The Last Word in Court—A Hidden Disadvantage for the Defense

In the legal systems of most western countries, defense attorneys present their sentencing recommendation after the prosecution has presented its sentencing demands. This procedural sequence for criminal cases is intended to balance the impact of both parties on the judge's final decision. Especially the positioning of the defense's plea at the end of the trial follows the fundamental legal principle “in dubio pro reo.” Research on judgmental anchoring, however, suggests that the standard procedural sequence may in fact work against this principle. Consistent with this implication, the present studies demonstrate that the defense's sentencing recommendation is anchored on, and consequently assimilated toward, the preceding recommendation by the prosecution. This influence prevents the defense attorney from effectively counterbalancing the prosecutor's demand. Instead, the biased defense attorney's recommendation partially mediates the impact of the prosecutor's demand on the judge's decision. These findings suggest that the standard procedural sequence in court may place the defense at a distinct disadvantage.     

Information inconsistency and the cognitive algebra of foreign policy decision making

This paper explores a special feature of the information complexity that underlies foreign policy decision making, i.e., inconsistency in information. We use the actor and action images to categorize types of inconsistency. The consequences of inconsistency for process and outcome are analyzed within the framework of a cognitive algebra model. Finally, we demonstrate the implications of the model in an experimental study. Our findings show that not every inconsistency is detected and those that are detected do not always affect the choice. The critical inconsistency is the one that presents an imbalanced structure of the actor and the action image. This inconsistency affects the choices made by decision‐makers and sensitizes them to the within image inconsistency. Furthermore, the results suggests that in the context of the scenarios employed in this experiment the actor image has a more dominant status for the foreign policy decision making process than the action image.     

博弈技术在政府危机应急管理决策中的应用

本文运用博弈论的方法，分析了政府应急管理决策中的相关者问题，指出决策相关者间的长期合作和相互信任是合作的重要基础，提出了相应的改善政府应急管理中相关者行为的策略，探讨了政府危机应急管理的一些具体方案。     

侦查和解的适用理念

当下对刑事和解的研究主要集中在审查起诉阶段和审判阶段,对侦查阶段的刑事和解关注不够。应当赋予侦查和解决定权,侦查阶段适用刑事和解指导思想应当是注重社会效果和法律效果平衡。侦查和解应当遵从和解自愿、基本事实清楚、自主和解为主他主和解为辅、和解事后监督等诸原则。     

Rules of military retaliation and their practice by the state of Israel

A major issue intriguing students of international relations is determining to what extent, if at all, do norms and standard operating procedures (SOPs) affect foreign policy. This question is addressed in this article in the case of Israel's policy of military retaliation. Alternative rules of conduct associated with this policy were deduced from strategic and normative arguments presented by Israeli decision‐makers in order to justify military reprisal attacks against Arab countries. These rules of conduct were then formulized into hypotheses and empirically tested with the aid of a database that contained daily accounts of Arab and Israeli acts of aggression towards each other between 1949 and 1982. In this manner it was possible to identify different decision rules that dominated Israel's reprisal policy at different periods of time.     

审查逮捕环节证据的审查与运用

在审查逮捕阶段的证据收集运用中,共存在十种不良倾向.为克服这些问题,从整体上讲,应当坚持证据审查的原则;从具体上讲,应当善于运用证据的审查方法.在多年司法实践的基础上,共归纳了八种行之有效的方法.     

Some individual differences in perception of the evidence and the verdict choice

Abstract

For the last century, social research has provided evidence that contradicts the idea of objectivity in judicial procedure. As a result, research on jurors' potential bias has emerged. We propose an alternative to traditional jury, one in which social researchers collaborate with judges and lawyers, providing them with information on the juror bias. Legal authoritarianism is one of the characteristics of personality, which seems to be linked to juror verdicts. We present two studies, which develop a specific measure for this variable. The first study shows the relevance of legal authoritarianism as a variable to describe the psychological profile of juror-eligible respondents. The second study explores the relationship between legal authoritarianism and interpretation of the evidence, as well as the potential of this variable to predict verdicts.     

试论治安管理处罚决定——治安管理处罚程序研究之四

依法、科学、合理的治安管理处罚决定程序,是治安管理处罚合法、公正实施的有效保证,同时对规范和保障公安机关及其人民警察依法履行治安管理职责,实施治安管理处罚具有十分重要的意义。     

A DUAL‐SYSTEMS APPROACH FOR UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENTIAL SUSCEPTIBILITY TO PROCESSES OF PEER INFLUENCE

The distinct peer‐based perspectives of deviant normative influence and unstructured/unsupervised socializing with friends contend that adolescents rely on different information when deciding to offend, with the former positing that individuals offend after considering the longer term consequences of behavior, and the latter positing that decisions to offend derive from situational stimuli. We argue that these processes can be organized under a dual‐systems framework of decision making, which leads to the hypothesis that individuals at the edges of impulsivity should be differentially vulnerable to these peer influence processes because of their tendency to rely on only one system of decision making. We use two large data sets to test this hypothesis: a nationally representative sample of adolescents from the AddHealth study (N = ～9,000) and a pooled panel data set of adolescents from the Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.) evaluation (N = 1,172). The results of longitudinal negative binomial analyses indicate that normative influence by deviant peers has a stronger effect on delinquency for adolescents with low impulsivity than it does for individuals with high impulsivity. Differences in the informal socializing with peers coefficients are less clear and offer minimal support for our predictions.