State writing,subversion and citizenship in Southern Rhodesia’s state of emergency, 1959–1960

This article takes a moment of political upheaval – Southern Rhodesia’s 1959 State of Emergency – to explore the uses of writing in the remaking of state authority and citizenship. The 1950s had produced a powerful bureaucratic state, a shaky attempt at multi-racial “partnership,” and African aspirations to a citizenship able to encompass equality, rights and self-determination. The Emergency brought the tensions in these modes of government and citizenship to the fore. The article explores the working out of these tensions in two instances: the bureaucratic attempt to manage political detainees, and the police evidence used to substantiate charges of subversion on the part of nationalists in court. The article traces the limits of the state’s “lawfare” and the means by which detainees and nationalists developed new understandings of citizenship as aspirational imaginary, legal condition and practical tool, through the written word.     

Small Screens and Big Streets: A Comparison of Women Police Officers on Primetime Crime Shows and in U.S. Police Departments, 1950 to 2008

This article utilizes a longitudinal approach to assess the visibility of women as police officers in primetime crime shows from 1950 to 2008 and compares these numbers for television to actual data on women who work as police officers in the United States. We find that as expected, annual labor force data and crime show data both indicate increases in the number of minorities and women working in the criminal justice system over time. Given the robust literature on the general underrepresentation of women on television, however, we did not expect to uncover that both White and minority women are overrepresented as police officers on television every year compared to the occupational reality. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Overkill? An Examination of Comparatively Excessive Death Sentences in North Carolina, 1990–2010

This study examines death/life capital sentences in one southern state, North Carolina, during the period 1990 to 2010 to determine the extent to which they are comparatively excessive/lenient. The study employs data derived from a variety of official sources on the population of capital trials in the state during this timeframe and follows the analytic techniques developed by David Baldus and his colleagues and by Paternoster and Kazyaka in their studies of comparative excessiveness in capital sentencing in California, Georgia, and South Carolina, respectively. The results show a substantial number of death sentences that meet the standard for excessiveness, but the data also show a nearly equal number of life sentences that may be deemed too lenient. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Hair analysis for diphenhydramine after surreptitious administration to a child

Diphenhydramine is one of the first effective antihistamine agents to have been discovered. The compound is also used for its sedative and antiemetic effects. The first case involving repetitive sedation linked to the use of diphenhydramine as a drug-facilitated crime and subsequent impairment of a 9-year-old female victim is reported. Due to the long delay between the alleged crime and clinical examination, collection of blood or urine was of little value. Hence, the laboratory developed an original approach based on hair testing by LC-MS/MS. A single strand of hair from the victim was sampled about 7 weeks after the last suspected administration and was cut into small segments. After cutting into small pieces, about 20 mg of hair per segment was incubated overnight in a phosphate buffer (pH 8.4). The aqueous phase was extracted with 5 ml of a mixture of methylene chloride/diethyl ether (80/20), in presence of diazepam-d5, used as internal standard (IS). The hair extract was separated on an XTerra MS C18 column using a gradient of acetonitrile and formate buffer. Detection was based on two daughter ions: transitions m/z 256.2-152.1 and 167.1 and m/z 289.9-154.0 for diphenhydramine and the IS, respectively. In the hair of the child, diphenhydramine was detected at concentrations in the range 33-39 pg/mg, depending on the segment.     

Age Estimation from the Teeth Using a Modified Demirjian System*

Abstract: The estimation of age at time of death is often an important step in the identification of human remains. The purpose of this study was to test the applicability of the Demirjian system on a sample of the Sydney child population and to develop and test age‐prediction models using a large sample of Sydney children (1624 girls, 1637 boys). The use of the Demirjian standards resulted in consistent overestimates of chronological age in children under the age of 14 by as much as a mean of 0.99 years. Of the alternative predictive models derived from the Sydney sample, those that provided the most accurate age estimates are applicable for the age ranges 2–14 years, with R‐square = 0.94 and a 95% confidence interval of ±1.8 years. The Sydney‐based standards provided significantly different and more accurate estimates of age for that sample when compared to the published standards of Demirjian.     

The use of RAS and related models in manpower forecasting

With the increasing availability of statistics describing the occupational structures of different industries manpower forecasters are beginning to develop more sophisticated models. The economic rationale of such models has tended to be obscured by the mathematics involved and an understandable eagerness to put the data to use in forecasting. In addition, the systematic testing of the explanatory power of these models has been neglected where it has not been hampered by the shortage of data series. The RAS model has featured prominently in manpower discussions and this paper attempts an evaluation of its predictive ability and economic interpretation subject to the limits imposed by the data available for the British engineering industry. It is argued that such a model plays a useful initial role in the development of models for sectoral manpower forecasting but must lead on to a more sensitive treatment of the labour market and the decision problem of investing in human capital.