Homicide in Alabama: an analysis of urban, suburban and rural murders in the Deep South

Eleven hundred forty-four (1144) homicides occurring in Alabama, U.S.A. during a 2-year period are presented and analyzed according to the demographic parameters of the victims, location in urban, suburban, or rural community, type of homicide based on a medical examiner's classification, presence of drugs, weapon employed and other factors. Urban dwellers, Blacks and males are found to be at high risk. Alcohol is much more prevalent than other drugs in homicide victims. Although the handgun is the weapon most commonly used throughout the state, in the rural regions the longgun is used almost as often. The difficulty of making valid comparisons with other homicide studies is discussed and the establishment of a uniform classification of homicides urged.     

Bringing Back the States: A Congressional Perspective on the Fall of Slavery in America

In the aftermath of America's Civil War, national lawmakers who chronicled the fall of slavery described the North as a terrain of states whose representatives assembled in Congress, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–77) and Alexander Stephens’s A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–70). Beginning in the early 1900s, scholars who helped establish the field of American constitutional history redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–1877) and Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–1870), a first generation of scholars writing during the Progressive Era redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in William A. Dunning's Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898), John W. Burgess's The Civil War and the Constitution (1901–1906), and James G. Randall's Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (1926). Although a second generation of scholars uncovered traces of the lawmakers' perspective of states, new efforts in the wake of the civil rights movement to understand the internal workings of political parties and the contributions of ordinary Americans kept the study of national lawmakers and their states on the margins of inquiry, as evidenced in leading revisionist histories of Reconstruction, including Harold Hyman's A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (1973), Michael Les Benedict's A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (1974a), and Eric Foner's Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution (1988). Today, the terrain of Northern states remains in the backdrop, as illustrated in recent studies featuring the wartime national government, including James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012) and Mark E. Neely, Jr.'s Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (2011), as well as studies of the mechanisms of constitutional change during Reconstruction, including relevant sections of Bruce Ackerman's We the People II: Transformations (1998) and Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography (2005). This review essay argues that incorporating the states back into this century‐old framework will open new lines of inquiry and provide a more complete account of federalism's role in the fall of slavery. In particular, a return to the archives suggests that in the uncertain context of mid‐nineteenth‐century America, slavery's leading opponents in Congress saw the Constitution's federal logic not simply as an obstacle, but as a crucial tool with which to mobilize collective action and accommodate wartime opposition at a time when no one could say for sure what would remain of the United States.     

The danger assessment: validation of a lethality risk assessment instrument for intimate partner femicide

The Danger Assessment (DA) is an instrument designed to assess the likelihood of lethality or near lethality occurring in a case of intimate partner violence. This article describes the development, psychometric validation, and suggestions for use of the DA. An 11-city study of intimate partner femicide used multivariate analysis to test the predictive validity of the risk factors on the DA from intimate partner femicide cases (N = 310) compared with 324 abused women in the same cities (controls). The results were used to revise the DA (four items added; one "double-barreled" item divided into two), and the calculated weights (adjusted odds ratios) used to develop a scoring algorithm with levels of risk. These levels of risk were then tested with an independent sample of attempted femicides (N = 194) with a final outcome of .90 of the cases included in the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.     

Cable television refranchising studies: an important role for citizen surveys

Approximately 1,700 communities granted cable television (CA franchises in the decade of the 1970s; more than 4,000 have done so in the 1980s. As original franchise terms expire, the question of refranchising becomes an increasingly salient issue in communities: across the country. Although specialized consultants are often hired to analyze technological, financial, and legal aspects of CATV operations, consumer input may nof be assessed as comprehensively or as systematically. In this article, adaptations of the citizen survey methodology that make it applicable to a CATV inquiry are addressed The product of those adaptations is offered as one vehicle for tapping CATV consumer experience and perceptions that can be an important component in refranchising deliberations.     

Mapping matters: geoprofiling application in South African serial rape investigation

Crime, Law and Social Change - Generally, the application of geographic profiling (also known as geoprofiling) is under-researched and its scientific and theoretical foundations, as well as the...     

Case report of sudden death after a blow to the back of the neck.

A 13-year-old girl experienced a fall during gym class that caused immediate unresponsiveness and death. The lone witness reported that the decedent lost her balance as she approached a hurdle and fell, striking her head on a crossbar of the hurdle near the ground. Autopsy revealed no external injury. Internal injury that could be demonstrated anatomically was confined to a contusion within the right semicapitis muscle at the base of the skull. In the absence of an anatomic cause of death, possible explanations of the death include a cardiac dysrhythmia, a vasovagal stimulus, and diffuse axonal injury caused by a concussive force to the junction of the medulla and spinal cord. Animal studies have shown that severe concussion can cause death via profound autonomic dysfunction without leaving anatomic evidence of injury, and that the essential component of concussion is an element of rotational injury to the brain. The authors believe that the blow to the neck caused this death by the transmission of a concussive force through the reticular activating system. The prompt work of police in distinguishing the lone witness from several people in the area who thought they knew what had happened was essential for diagnosis. On reaching our conclusions, the authors notified first the family, then the superintendent of the school system, and finally the news media. The authors told each party in turn that they would be contacting the others.