Harmless error analysis: How do judges respond to confession errors?

In Arizona v. Fulminante (1991), the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door for appellate judges to conduct a harmless error analysis of erroneously admitted, coerced confessions. In this study, 132 judges from three states read a murder case summary, evaluated the defendant's guilt, assessed the voluntariness of his confession, and responded to implicit and explicit measures of harmless error. Results indicated that judges found a high-pressure confession to be coerced and hence improperly admitted into evidence. As in studies with mock jurors, however, the improper confession significantly increased their conviction rate in the absence of other evidence. On the harmless error measures, judges successfully overruled the confession when required to do so, indicating that they are capable of this analysis.     

The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism

Terrorism was first confronted as a discrete subject matterof international law by the international community in the mid-1930s,following the assassination of a Yugoslavian king and a Frenchforeign minister by ethnic separatists. The League's attemptto generically define terrorism in an international treaty prefiguredmany of the legal, political, ideological and rhetorical disputeswhich plagued the international community's attempts to defineterrorism in the 50 years after the Second World War. Althoughthe treaty never entered into force following the dissolutionof the League itself, the League's core definition has beenhighly resilient and has influenced subsequent legal effortsto define terrorism. While the League's 1937 Convention forthe Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism is often referredto obliquely in international legal discussions of terrorism,the drafting of the Convention has seldom been intensively analysed.By closely examining its drafting, this article elucidates howthe drafters of the Convention agreed on a definition of terrorism,and why they rejected alternative definitions. In doing so,it hopes to refresh and enliven current international debatesabout definition in the wake of the United Nation's 60th anniversaryyear, which saw renewed emphasis placed on the quest for definition.     

The Revolution in Portugal's African Colonies: A Review Essay

Controversy over the existence of a gender order among the pre-colonial Yoruba in south-western Nigeria is growing within postcolonial scholarship, including among Western academics. This article argues that Nathaniel Fadipe's ethnographic study, which references the pre-colonial era, sheds light on the debate. Fadipe was the first Yoruba sociologist to gain a Ph.D. Focusing on his discussions of childhood, the domestic sphere and family life, I undertake a textual analysis that compares his unpublished dissertation (1939) with the published version that was edited by Okediji and Okediji (1970). I conclude that both texts present clear evidence of pre-colonial gender constructs. The dissertation, less referenced by scholars, is however more persistent in discussing inequalities. I discuss the portrayal of gender, offer reasons for differences between the two texts and highlight areas of divergence.     

A new allele of the short tandem repeat (STR) locus, CSF1PO.

CSF1PO is one of the thirteen core loci used for the CODIS database, and alleles reported for this short tandem repeat (STR) locus contain from 6 to 15 repeats of the tetranucleotide AGAT. Screening of DNA from 76 individuals by gel electrophoresis and silver stain detection yielded one sample that contained a rare, off-ladder CSF1PO allele; an allele larger than CSF1PO15 was detected in a heterozygote that also contained a CSF1PO10 allele. Capillary electrophoresis analysis using GeneScan software demonstrated that the variant allele contained four bases more than CSF1PO15. Following agarose gel electrophoresis to separate the two alleles of the heterozygote and cycle sequencing using dye terminators, sequence analysis showed that the variant, which was otherwise identical to the CSF1PO GenBank sequence, contained exactly 16 AGAT repeats. These results demonstrate the existence of an additional CSF1PO allele, a previously unreported size variant, CSF1PO16.     

On the Power of Confession Evidence: An Experimental Test of the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis

In Arizona v. Fulminante (1991), a U.S. Supreme Court majority stated that confessions are similar to, not fundamentally different from, other types of evidence. To evaluate this claim, three mock juror studies compared the impact of confessions to other common forms of evidence. In Experiment 1, participants read summaries of four criminal trials (murder, rape, assault, theft), each of which contained a confession, an eyewitness identification, character testimony, or none of the above. Significantly, the confessions produced the highest conviction rates. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants read a murder or assault trial containing all three types of evidence and made a series of midtrial judgments. Results indicated that the confession was seen as the most incriminating, followed by the eyewitness and character testimony. Although the comparisons we made are limited in certain respects, our findings suggest that confessions are uniquely potent.