Can analysis of a small clod of soil help to solve a murder case?

Soil forensics utilizes extensive soil information to answer legal questions and test hypotheses. The main difficulty often is the determination of different variables from a small amount of soil sample collected on the suspect. We developed a sequential mineralogical and chemical analyses to assess a limited quantity of soil vestiges (0.5 g) from a suspect's vehicle (adhered to the outside rear-view mirror and to the left front fender) involved in a murder case and compared them with the surface samples found at the victim's body disposal site at the Graciosa Road, Paraná State, Brazil. All results affirm that the suspect’s vehicle could have been in contact with the edge of the Graciosa Road, approximately the place where the victim’s body was located. As a result of the soil analysis and comparison, the results support the likely contact of the suspect’s vehicle with the crime scene.     

An Aquatic Decomposition Scoring Method to Potentially Predict the Postmortem Submersion Interval of Bodies Recovered from the North Sea

This study aimed to develop an aquatic decomposition scoring (ADS) method and investigated the predictive value of this method in estimating the postmortem submersion interval (PMSI) of bodies recovered from the North Sea. This method, consisting of an ADS item list and a pictorial reference atlas, showed a high interobserver agreement (Krippendorff's alpha ≥ 0.93) and hence proved to be valid. This scoring method was applied to data, collected from closed cases—cases in which the postmortal submersion interval (PMSI) was known—concerning bodies recovered from the North Sea from 1990 to 2013. Thirty‐eight cases met the inclusion criteria and were scored by quantifying the observed total aquatic decomposition score (TADS). Statistical analysis demonstrated that TADS accurately predicts the PMSI (p < 0.001), confirming that the decomposition process in the North Sea is strongly correlated to time.     

Drug Recognition Evaluation and Chemical Confirmation of a 25C‐NBOMe‐Impaired Driver

This case report details an individual arrested for drug‐impaired driving after leaving the scene of multiple motor vehicle collisions and evading police. The driver was examined by a drug recognition expert and failed the drug recognition evaluation. The driver admitted to using cocaine, marijuana, an antidepressant medication and “N‐bomb,” a novel psychoactive substance that possesses hallucinogenic properties. Toxicological analyses at the Centre of Forensic Sciences’ Toronto laboratory revealed only the substance 2‐[4‐chloro‐2,5‐dimethoxyphenyl]‐N‐[(2‐methoxyphenyl)methyl]ethanamine (25C‐NBOMe) in the accused's urine. This is the first report in which 25C‐NBOMe was identified through DRE and toxicological analyses in a drug‐impaired driver.     

Practice narratives enhance children’s memory reports

Practicing recall of a non-target event prior to discussing substantive issues is a relatively new recommendation for interviews with child victims and witnesses. Despite evidence of the effectiveness of these practice narratives in obtaining detailed reports from children, specific recommendations about the duration and content of these interviews have yet to be systematically investigated. In the present study, 176 children aged 6–10 years watched a magic show and then participated in an interview that began with a practice narrative, with varying length (2 or 5 minutes) and topics (unique or commonplace), or no practice narrative. Conducting a practice narrative of any kind was beneficial to children's subsequent recall of accurate details over no practice narrative. Benefits to children's accurate recall were observed with as little as 2 minutes of practice and practice narratives were particularly beneficial if a unique, rather than commonplace, experience was targeted for practice recall. The present results confirm previous field research and laboratory findings indicating that the substantive phase of the interview is enhanced by conducting a practice narrative and extends the benefits of practice narratives to even a very brief practice narrative.     

Polarization and Policy: The Politics of Public‐Sector Pensions

For decades, America's state and local governments have promised their workers increasingly generous pensions but failed to fully fund them, producing a fiscal problem of staggering proportions. In this article, we examine the politics of public pensions. While mainstream theoretical ideas in the American politics literature would suggest the pension issue should be polarized, with Democrats pushing for generous pensions over Republican resistance, we develop an argument—rooted in more traditional theoretical work by Schattschneider, Lowi, Wilson, and others—implying that both parties should be expected to support generous pensions during normal times and that only after the onset of the Great Recession, which expanded the scope of conflict, should the parties begin to diverge. Using a new data set of state legislators' votes on hundreds of pension bills passed between 1999 and 2011, we carry out an empirical analysis that supports these expectations.     

The Crime Kuznets Curve

Objectives

Criminologists have long studied the relationship between economic conditions and crime. Empirical evidence is inconclusive, pointing at different directions. This may reflect the conflicting theoretical predictions on the relationship between these phenomena, but also the prevailing methodological choice which focuses on linear relationships even though nonlinearities are plausible theoretically.

Methods

In this paper, we revisit the empirical relationship between economic conditions and crime by exploring potential nonlinearities. We look at flexible parametric specifications that include up to a cubic term of per capita income (or one dummy for each income quintile) and nonparametric and semi-parametric specifications (such as General Additive Models). Our results are robust to controlling for the standard socioeconomic, demographic, and policy determinants of crime, as well as to including a lagged dependent variable or state and time fixed effects.

Results

We document the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between crime and income within US states for the period 1970-2011. Crime increases with per capita income until it reaches a maximum, and then decreases as income keeps rising. This “Crime Kuznets Curve” (CKC) exists for property crime and for categories of violent crime that can be related to economic appropriation, like robbery, and is less robust for violent crimes not connected to economic incentives. We show that this pattern cannot be explained by correlated changes in economic inequality or by changes in law enforcement.

Conclusions

In addition to providing robust evidence of the existence of a CKC, our findings lay the groundwork for studies exploring the underlying theoretical mechanisms. These should go beyond income inequality or law enforcement, and should explain why the results hold more clearly for property than for violent crime. Our findings and subsequent research to understand the underlying drivers are relevant for policy, as they suggest that violent conflict cannot be tackled solely by the trickle-down forces of economic growth.

     

Meet the Narco: increased competition among criminal organisations and the explosion of violence in Mexico

Several previous studies have found that interventions by security forces against criminal organisations result in increased violence related to organised crime. However, much less is known about how and why this effect occurs. Our study not only identifies the causal mechanisms that explain this outcome, but also evaluates the empirical validity of these mechanisms. Employing a novel data set, we find that following security-force intervention, the number of criminal organisations increases, and such greater fragmentation in turn raises the incidence of violence among criminal organisations as the relative power of the organisations changes. We employ a mediation model to verify the existence of these causal mechanisms. In addition, we find a decreasing rate of rise in levels of violence as the number of organisations increases.