analysis of the local media, provide the data.     

Reform of forensic autopsy in the German Code of Criminal Procedure

The Federal Ministry of Justice has presented another proposal to rephrase the wording of Section 87 of the German Code of Criminal Procedure (StPO). The new version of Section 87 StPO is to be rejected as it would lead to a loss of institutional and professional standards. The bill is clearly influenced by a tendency towards privatisation for the benefit of a small group of specialists in forensic medicine mostly organised in limited liability companies and thus at the expense of institutes of legal medicine affiliated to universities or physicians working in the forensic service of regional courts. In the long run, this reform would not only jeopardize medicolegal research and teaching but also medical education and specialist medical training. For future severe negative consequences would have to be expected on the rule of law and legal certainty.     

Morphology of low-velocity impact stains produced from single drops of blood

Systematic variation of blood droplet volume, the distance fallen and the surface (paper, wood, plastics, tiles) led to the conclusion that the size and the shape of the stains ("fingers", satellites) allowed to deduce the distance fallen but only if the actual surface structure was known. We found that detailed photography at the crime scene was necessary, yet experiments have to be performed due to the extreme influence of the actual surface texture on all characteristics (size, spines, peripheral spatter) of the blood stains.     

Analysis of drugs of abuse in hair: evaluation of the immunochemical method VMA-T vs. LC-MS/MS or GC-MS

Hair analysis is an elaborate and time-consuming multi-step process. The immunometric test VMA-T from Comedical has been evaluated as screening assay for hair analysis. From routine work, authentic samples were selected that were positive for opiates, cocaine, MDMA-type drugs, amphetamines, methadone or THC. These hair samples were investigated by LC-MS or GC-MS and the VMA-T procedure, respectively. Using the cut-off values recommended by the Society of Hair Testing, the VMA-T method discriminates with good sensitivity between negative and positive hair samples and is an expedient screening method for drugs in keratinized matrices such as hair. In order to save time and resources, the residue of the VMA-T extraction solution can be reused for confirmation analysis by LC-MS except for cocaine.