“In One Direction Only”: Chains of Reasoning and Tail Events in CAFA Amount-in-Controversy Claims

While the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) establishes a bright-line jurisdictional amount in controversy for removing cases from state to federal court, calculating that quantitative threshold in practice is a fraught and heavily litigated exercise. This article examines removals under CAFA to show the substantial lack of clarity in how state-law causes of action and damage claims interact to reach the jurisdictional threshold. It compiles cases illustrating the challenges surrounding removal litigation that flow from these uncertainties, particularly in how the structure of CAFA incentivizes defendants to chain together tail-event precedent to inflate theoretical amounts in controversy. It then applies a Coasean analysis to suggest these uncertainties impede efficient resolutions to litigation. Finally, it suggests a series of practical amendments to CAFA and its interpretive case law that would provide clarity, decrease forum-selection litigation, and enhance the efficacy of class litigation.     

The impact of human-technology cooperation and distributed cognition in forensic science: biasing effects of AFIS contextual information on human experts

Experts play a critical role in forensic decision making, even when cognition is offloaded and distributed between human and machine. In this paper, we investigated the impact of using Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) on human decision makers. We provided 3680 AFIS lists (a total of 55,200 comparisons) to 23 latent fingerprint examiners as part of their normal casework. We manipulated the position of the matching print in the AFIS list. The data showed that latent fingerprint examiners were affected by the position of the matching print in terms of false exclusions and false inconclusives. Furthermore, the data showed that false identification errors were more likely at the top of the list and that such errors occurred even when the correct match was present further down the list. These effects need to be studied and considered carefully, so as to optimize human decision making when using technologies such as AFIS.     

A Comparison of Ideologically-Motivated Homicides from the New Extremist Crime Database and Homicides from the Supplementary Homicide Reports Using Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations to Handle Missing Values

This study took advantage of the new open-source Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) to overcome obstacles to studying domestic far-right terrorism from a criminological perspective. In the past, exclusive definitions and inclusion criteria have limited available data on violent crimes committed by domestic far-right terrorists, and official data on violent crimes fail to capture offenders’ links to domestic far-right terrorism and ideological motivation (e.g., anti-government, anti-abortion, anti-religion). Therefore, little is known about the nature of far-right terrorist violence and how such violence is similar to and different from routine or more common forms of violence. Focusing on homicides, this study addressed why and how open-source terrorism data and official crime data can be comparatively analyzed. In doing so, we also demonstrate the utility of synthesizing terrorism and official crime data sources. Data on 108 far-right terrorist homicides were taken from the ECDB. Data on 540 common homicides (five comparison homicides for each far-right terrorist homicide) were randomly sampled from the 2000 Supplementary Homicide Reports. Using multiple imputation by chained equations and logistic regression, we imputed missing values and estimated models to compare the two homicide types on 12 different victim, offender, and event characteristics. Relative to common homicides, we found that far-right terrorist homicides were significantly more likely to have white offenders, multiple victims, multiple offenders, and to occur between strangers, and they were significantly less likely to have white victims, to be carried out with a firearm, and to occur in cities with more than 100,000 residents.     

Halfe the world knowes not how the other halfe lies: Investigation of verbal and non‐verbal signs of deception exhibited by criminal offenders and non‐offenders

Purpose. This study examined the verbal and non‐verbal behaviours exhibited by criminal offender and non‐offender participants while they related planned truthful and deceptive accounts about emotional autobiographical events. Methods. In a 2 × 2 (participant group × veracity) quasi‐experimental design, offenders (N = 27) and university students (N = 38) provided videotaped accounts of four autobiographical emotional events: two honest and two fabricated (counterbalanced). Patterns of behaviour exhibited during the truthful and the deceptive accounts were then compared. Results. In general, offenders and non‐offenders showed similar patterns of deceptive behaviour. Deceptive accounts by both groups contained fewer details than honest accounts. Deception was associated with an increase in illustrator usage and self‐manipulations; however, univariate analyses indicated only that offenders exhibited significantly more self‐manipulations when lying. A significant interaction emerged in which offenders showed a reduction in smiles when lying about the emotional events, while students showed no difference. Conclusions. Offenders and students showed similar patterns of lying on most cues. However, unlike non‐offenders, offenders smiled less and showed an increase in self‐manipulations when lying. We theorize that offenders may have been aware that smiling and laughing are negatively related to perceived credibility in the speaker and used self‐manipulations to distract listeners from the content of their lies.