Four Comprehensive Pillars of Xisms

At the end of 2014,Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward the strategic layout of the Four Comprehensives—comprehensively building a moderately prosperous society,deepening reform,advancing the rule of law,and strictly governing the Communist Party of China.Later,the new guideline for development became the overall framework for the current leadership’s work and has aroused interest at home and abroad.From Issue No.17 published on April 23,Beijing Review has put forth a series of commentaries by foreign researchers commissioned by Renmin University of China’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies.This is the last commentary of the series,presented here in abridged form.     

Review of the Evidence Supporting the Medical and Legal Use of NeuroQuant® in Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury

Decades of research have shown that the brain atrophies after traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, multiple practical issues made it difficult to detect brain atrophy in individual patients with mild to moderate TBI. This situation improved by 2007 with the FDA approval of NeuroQuant®, a commercially available, computer-automated software program for measuring MRI brain volume in human subjects. Several peer-reviewed scientific studies have supported the reliability and validity of NeuroQuant®. This review addresses whether NeuroQuant® meets the Daubert standard for admissibility in court cases involving persons with TBI. The review finds that NeuroQuant® is an objective, reliable, and practical means of measuring brain volume and therefore can be an important tool for measuring the effects of TBI on brain volume in clinical or medicolegal settings.     

Between Hermes and Themis: An Empirical Study of the Contemporary Judiciary in Singapore

Drawing upon interviews in 1995 and 1998 and analyses of judicial appointments from 1975–1998, the article offers a new explanation of judicial-executive relations in Singapore. It attempts to explain how the judiciary in Singapore actually functions, partly by using the concept of the core executive to locate the judiciary more accurately within its political context. The study demonstrates that the judicial system has been hegenomized by a number of political and bureaucratic strategies, and interprets its role in terms of the overall goals of the political executive. The lower judiciary is an amateur judiciary and forms part of the executive government. Despite this, the contemporary superior judiciary is not wholly a creature of the political executive, as is often postulated, but rather the result of a compromise which balances the need for a reputable judiciary with the requirement by the political executive for the judicial system to assist with the control of political opposition. This negotiated balance is qualitatively different from the relationship that characterized that between the Lee Kuan Yew governments and their Supreme Courts until 1991 and reflects the maturing of hegemonic control strategies under Goh Chok Tong. The analysis was completed in 1999.     

Why a jail or prison sentence is increasingly like a death sentence

Because of current conditions inside American jails and prisons, a sentence to a correctional facility routinely compromises the health, safety, and life of inmates. Four environmental factors can make a jail and prison sentence appear like a death sentence: poor health care, unsanitary living conditions, high levels of violence, and an increased number of people with chronic diseases living in close proximity. Thus, a de facto death penalty, the most controversial sanction of the criminal justice system, is the result for some inmates, and a misapplication of the criminal law is thus achieved. In order to present this argument, the author reviews research which increases the likelihood that a person will die behind bars.     

Detecting deception in suspects: verbal cues as a function of interview strategy

Research on deception has consistently shown that people are poor at detecting deception, partly due to lack of consistent cues to deception. This research focuses on eliciting verbal cues to deception when questioning suspects who deny crime and how such cues differ due to type of questioning. An experiment examined verbal differences between innocent and guilty mock suspects (N=96) as a function of veracity and interview style (Free recall, Probes, or Free recall plus Probes). Guilty (vs innocent) suspects omitted more crime-relevant information and their statements were more likely to contradict the evidence, showing that statement–evidence inconsistency was a cue to deception. This cue to deception was more pronounced when the interview contained probes. Lie-catchers (N=192) obtained an accuracy rate higher than chance (61.5%) for detecting deceptive denials. Implications for further research on verbal cues to deception are discussed.     

Los Angeles Urban processes: The tension among myths,high expectations,and minimal satisfaction

20th Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict. Edited by Norman M. Klein and Martin J. Schiesl. Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1990. Pp.240. $12.95.

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. By Mike Davis. Verso, 1990. Pp.462. £19.95 hb, £8.99 pb.

Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World. By David Rieff. New York: Cape, 1992. Pp.270. £17.99.

Sex, Death and God in L.A.. Edited by David Reid. New York: Pantheon, 1992. Pp.356. $23.