Variables influencing sentencing severity: Intercourt differences in Connecticut

Studies of criminal-court dispositions have traditionally aggregated courts along political and geographic boundaries. This article suggests that courts should be analyzed individually, even within the same jurisdiction, as a means of increasing the explanatory capacity of the variables involved. Further, it is contended that intercourt differences are a result of organizational influences operating within each court.     

Book review: Criminal justice history and co‐corrections

Lawrence M. Friedman and Robert V. Percival, The Roots of Justice: Crime and Punishment in Alameda County, California, 1870–1910 Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981, 335 pp.

Charles Campbell, Serving Time Together: Men and Women in Prison Fort Worth, Texas Christian University Press, 1980, 237 pp.     

Media Transitions in the Rear-View Mirror: Some Reflections

This essay explores the development of media systems in Central and Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet period, including the influence of social and political factors, outside media assistance, and the drive toward privatization and public service broadcasting, in an effort to understand what the experience teaches about democracy promotion, about the efficacy of various forms of media intervention, and about the utility of various forms of incentives and pressures in setting agendas and effecting political change. Despite differing historical, social, and political traditions and different forms of and reactions to media assistance efforts, factors, both exogenous (“Americanization” and “strategic communication”) and endogenous (“modernization,” secularization and commercialization), ultimately contributed to a homogenization of systems, rendering less relevant the particular distinctions among countries.     

The Reciprocal Relationships Among Parents’ Expectations,Adolescents’ Expectations,and Adolescents’ Achievement: A Two-Wave Longitudinal Analysis of the NELS Data

Previous research has consistently demonstrated the importance of parents’ expectations and adolescents’ expectations on adolescents’ academic achievement. Less is known, however, about the reciprocal relationships among these constructs. To address this issue, we analyzed two waves of data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) using longitudinal cross-lagged path models. The sample consisted of 14,376 students (51.1% females; 6.5% Asian, 11.1% Hispanic, 9.2% African American, and 73.2% White). Results indicated that there was a reciprocal relationship between parents’ expectations and adolescents’ expectations (i.e., they had mutual influence on each other). Moreover, there was a reciprocal relationship between expectations (both parents’ and adolescents’) and adolescents’ academic achievement. Multiple-group analyses of gender and ethnicity revealed that the effects of parents’ expectations on students’ expectations were stronger among males than among females. With respect to ethnic differences, the effects of adolescents’ expectations were weakest on parents’ expectations among African Americans as compared to the other ethnic groups (i.e., Asian, Hispanic and White). Implications of these findings are discussed.     

An apparently jawless cadaver: a case of post-mortem slippage

Passer-by witnesses reported a human cadaver in woodland associated with an agricultural college to police in Northern Ireland. The cadaver comprised reasonably preserved feet, legs and pelvis, with poorly preserved arms and torso, lying with the torso down-slope abutting a fallen tree. A search of the area around the torso, and for some 20m around, failed to find the cranium and mandible. The mandible was found, embedded inside the chest cavity. The cranium was found some 30m away. The victim was later identified as a 24-year old drug addict who had absconded from a local hospital. Mapping of the area led us to speculate that he had tripped and fallen down-slope: other reasons for the body location were also considered. After death, the cadaver had further slipped down-slope forcing the mandible into the chest cavity: slippage of human remains is well-known in forensic and archaeological literature but not well documented. Knowledge of this process of cadaver 'slip' may save wasted police resources in future similar environments where the mandible, and possible other nearby bones appear missing yet are inside the body.     

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation-related injuries and homicidal blunt abdominal trauma in children

Defendants accused of inflicting fatal abdominal injuries to children occasionally raise the defense that the injuries were caused by cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). The purpose of this study is to answer the question: Does closed chest CPR result in fatal blunt abdominal injuries that can be mistaken for homicidal assault? To that end, a retrospective study was conducted of all homicidal blunt abdominal injuries in children 10 years and younger from the Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Medical Examiner's Offices from 1981 through 1997. These were compared to cases of children who died of natural causes during the same time period in Broward County who had CPR (control group 1) and to children who died of nonvehicular accidental blunt abdominal trauma (control group 2). Children with life-threatening head injuries were excluded. Medical examiner records, autopsy reports, documenting photographs, and clinical records were reviewed. The data analyzed included subject demographics, whether CPR was performed and by whom, and autopsy findings. Thirty-three child homicides with fatal abdominal injuries were reviewed. Twenty-four (73%) of the homicides received CPR. There was no difference in the nature and severity of injuries between the 24 children who received CPR and the 9 who did not. Three hundred and twenty-four cases of pediatric natural deaths were reviewed, all of which had CPR. No traumatic abdominal injuries were found in any of the children who died of natural causes. Only four children who died of natural causes had evidence of extraabdominal trauma related to CPR. No cases of nonvehicular accidental blunt abdominal trauma were identified during the 17-year period, although there were nonvehicular accidental fatalities due to extraabdominal injuries. The likelihood of CPR-related primary abdominal trauma in child homicides is very low.     

Decayed, filled and missing teeth as a forensic-odontologic aid for determining the age above 18 years: A radiographic study of orthopantomograms from a group of teenagers and young adults

The human teeth are a valuable source of information concerning identification and age calculation in forensic sciences. Dental treatment often causes permanent alteration of the teeth, which is visible on radiographs. The correlation of decayed, missing or filled teeth and chronological age has not yet been used for determining the accomplished 18th year of life in teenagers and young adults, e. g. for legal and anthropological purposes. The aim of this study was to determine whether the evaluation of these findings on radiographs correlates with the chronological age in teenagers and young adults. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The dental X-rays (orthopantomograms, OPG) of 1053 outpatients (age: 14 to 24 years) were evaluated. The values "decayed", "missing", or "filled" were recorded for each tooth present. The data were then calculated using statistical tools. RESULTS: The correlation between the number of missing teeth and the chronological age is low. However, the positive predictive value of determining the age of 18 years for certain types of teeth proved to be very high, even up to 100 %. Further, high numbers of filled teeth gave reasonable positive predictive values for an age of 18 years. The number of decayed teeth did not correlate with age. DISCUSSION: This study provides for the first time predictive values for the estimation whether a person is 18 years of age, based on the evaluation of decayed, missing or filled teeth on OPGs only. Whereas the number of patients with such findings is generally low in this age group, some of the positive findings can be used for age estimation as an adjunct to other sources of age calculation. The sole application of these items is not recommended, as sanitary conditions of the teeth depend on both social and individual circumstances. Therefore, the calculated values also reflect the culture of the sample studied. Finally, they are time-dependent and have to be compared to data from other populations. These results have some bearing on the field of forensic odontology.