Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth-Century America

The most notorious lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1890 and 1940 involved publicity, crowds, ritual, and abnormal cruelty. Several hundred of these "public torture lynchings" took place, most of them in the Deep South. The author develops an interpretation that takes seriously the specific forms and discourses that lynchers and their supporters used to describe and justify these events—characterizing them as criminal punishments, albeit summary, informal ones that were shaped by a white supremacist culture and a politics of racial domination. An interpretation of the penal context and meanings of these public torture lynchings helps us understand their specific forms and their claims to legitimacy. The penal character of these lynchings increased the probability that they would be tolerated by local (and even national) audiences and thus made them a strategic form of violence in struggles to maintain racial supremacy. The author argues that a consideration of these events should lead us to revise our standard narratives about the evolution of modern punishments.     

Significant Differences in PostMortem Heart Weight Before and After Dissection Using the Short-Axis Dissecting Method

Correctly assessing heart weight can be critical at postmortem examination. The current international guidelines advocate using the short-axis method in dissecting the heart and the heart weighed when the blood is emptied. However, it did not specify at what point the heart should be weighed or how the blood should be emptied. This study compared heart weights at three different time points during the heart examination (immediately after dissecting out of the pericardial sac with blood still in chambers, blood washed/removed from heart chambers without the heart opened, and the heart completely opened, blood emptied, and pad dried). This was to illustrate the variation in measurement and potential errors when the heart is weighed at different time of dissection. The results show that there were statistical and clinical significant differences between the heart weights at each weighing points. We recommend the heart to be completely dissected with any blood and residual washing/rinsing water emptied before being weighed. Although performed in this study, the effect of pad drying the heart on heart weight was not explored and was a limitation in this study.     

Learning to de-escalate: evaluating the behavioural impact of Verbal Judo training on police constables

ABSTRACT

This article presents findings from an assessment of the immediate behavioural impact of the ‘Verbal Judo’ de-escalation training program, delivered to officers in a Canadian police service in 2017, and represents the first evaluation of Verbal Judo. The evaluation utilized systematic observations of officers in videotaped simulations, comparing a baseline group of officers to officers trained in Verbal Judo. The study found that five of 15 coded behaviours were impacted at a statistically significant level in the hypothesized direction, and these tended to be simpler behaviours encouraged by the training (such as identifying oneself or providing a reason for contact), while more complex behaviours (such as empathizing with the subject) were not impacted. The evaluation also found that likelihood of utilizing de-escalation skills decreased as an officer’s years of experience increased. The paper closes by outlining the implications of these findings for de-escalation training, and elaborates the main limitations of the study.     

Making the State Responsible: Intersex Embodiment,Medical Jurisdiction,and State Responsibility

Through consideration of new developments in the United Kingdom's intersex policy, this article traces the ways in which responsibility is produced, naturalized, and avoided by individuals, institutions, and the state. Jurisdiction is identified as a barrier to the attribution of responsibility that must be overcome to achieve progress in relation to the needs of intersex people. By bringing together jurisdictional analysis and vulnerability theory, this article demonstrates how the state has traditionally abrogated responsibility by compartmentalizing specific practices as governed by medical authority. It highlights that such accounts mask the role of the state in the creation of jurisdiction and the ways in which governance is conducted. Challenging these boundaries allows vulnerability theorists to move the state towards greater levels of responsibility. By combining these theoretical tools, the article enhances the practical utility of vulnerability theory and advances an important agenda for intersex people.     

Identifying Fatal Head Injuries on Postmortem Computed Tomography Using Convolutional Neural Network/Deep Learning: A Feasibility Study

Postmortem computed tomography (PMCT) is a relatively recent advancement in forensic pathology practice that has been increasingly used as an ancillary investigation and screening tool. One area of clinical CT imaging that has garnered a lot of research interest recently is the area of “artificial intelligence” (AI), such as in screening and computer-assisted diagnostics. This feasibility study investigated the application of convolutional neural network, a form of deep learning AI, to PMCT head imaging in differentiating fatal head injury from controls. PMCT images of a transverse section of the head at the level of the frontal sinus from 25 cases of fatal head injury were combined with 25 nonhead-injury controls and divided into training and testing datasets. A convolutional neural network was constructed using Keras and was trained against the training data before being assessed against the testing dataset. The results of this study demonstrated an accuracy of between 70% and 92.5%, with difficulties in recognizing subarachnoid hemorrhage and in distinguishing congested vessels and prominent falx from head injury. These results are promising for potential applications as a screening tool or in computer-assisted diagnostics in the future.