Confounding influences on police detection of suspiciousness

The social psychological literature had shown wide acceptance by the police of the use of nonverbal behaviors such as smiles, speech disruptions, gaze aversion, and hand gestures as cues to deceptive or suspicious activity by criminal suspects. Current police investigative training also reinforces these beliefs. The present study analyzed the influence of race and emotional agitation level on the frequency with which these ‘suspicious’ nonverbal behaviors are displayed. Reviewing 120 videotaped police-citizen interactions of a noncriminal nature involving law-abiding citizens, the results suggested that level of emotional agitation had a weak but significant influence on the frequency with which two of these nonverbal behaviors were displayed. Race also had a significant influence that ranged from moderate to strong, as African-American and Hispanic citizens displayed significantly higher levels than Caucasians of behaviors thought of as ‘suspicious’ by police officers.     

Still in Deficit: Rights,Regulation, and Democracy in the EU1

Abstract: Critics of the EU's democratic deficit standardly attribute the problem to either sociocultural reasons, principally the lack of a demos and public sphere, or institutional factors, notably the lack of electoral accountability because of the limited ability of the European Parliament to legislate and control the executive powers of the Commission and the Council of Ministers. Recently two groups of theorists have argued neither deficit need prove problematic. The first group adopts a rights‐based view of democracy and claims that a European consensus on rights, as represented by the Charter of Fundamental European Rights, can offer the basis of citizen allegiance to EU wide democracy, thereby overcoming the demos deficit. The second group adopts a public‐interest view of democracy and argues that so long as delegated authorities enact policies that are ‘for’ the people, then the absence of institutional forms that facilitate democracy ‘by’ the people are likewise unnecessary—indeed, in certain areas they may be positively harmful. This article argues that both views are normatively and empirically flawed. This is because there is no consensus on rights or the public interest apart from the majority view of a demos secured through parliamentary institutions. To the extent that these remain absent at the EU level, a democratic deficit continues to exist.     

Postmortem interval estimation by creatinine levels in human psoas muscle.

A new method was tested for estimating time after death in the middle range of postmortem interval (weeks). Creatinine muscular concentration in human cadaver is positively correlated to postmortem estimation. Temperature should be mainly related to the creatinine transformation rate. A stronger correlation was found at 11 degrees C up to 30 days and at 20 degrees Celsius up to 15 days.