ICC Pre-Trial Chamber Allows Victims to Participate in the Investigation Phase of Proceedings

The decision rendered by the International Criminal Court (ICC)Pre-Trial Chamber I on 17 January 2006 allows victims to beinvolved in ICC proceedings at an early stage of the investigation.The Prosecutor, who has filed an appeal against this decision,has consistently argued that the right of victims to participatein the proceedings does not cover the investigation phase. Itis argued that the impact of this decision goes far beyond theissue of victims’ participation in the investigations;it has general implications for the balance of power betweenthe judiciary and the prosecution in proceedings before theICC.     

Newspaper juries

This article reports on a field experiment on the effect of media information on people’s attitudes towards the justice system. For the duration of a year a Dutch local newspaper took small groups of readers, called ‘newspaper jurors’, to court sessions of criminal cases and subsequently reported on their experiences and perceptions. Using a quasi-experimental design, we examined whether an attitude change in the general reader population of this particular local newspaper occurred as a result of the jury’s newspaper reports. Findings show that, after the treatment interval of 1 year, no attitude change in the general reader population could be identified that was absent in the control group.     

A rapid gas chromatographic method for the fingerprinting of illicit cocaine samples.

A gas chromatographic (GC) fingerprint method, based on the presence or absence of six congeners, was developed for illicit cocaine samples. The fingerprint utilizes the relative abundances of these congeners towards each other, disregarding cocaine as the main constituent, and can be expressed numerically or graphically in the form of pictograms for rapid visual comparison. The method can be applied directly to a solution of the sample in chloroform, without previous workup procedures. More than 70 unrelated samples were analyzed and a great variation was observed in the parameter composition. On the other hand, a remarkable similarity could be seen between related samples. The GC fingerprint method may be considered an important contribution for sample comparison, as is exemplified by a subdivision of the analyzed samples in different categories, based on the number and types of congeners found.     

Social skills,distorted perception and being suspect: Studies in impression formation and the ability to deceive

Conclusion This paper dealt with the relation between social skills and a) making a suspicious impression, b) the ability to deceive. The results suggest that observers typically entertain perceptual distortion: introverted and socially anxious persons automatically impress them as less credible while extroverts establish more credibility. Introverts and socially anxious people are more likely to be designated as suspect in the sense of Article 27 of theCod of Penal Procedure-their extroverted and non-anxious counterparts run less risk on this point. The results further show that social skills are related to the ability to hide the truth. The introverted and socially anxious are poor liars. In sum, we may conclude that the likelihood of criminal stigmatization is appreciably greater if one's behavior is introverted or socially anxious because they impress others as suspicious (they run the risk of being apprehended more readily and they will more quickly succumb under questioning). Eysenck's theory (1984) states that crimes are more strongly correlated with extroversion. This means that extroverts have a double advantage. The double handicap for introverted and socially anxious persons could be undone if detection officers would pay somewhat greater attention to the extroverted and socially non-anxious. In addition, we would recommend that training programs for police officers include material on impression formation and impression management as aspects of social skills.