Suicide by blunt force trauma

Suicide by self-inflicted blunt force injury is rare. The authors report a case of a 48-year-old man who initially appeared to have died of a homicidal beating. The pertinent autopsy findings consisted of blunt force closed head injury combined with numerous cutaneous abrasions and contusions of the entire body. Further inquiries confirmed a medical history of paranoid schizophrenia and a previous attempt at suicide. This case represents an extreme example of severe blunt trauma sustained during fatal self-mutilation and masquerading as a homicide. It also underscores the importance of correlating a thorough background investigation with autopsy findings in determining the appropriate manner of death.     

A newspaper surveillance study of homicide-suicide in the United States

The objective of this study was to identify the number and subtypes of homicide-suicides in the United States by age group and state over a 3-year period from 1997 through 1999. A total of 673 homicide-suicides, including 674 perpetrators and 779 victims, were identified from Internet searches of 191 national newspapers, and they were classified according to a modified Hanzlick-Koponen typology. One quarter of the homicide-suicides were perpetrated by persons 55 years or older, and 77% were spousal/consortial, higher than the 57% observed in the younger age group; 11% of the older homicide-suicides were familial, compared with 16% in the younger age group. Whereas only 3% of older homicide-suicides were infanticide/pedicide, 16% of the younger homicide-suicides involved parents killing their children. Forty-five states, including the District of Columbia, reported a homicide-suicide during the 3-year period, and they occurred most frequently in Florida (163), California (98), Texas (36), and New York (35). Newspaper surveillance is useful to identify where homicide-suicides are occurring most frequently, but they are underestimates of the true prevalence. However, the number of incidents detected is large enough that the cases detected may be a fairly representative sample.     

Therapy-related café coronary deaths: two case reports of rare asphyxial deaths in patients under supervised care

Café coronary deaths, as initially characterized, denote fatal occlusion of the upper airway by food substances. Such fatalities typically occur in individuals who either are clinically inebriated or have clinically significant neuromuscular dysfunction. Both conditions impair mastication and deglutition. The authors review the accidental deaths of two neurologically compromised patients under supervised care. Both subjects underwent complete medicolegal autopsy. In one case, ingestion of a prescribed emollient laxative precipitated death; in the other, death was attributable to aspiration of a contrast medium during a diagnostic radiographic procedure. These therapy-related deaths, which are regarded as a variation of the traditionally described café coronary fatalities summarized in the discussion, represent adverse events occurring during medical care. The adverse outcomes reviewed here are potentially avoidable and require special attentiveness by the clinicians directed to the particular condition of each patient. Such true aspiration-related deaths are confirmed on autopsy examination and are to be differentiated from the findings of agonal aspiration of gastric contents commonly encountered by the autopsy pathologist investigating deaths due to a great variety of natural and traumatic causes.     

Reflections on Henry Ford's War on Jews

Woeste, Victoria Saker. 2012 . Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. This essay provides an introduction to and overview of four essays that emerged from an “Author Meets Readers” session at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, considering Victoria Saker Woeste's book, Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech. Three essays are authored by panelists (Aviam Soifer, Carroll Seron, and Clyde Spillenger) and a final essay is provided by Woeste. The essays explore larger themes suggested by the book, including what the involvement of Louis Marshall reveals about the rise and role of spokespeople purporting to represent Jewish interests; whether the arc of Aaron Sapiro's education and career challenges our understandings of the development of the legal profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and how the law of group libel intersected with government attempts to regulate hate speech during the twentieth century. Woeste ends the symposium with a reconsideration of Henry Ford's War and how it fits into the new civil rights history.     

Deictic use as a threshold for imaginative thinking: a Peircean perspective

This investigation traces the ontogeny of the use of “I” and how its symbolic use promotes imaginative thinking. Peirce's triadic system is contrasted with Vygotsky's binary system to highlight the import of Thirdness in characterizing the ontogeny of person deictics within conversational roles. Person deictics, such as “I”, are first indexes. Later when their social function/meaning is apprehended, they serve as symbols as well; still later they are used psychologically in self to self monologues, and acquire distinctive interpretants when used unconventionally. Early indexical uses of “I” are non-symbolic – “I” referring to self only absent recognition of conversational roles. “I” is employed symbolically when its referent shifts and when its invariant meaning (speaker) is apprehended. Person deictics enhance the emergence of imagination when the symbolic use transcends their inter-psychological regulation through human to human conversation to their intra-psychological function in self to self discourse. Extension of functional roles (speaker/listener) to dolls/puppets (in representational play scenarios) constitutes an extended use of the symbolic function because inanimates cannot assume conversational roles; and such use triggers the association of different interpretants to the category of deictic use. The symbolic use of “I” as speaker facilitates apprehension of self as object, which is a major determinant of when in ontogeny children extend the use of person deictics from Dynamic to Final interpretants.     

Issues of justice and reconciliation in complex political emergencies: Conceptualising reconciliation,justice and peace

This paper focuses on what can be done during emergency and transition periods to promote sustainable peace, in the aftermath of complex political emergencies in Africa, with particular reference to issues of reconciliation and justice. There is no common understanding of the political conditions under which efforts at reconciliation should be minimal in relation to a focus on justice in order to achieve the 'best' peace, or of those where the pursuit of justice should become paramount. There is also not even a common language of what justice and reconciliation mean in the context of post-conflict peace-building. The paper concludes that there is a much greater potential role for outsiders with regard to justice, while reconciliation is considered to be more of an internal affair in which international actors can only be present as supporters of domestic initiatives, and even then with great caution.     

Career Values of Public Administration and Public Policy Students in China,Malaysia and the United States

With governments around the world needing to attract talented professionals, this exploratory, cross-cultural research analyzes career values of 384 MPA and MPP students at major universities in the capitals of China, Malaysia and the United States. Malaysians and Americans structured 23 goals along dimensions that contrasted sharply to those of the Chinese. Moreover, Malaysians and Americans cared more about self-actualization and less about co-worker comradeship than did the Chinese. All three groups prioritized elements of altruism and affluence. Segmentation analysis uncovered six distinct subgroups (Acheivers, Altruistic Analysts, Administrators, Altruistic Affluents, Acquiescents, and Apathetics) with their distributions varying by country.     

Family law

In response to the Legal Education Training Review (LETR) the professional bodies have revisited the competencies required for legal practice. The SRA has prepared a draft competency statement for day one solicitors which focuses on the “key activities required for effective performance as a solicitor”. The impact of this more comprehensive competency statement on legal education is not yet clear, but one option is that it opens up a route to qualification where competency is achieved in the workplace or other non-academic settings and assessed outside the educational establishments. This article considers how to assess competency in legal education in both educational and work based settings. It charts the development of an outcomes orthodoxy in legal education in England and Wales and in other jurisdictions and draws on research in medical education to identify key principles in the design of an assessment methodology for professional education. The article takes a broad “view from the bridge” and reviews a range of assessment methods already in use in legal education and in other professions such as accountancy, medicine and conservator restorers. It argues that a move to a complex competency orientated training system will require a different approach to both the method of assessment and its programming.     

Another look at across-crime similarity coefficients for use in behavioural linkage analysis: an attempt to replicate Woodhams,Grant, and Price (2007)

Abstract

In the absence of physical evidence, investigators must often rely on offence behaviours when determining whether several crimes are linked to a common offender. A variety of factors can potentially influence the degree to which accurate linking is possible, including the similarity coefficient used to assess across-crime similarity. The current study examines the performance of two similarity coefficients that have recently been compared to one another, Jaccard's coefficient (J) and the taxonomic similarity index (Δ_s), using samples of two crime types, serial homicide (N=237) and serial burglary (N=210). In contrast to previous research, the results indicate that Δ_s does not significantly outperform J with respect to linking accuracy. In addition, both coefficients lead to higher levels of linking accuracy in cases of serial homicide compared to serial burglary. Potential explanations for these findings are presented and their implications are discussed.