非法证据排除规则视野下的“命案必破”

层进式梳理＂命案必破＂的提出背景、原因和正常运转所具备的条件,系统分析其对司法实践产生的正反两方面影响,并试图指出在非法证据排除规则的规范和制约下,＂命案必破＂刑事政策必将对目前中国的刑事司法实践产生更加积极的推动作用。     

Alcohol‐Induced Osteopenia Among In‐Custody and Homicide Deaths from the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences

Four cases of in‐custody or unlawful death are presented as examples of increased bone fragility with an associated increase in fracture rates due to ethanol‐induced osteopenia. In addition, one of the individuals suffered fractures several weeks premortem, allowing some healing to take place. Using radiographs and physical examination, the ribs from these individuals are compared with those retained from three individuals with no history of alcoholism to illustrate diagnostic characteristics that will be notable using standard autopsy and anthropological procedures. Trabecular bone mass is notably decreased in the alcoholic group leading to a greater chance of fracture occurring during conflict, including arrest and in‐custody situations. The average number of perimortem fractures among the alcoholic individuals is 15, while the control group is six. In the case of the individual with healing, the degree of bone repair on the ribs was less than is expected considering the interval between injury and death.     

We mind and we care but have things changed? Assessment of progress in the reporting,investigating and prosecution of allegations of rape

Abstract

This paper discusses three themes in relation to assessing progress in the Criminal Justice System's (CJS) ability to investigate and successfully prosecute rape. The themes are business as usual, the justice gap and implementation problems. They arose as a consequence of two discussion papers in this volume by Kate Cook and Jan Jordan, who take positions of optimism and pessimism with respect to improvements for rape victim survivors after a series of reforms and changes in police and prosecution procedures. The stimulus for these papers was the latest review in England and Wales into the CJS's approach to rape conducted by Baroness Stern (2010). The present paper observes that the lack of systematic evaluative research makes it difficult to assess whether innovations in the CJS with respect to rape have been effective or to partial out the relative contribution law reform and changing police or prosecution practice may have made to reporting and conviction rates. Finally, it is suggested that intensification of effort to fully implement review recommendations may achieve limited improvement because of the characteristics of an adversarial legal model.     

Parenthood in Murder‐Suicide News. Idealized Fathers and Murderous Mums

In this article I analyse how parents' lethal violence is presented in Finnish murder‐suicide news reports. I explore how gendered ideas of parenthood and violence affect these constructions. The cases that I am interested in are those with child victims where the perpetrator is either the father or the mother. The theoretical frame of analysis is feminist ethnomethodology, and Membership Categorization Analysis is used as the method. One of the starting‐points is that parenthood is gendered in a way that mothers and fathers have different rights, responsibilities and competences in our culture. In other words, moral orders of fathering and mothering exist. Because of this, women's and men's violent actions towards their own children are understood differently. When a man kills his children and himself he can be portrayed as a caring parent. Instead, in a certain context a woman can be ‘a killer mum’, her act ‘a murder’ and her personality described in the light of the deed. The focus of this article is on gender and family categorization used in murder‐suicide news in Finnish newspapers and the moral orders created in them. I explore the differences by mainly using two case examples: 1) a man who killed his three children and himself, and 2) a woman who killed her husband, two children and herself. The consequences of these newspaper constructions are also considered.     

Violent Life Events and Social Disadvantage: A Systematic Study of the Social Background of Various Kinds of Lethal Violence,Other Violent Crime,Suicide, and Suicide Attempts1

ABSTRACT

Open sanctions and changes in conceptions of rehabilitation are changing qualification requirements in the field of prison and probation services. In particular, the significance of social interaction between employees and offenders has emphasized. This study examines this issue from the viewpoints of social constructionism and discourse analysis. Research material was collected by interviewing 11 Finnish Criminal Sanction Agency employees who prepared and enforced supervised probationary freedom. According to the results, social interaction was structured from different points of view and linked to differently constructed identities in the interviewees’ speech. Professional interaction and a confidential employee–offender relationship were viewed as a means to create occupational safety and prevent security risks, and also to support offender’s rehabilitation. In addition, employees used a discourse of daily interaction and support which emphasized the significance of everyday encounters with the offender. Employees were able to overcome the tension between support and control by flexibly combining the discourse of supervision with the discourse of daily interaction and support, which enabled them to support the offender without being a rehabilitation professional. The study reveals the central role of social interaction, which creates challenges for education, and the development of an organizational culture in prison and probation services.     

Using Booking Data to Model Drug User Arrest Rates: A Preliminary to Estimating the Prevalence of Chronic Drug Use

Public policy is often concerned with the size and characteristics of special populations that are difficult to reach in household surveys. Chronic drug users, who often live outside conventional households, provide the illustration motivating this paper. An alternative to household surveys is to question chronic drug users where they congregate—jails, treatment programs, and shelters, for example. Using such opportunistic data for prevalence estimation raises difficult problems for statistical inference: Study subjects who arrive at the collection points cannot be deemed a random sample of the general population. However, if we could estimate the rates at which chronic drug users arrive at the collection points, then we could use those estimates to weight the sample to represent the population. This paper presents a modified Poisson mixture model used to estimate the stochastic process that accounts for how chronic drug users get arrested. It uses that model to estimate arrest rates for 38 counties using up to sixteen quarters of data from the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring survey.

浅析当前全国命案侦办情况——第二届全国公安刑侦系统“命案卷宗评比”工作综述

2006年全国公安刑侦系统"命案卷宗评比"在云南警官学院侦查系顺利完成。通过此次评比工作发现:全国各地公安刑侦部门命案侦办质量有明显提高,科技强侦意识进一步增强,"一长双责"制得到较好落实,办案程序上的问题大大减少,法律文书制作和案卷装订质量有明显改进。但是,一些单位、一些案件在执法办案中仍存在不少问题有待进一步改进。今后,应坚持系统业务培训,提高民警的办案能力;逐步推行命案审讯全程录音录像制度;加强管理、明确责任,落实命案办案责任制。     

WHEN MISSING DATA ARE NOT MISSING: A NEW APPROACH TO EVALUATING SUPPLEMENTAL HOMICIDE REPORT IMPUTATION STRATEGIES*

The Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR) are widely used in criminological research and inform a broad range of research topics and subsequent policy applications. A serious issue with the SHR is missing information about the offender and incident in many recorded homicides. Although it is convenient to discard cases with missing data before analysis, such discarding is not theoretically justified and can lead to incorrect substantive conclusions. Recently, several techniques for imputing missing SHR data have been proposed, but it is difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. This research presents a new approach to testing and evaluating SHR imputation techniques. Offender data that are missing in the SHR are often found in police records available for individual cities. We examine similarities and differences among cases with known offender characteristics in the SHR, cases with such information missing in the SHR but available in police records, and cases with such information missing in both sources. We then use these data sets to evaluate four different imputation techniques suggested in the literature (Fox, 2004; Messner, Deane, and Beaulieu, 2002; Pampel and Williams, 2000; Regoeczi and Riedel, 2003). We apply each imputation technique to the SHR, and for cases with information missing in the SHR but known in the police records, we see how well the imputed values correspond both with the individual known values and with the overall distributions in the police records. We discuss the outcome of our assessment of these strategies, and we outline important implications this assessment has for research using SHR data.     

命案发案特点与侦破对策

提高命案侦破能力,实现“命案必破”的目标,是摆在公安机关当前的一个重大任务。目前,在故意杀人等严重刑事案件中,犯罪分子作案手段和方法出现了新特点、新趋势。公安机关应根据新变化,把握新特点,采取相应措施,不断提高侦破命案能力,努力实现“命案必破”。     

浅析不作为故意杀人罪

不作为故意杀人罪的认定是一个复杂的问题,准确定性和量刑关键是要清楚地界定先行行为引起的不作为故意杀人罪的构成要件。