Assumption of Responsibility in Corporate Groups: Chandler v Cape plc

In Chandler v Cape plc, the Court of Appeal imposed for the first time liability on a company for a breach of its duty of care to an employee of its subsidiary. In doing so, the court laid out a new four‐part test for ascertaining a parent company's responsibility for the health and safety of individuals employed by group companies. Although liability of parent companies may be justified under the right circumstances, the court's approach in Chandler is problematic in a number of ways and raises more questions than it answers.     

Slaves as criminal informers in ancient Rome

The Romans expected slaves to inform on their fellow slaves, particularly in regard to the master's safety. If a slave killed his master, a terrible retribution on the entire household of slaves would have to be paid to atone for the offense. In the final analysis, the slave‐informer system, with all of its drawbacks, supported the Roman criminal justice system nearly 1,000 years and the Byzantines employed it in a modified form. This paper is a case study of how a culture, with its values, musters its resources, in the case of slavery, to cope with the problems of internal security.

With most of the crime problems that confront us today, the ancient Romans were hard put to protect the public peace. They had neither the modern technology nor the forensic science that we do, so they utilized the limited resources they had to prevent crimes and catch criminals. They devised a policy of enticing slaves to act as criminal informants with the offer of freedom. Considering the sizeable adult slave population, this policy greatly deterred crime and the saying “Every slave, an enemy” became current among the citizenry.

The Romans, however, did not intend to open a door by which slaves could accuse citizens of false charges out of vindictiveness. The legal‐minded Romans adopted the safeguard of having the slave informant interrogated under torture.

Slaves also served the criminal justice system in other ways besides volunteering information. When the police were stymied in an investigation, they “rounded up the usual suspects” in the form of slaves who might have knowledge of the crime, but for some reason had not stepped forward. The police would use their powers to interrogate slaves in this case, too. This ancient practice reflects the procedure of modern police investigators checking surveillance cameras in the vicinity of the crime scene in the hopes of discovering a clue.     

Defence lawyers and probation officers: offenders' allies or adversaries?

The shift in recent decades towards an explicitly punitive agenda for criminal justice in Western jurisdictions has been well-documented in the criminological literature. People accused of offences and convicted offenders progress through a punitive criminal justice system replete with crime control values. Furthermore, in criminal justice policy development, the notion of victims' rights and the quest to rebalance the system in favour of victims now override concerns about rights. In the light of this state of affairs, it seems necessary to assess the role of practitioners within the criminal justice system who, by virtue of their professional mandates, can be expected to act as much needed allies for defendants as they progress through the system. These practitioners are defence lawyers and probation officers. Insufficient attention has been paid to the role of both and they have not previously been considered as two parts of a greater whole despite their obviously complimentary nature. In an effort to address this gap in knowledge, this article draws on two different studies to offer an exploratory discussion of how both practitioners interact with their clients and whether or not the practitioners can be viewed as effective allies of those implicated with the criminal process.     

Measurement of Postmortem Pupil Size: A New Method with Excellent Reliability and Its Application to Pupil Changes in the Early Postmortem Period

Measurement of postmortem pupil width is a potential component of death time estimation. However, no standardized measurement method has been described. We analyzed a total of 71 digital images for pupil–iris ratio using the software ImageJ. Images were analyzed three times by four different examiners. In addition, serial images from 10 cases were taken between 2 and 50 h postmortem to detect spontaneous pupil changes. Intra‐ and inter‐rater reliability of the method was excellent (ICC > 0.95). The method is observer independent and yields consistent results, and images can be digitally stored and re‐evaluated. The method seems highly eligible for forensic and scientific purposes. While statistical analysis of spontaneous pupil changes revealed a significant polynomial of quartic degree for postmortem time (p = 0.001), an obvious pattern was not detected. These results do not indicate suitability of spontaneous pupil changes for forensic death time estimation, as formerly suggested.     

Estimating the Skull‐to‐Camera Distance from Facial Photographs for Craniofacial Superimposition

The overlay of a skull and a face image for identification purposes requires similar subject‐to‐camera distances (SCD) to be used at both photographic sessions so that differences in perspective do not compromise the anatomical comparisons. As the facial photograph is the reference standard, it is crucial to determine its SCD first and apply this value to photography of the skull. So far, such a method for estimating the SCD has been elusive (some say impossible), compromising the technical validity of the superimposition procedure. This paper tests the feasibility of using the palpebral fissure length and a well‐established photographic algorithm to accurately estimate the SCD from the facial photograph. Recordings at known SCD across a 1–10 m range (repeated under two test conditions) demonstrate that the newly formulated method works: a mean SCD estimation error of 7% that translates into <1% perspective distortion error between estimated and actual conditions.