The Frye hearing in Florida: an attempt to exclude scientific evidence

State Supreme Courts require a minimum threshold of reliability and acceptance in the scientific community for all medical and similar evidence to be admitted at trial. In Florida and some other states, the courts adhere to what is known as the Frye standard, whereas in most states and in Federal Courts, it is the so-called Daubert standard. The jurisdiction of the present case is Hillsborough County (Tampa), Florida. Forensic pathologists seldom, if ever, are requested to participate in such hearings, unlike their toxicological and basic science colleagues who are more involved in research methodology and technical procedures. The burden is on the proponent of the evidence to prove the general acceptance of both the underlying scientific principle of the test and procedures used to apply that principle to the facts of the case at hand. The trial judge has the sole discretion to determine this question and general acceptance must be established by a preponderance of the evidence. The authors describe in detail a hearing in a case in which they were all involved. One author (WQS) had researched and documented the original scientific methodology in the literature. The situation involved a car and tractor trailer crash with the two occupants of the car dying of multiple trauma, whereas the truck driver was not injured. Autopsy of the auto driver revealed multiple injuries with exsanguination, and only vitreous humor and liver tissue, but not blood, were tested for ethyl alcohol. The estate of the driver of the automobile brought suit against the owner of the trucking company for wrongful death. The plaintiff requested a Frye hearing to question the reliability of testing other body specimens to translate to probable blood alcohol level. The testimony, submitted documents, and eventual decision by the judge are discussed.     

The Impact on Juror Verdicts of Judicial Instruction to Disregard Inadmissible Evidence: A Meta-Analysis

The effect on juror verdicts of judicial instructions to disregard inadmissible evidence was evaluated using meta-analysis. One hundred seventy-five hypothesis tests from 48 studies with a combined 8,474 participants were examined. Results revealed that inadmissible evidence (IE) has a reliable effect on verdicts consistent with the content of the IE. Judicial instruction to ignore the inadmissible evidence does not effectively eliminate IE impact. However, if judges provide a rationale for a ruling of inadmissibility, juror compliance may be increased. Contested evidence ruled admissible accentuates that information, resulting in a significant impact on verdicts. Suggestions for how the courts may mitigate the impact of inadmissible evidence more effectively are discussed.     

Gender disparity in criminal offenses among persons of high IQ

Criminologists have largely neglected deviance among those with high IQs. This work uses Towers's (1988) concept of conventional genius to analyze how deviant behavior varies by gender among genius offenders. Like Bisi (2002), the authors expect female patterns of deviance to be lower than that for males even within this genius sample. Their work finds that male geniuses are significantly more likely to self-report ever having committed violent felonies. Among the authors' conventional genius sample of university students, gender differences in nonviolent felonies, misdemeanor offenses, and unethical behaviors are not significantly different between the female and male respondents.     

The Unintended consequences of sentencing reforms: Using social chain theory to examine racial disparities in Female imprisonment

The current study uses social chain theory to examine the potential unintended effects of sentencing reforms on racial disparities in female imprisonment. Our analysis measures changes in the relative odds of Black to White female imprisonment using the Relative Rate Index (RRI) through panel regression modeling on 40 states from 1983 to 2008. Our final models indicate that four types of sentencing reforms had unintended perverse effects on racial disparities in prison admissions while Truth in Sentencing laws increased racial disparities in time-served. Eighteen combinations of sentencing reforms also significantly impacted disparities. Theoretical and policy implications are also discussed.     

Ordinary Sentences for Extraordinary Crimes

In comparison to sentences meted out by international tribunalsat Nuremberg, Tokyo and Arusha, and by domestic courts, sentenceshanded down at the International Criminal Tribunal for the formerYugoslavia (ICTY) have been inexplicably lenient. Factors thatmay have contributed to the high proportion of low sentencesat the ICTY include undue emphasis on mitigating factors, particularlythose of particular importance to the Tribunal, the use of pleaagreements, the absence of a separate sentencing hearing followingconviction and the practice of using global (rather than separate)sentences. To make sentences more proportionate to the crimescommitted, the objectives of sentencing should be clarifiedand re-evaluated. Greater weight should be given to deterrence.In assessing the gravity of the offence, the quantum of harmcaused to and suffering experienced by direct and indirect victimsof the crime merits more detailed evaluation. The importanceof mitigating circumstances (such as combating historical revisionism,pleading guilty, expressing remorse and voluntary surrender)should continue to be fully recognized but those factors shouldnot attract excessive weight. Plea bargaining and plea agreementsshould be encouraged because they are indispensable to the Tribunal,an institution with significant temporal, practical and resourcelimitations. The sentencing process should take place afterconviction. A sentencing Chamber should be obliged to statethe starting point of the sentence which it deems appropriateand then quantify the discounts it gives to each mitigatingfactor. Greater consideration should be given to imposing consecutiverather than concurrent sentences. The decision not to adoptsentencing guidelines represents a missed opportunity.     

Spain's ETA Terrorist Group is Dying

The armed organization “Basque Fatherland & Liberty” undertook a struggle for an independent homeland vis-à-vis Spanish central government over half a century ago. But today, the author argues, the ETA appears doomed for three reasons. First, Spanish statesmen of the late 1970s agreed to limited autonomy for Basque-dominated provinces, and over time this undermined militancy. Second, Paris has become a strong partner to Madrid in pursuing ETA members—who once could hide readily amidst French Basques. And finally, Spanish policing is now excellent. With good intelligence and professionalism, varied internal security forces have been confronting ETA gunmen and tracking down the personnel of proscribed support groups. Thus, a resilient Spanish democracy offers a case study in how terrorist groups may end.     

Decisionism and action: changing perspectives in organization theory

The neglect of moral discourse in mainstream organization theory during the past four decades may be attributed to the dominance of the “decision,” popularized by Herbert Simon, as the field's primary unit of analysis. Underwritten by an epistemology derived from the logical positivists’ analytical distinction between value and fact, the idea of decision has come to be uncritically accepted as a morally neutral and empirically self-evident beginning point for organizational analysis. The ethnomethodological writings of Harold Garfinkel, coupled with insights from contemporary philosophy of language, radically challenge the value-fact distinction, pointing to an epistemology of everyday life in which value and fact are initially fused. The inherent fusion of value and fact provides the basis for an alternative epistemology for organization theory—termed the “action” or “process” perspective—which fundamentally alters the empirical understanding of organizational life and, consistent with the writings of Mary Parker Follett, enables the recovery of organization theory's moral center.

Commenting on the effects of technology on modern consciousness, Manfred Stanley has noted that:

Of all the upheavals of history and culture, it is difficult to imagine any of greater scope than the decline and fall not of some one vision of the good, but of the good itself. The rise of the notion that there is no such phenomenon as the good in the objective nature of things must be the most ironic anticlimax possible to centuries of bitter conflict between those who felt themselves empowered to define it.⁽¹⁾

For Stanley, the problem is not technology as such, but “technicism”: the implicit, even unconscious, belief that the humanly possible is synonymous with the technologically available. In technicist consciousness, technology is no longer a means for attaining the good, because “means” presupposes a prior moral or practical end in whose service that means is applied. Should any conception of the good be embraced at all, he argues, it ironically can merely be an artifact of what has been made available by technology.

Technicism has become the predominant attribute of modern consciousness, producing what William Barrett, speaking in a slightly different context, calls “the illusion of technique.”⁽²⁾

In the collective infatuation with technology, Barrett argues,

... we have come to regard it [technology] as the source for the discovery of human meaning. The tragic consequence of this is the inevitable alienation of man from himself and his estrangement from others. The irony of technicism to which Stanley alluded earlier may be summarized as a reversal of a familiar aphorism—invention has now become the mother of necessity—albeit one devoid of moral content.

Stanley sees the rise of technicism as concomitant with the emergence of liberal society, whose institutions have achieved coherence and legitimacy explainable in terms of three themes that have dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century. The first is the general desanctification or secularization of the political economy exemplified ... in the transformation of human skills and the earth itself into objective commodity resources for commercial production.⁽³⁾ The second theme is the ascendancy of the market principle as the chief basis of socioeconomic organization, wherein interests are privately held by individuals rather than shared by communities or other larger collectivities. Finally, there is the theme of pluralistic representation in political decision making, where the expression of individual (and group) interest is tolerated in the hope of achieving a balance among them.

Taken together these themes have produced a pervasive sense of nihilism in Western society insofar as they seem to exclude the possibility “of grounding collective standards of value priorities in anything more transcendent than the simplest shared utilities like power, wealth, and the security of one's immediate personal circumstances.”⁽⁴⁾

The consequence of the three themes of liberal society, profoundly abetted by technicist consciousness, is nothing less than the loss “of a sense of common human community in the West”⁽⁵⁾and also of the moral possibility of a common, transcendent good.