Immunocytochemical examinations of biological traces on expanding bullets (QD-PEP)

When a crime victim has been injured with several different objects, it is of central importance for the forensic investigation to be able to show which object caused which injury, especially if one of the injuries was lethal. In cases of bullet penetration wounds it is often not possible to find such evidence. However, immunocytochemical investigations can accurately match a victim's injury to a particular bullet path through the body. In cases where expanding bullets have been used and the heart or liver has been struck by a projectile, it can be shown that the cells remaining on the bullet stem from those particular organs. In this case the specific cytological evidence was established by means of marking heart- and liver-specific tissue proteins with appropriate antibodies (cardiac troponin I and HepPar 1) followed by disclosure with an appropriate chromogen. Thus, in principle, cells can be used as evidence after being extracted from the projectiles by either damp cotton-wool swabs or adhesive trace evidence tape. Because of the specificity of the used immunocytochemical antibodies, finding evidence of an antigen on a particular projectile proves that it was the object that injured the organs.     

Becoming an entrepreneurial university? A case study of knowledge exchange relationships and faculty attitudes in a medium-sized,research-oriented university

This paper seeks to contribute to the growing literature on the entrepreneurial university by mapping knowledge exchange relationships of entrepreneurial faculty in a comprehensive manner and also capturing faculty attitudes towards measures taken by the university administration to promote entrepreneurship. We report on an exploratory study of Sussex University, a medium-sized, research-oriented university, which launched technology transfer activities in the mid-1990s. Our results show that, in spite of a comparatively late start, a considerable number of researchers engage in knowledge exchange processes with industry and other non-academic partners. We present evidence that suggests faculty in the social sciences and humanities as well as natural sciences and engineering maintain links to industrial partners, including multinational corporations. Furthermore, our observations indicate that schools differ in the way their faculty engage in university–industry collaborations. Further differences can be observed with respect to faculty attitudes towards technology transfer and awareness of the university’s respective codes of practice.

Drunk and dangerous: a randomised controlled trial of alcohol brief intervention for violent offenders

To assess the effectiveness of an alcohol brief intervention administered to violent offenders in a judicial (Magistrates’ court) setting, a randomised controlled trial was conducted. Participants (n = 269) were men aged 16–35 years, who resided within a 30-mile radius of Cardiff, UK, and who had been sentenced for a violent offence committed whilst intoxicated with alcohol. Recruitment occurred on-site. Participants were randomly allocated to receive an alcohol brief intervention (n = 135) or to a control group (n = 134). Objective measures comprised re-offending and injury rates. Self-reported outcome measures comprised Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT); number of drinking days in the past 3 months; total weekly standard units of alcohol; and stage of change with respect to alcohol consumption (as measured by the Readiness to Change Questionnaire). Participants were followed up 3 months (n = 234; 87%) and 12 months (n = 202; 75.1%) after sentence. No significant between-group differences were observed in any of the alcohol measures or in re-offending. Injury was significantly less likely in offenders who had received the intervention (27.4%) than those who had not [39.6%; 95% confidence interval (CI) = −0.23, −0.009]. At 3-month follow-up, significantly more participants in the intervention group (31%; n = 37) than control group (16%; n = 18) demonstrated an increase in their readiness to change drinking behaviour (χ² = 8.56; df = 2; P = 0.014), but this did not persist at 12-month follow-up.

Experimentalist interactions: Joining up the transnational timber legality regime

This paper analyzes the interactions between the separate components of the emerging transnational timber legality regime, both public and private. It examines how far, and through what institutional mechanisms, these interactions are producing a joined-up transnational regime, based on a shared normative commitment to combat illegal logging and cooperative efforts to implement and enforce it. The paper argues that the experimentalist architecture of the EU FLEGT initiative has fostered productive, mutually reinforcing interactions both with public timber legality regulation in other consumer countries and with private certification schemes. But this emerging regime remains highly polyarchic, with broad scope for autonomous initiatives by NGOs and private service providers, along with national governments, international organizations, and multi-donor partnerships. Hence horizontal integration and coordination within it depend on a series of institutional mechanisms, some of which are distinctively experimentalist, while others can also be found in more conventional regimes. These mechanisms include cross-referencing and reciprocal endorsement of rules and standards; recursive learning through information pooling and peer review of implementation experience; public oversight and joint assessment of private certification and legality verification schemes; and the “penalty default” effect of public legality regulation in consumer countries, which have pushed both exporting countries and transnational firms to comply with the norms and procedures of the emerging transnational regime. The paper's findings thus provide robust new evidence for the claim advanced in previous work that a joined-up transnational regime can be assembled piece by piece under polyarchic conditions through coordinated learning from decentralized experimentation, without a hegemonic power to impose common global rules.     

“Truly free consent”? Clarifying the nature of police legitimacy using causal mediation analysis

Journal of Experimental Criminology - To test whether normative and non-normative forms of obligation to obey the police are empirically distinct and to assess whether they exhibit different...     

Statistical techniques for juror and jury research

Juror and jury research is a thriving area of investigation in legal psychology. The basic ANOVA and regression, well‐known by psychologists, are inappropriate for analysing many types of data from this area of research. This paper describes statistical techniques suitable for some of the main questions asked by jury researchers. First, we discuss how to examine manipulations that may affect levels of reasonable doubt and how to measure reasonable doubt using the coefficients estimated from a logistic regression. Second, we compare models designed for analysing the data like those which often arise in research where jurors first make categorical judgments (e.g., negligent or not, guilty or not) and then dependent on their response may make another judgment (e.g., award, punishment). We concentrate on zero‐inflated and hurdle models. Third, we examine how to take into account that jurors are part of a jury using multilevel modelling. We illustrate each of the techniques using software that can be downloaded for free from the Internet (the package R) and provide a web page that gives further details for running these analyses.