Whistleblowers, the Public Interest, and the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998

Corporate crime and organisational deviance raise complex legal issues. An initial problem lies simply in identifying when such wrongdoing has occurred. Here, whistleblowers can perform a valuable service. However, publicized cases suggest that they often pay dearly for their candour, encountering unfair sanctions at work. In Britain, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 seeks to protect "good-faith" whistleblowers from employer reprisals. In the wake of this legislation, the authors examine whistleblowing from a socio-legal perspective, asking what motivates whistleblowers, how do institutions respond to them, can legislation adequately protect them, and what effects will PIDA have on whistleblowing, employment practices, the culture of the workplace and, ultimately, society.     

Should the High Court Consider Policy Implications in Deciding Cases?

If the High Court is to consider policy implications when making judicial decisions, a number of preliminary matters require examination. First, what parliaments, executive governments and other instrumentalities will be affected? Next, may the High Court validly exercise this function? And last, is it likely to do so? I shall discuss these preliminary matters in the order stated and thereafter express my view on the question raised by the editors for discussion. In the course of discussion, I shall mention some incidental matters related to the High Court and its functions.     

Reliability, validity, and utility of criminal profiling typologies

Criminal profiling has received attention from the academic community and from the entertainment world since the FBI first published accounts of its profiling principles. It became popular through films such as Silence of the Lambs and the X-Files making headlines. However, beyond the victims' pin pictures that help create the sensationalism in these resources, there have been few, if any, reliable criminal profiling classification designs. This work examines deductive and inductive profiling models that classify crime scene activity including the first systematic review of the FBI's organized and disorganized profiling typology. The paper concludes with a discussion about how to turn profiling from an art too more a scientific process through the use of investigative process management research.     

Ultrafast STR Separations on Short‐Channel Microfluidic Systems for Forensic Screening and Genotyping

There are situations in which it is important to quickly and positively identify an individual. Examples include suspects detained in the neighborhood of a bombing or terrorist incident, individuals detained attempting to enter or leave the country, and victims of mass disasters. Systems utilized for these purposes must be fast, portable, and easy to maintain. DNA typing methods provide the best biometric information yielding identity, kinship, and geographical origin, but they are not portable and rapid. This study details the development of a portable short‐channel microfluidic device based on a modified Agilent 2100 bioanalyzer for applications in forensic genomics. The system utilizes a denaturing polymer matrix with dual‐channel laser‐induced fluorescence and is capable of producing a genotype in 80 sec. The device was tested for precision and resolution using an allelic ladder created from 6 short tandem repeat (STR) loci and a sex marker (amelogenin). The results demonstrated a precision of 0.09–0.21 bp over the entire size range and resolution values from 2.5 to 4.1 bp. Overall, the results demonstrate the chip provides a portable, rapid, and precise method for screening amplified short tandem repeats and human identification screening.     

Palatine Sutures as Age Indicator: A Controlled Study in the Elderly

Abstract:  Vault sutures have proven their low reliability for estimating age at death in individual forensic science cases. We broke down the palatine sutures of 134 skulls (with known sex and age at time of death) into 15 subparts and 5 stages of fusion to obtain a mean coefficient of obliteration ( C p) which was then linked to five age classes. We completed this study with multiple regression equations of total palatine suture scores. We compared our results with those obtained using the Mann method on the one hand and classically segmented and scored ectocranial suture age determination methods on the other. Palatine sutures generally do not estimate age at death any better than cranial vault sutures. Despite the partly subjective aspect of suture study, palatine suture observation contributes additional information to age-range estimation, especially in old and very old subjects where other methods lose their effectiveness.