Criminology's future is in its past Dooley, Brendan D.; Rocque, Michael
Journal of criminal justice,
March-April 2023, 2023-03-00, 20230301, Letnik:
85
Journal Article
This Article seeks to examine judicial opposition to New York’s 2020 criminal justice reforms in the context of existing scholarship on judicial organizational culture to understand why judicial ...obstruction occurs and how it can be addressed. New York’s 2020 criminal legal reforms sought to reduce pretrial detention and to provide greater access to discovery for the defense by curtailing judicial discretion to set bail and judicial power to excuse prosecutorial discovery delays. But judges opposed the law both surreptitiously and openly through defiant opinions, administrative adjustments, and routine court actions that undercut the reforms’ intended effects.
Scholars such as Malcolm Feeley, Brian Ostrom, and Roger Hanson have written about how the informal organizational culture of a court system can be an impediment to reforms. Their analysis applies to New York’s 2020 reforms and provides insight into why this specific resistance occurred and how it can be addressed. The judiciary was included in planning and discussing the 2020 reforms and the reforms sought to remove judicial discretion in the matters of bail and discovery. Yet when it came time to implement the change, judges used other powers to avoid releasing individuals and to avoid sanctioning prosecutors.
This is at least partially due to New York’s judicial appointment scheme which makes the judiciary sensitive to structural narratives concerning public safety and court leniency. Although these reforms were democratic and popular, judges were not sufficiently incentivized to properly implement the changes. If reforms are to succeed, the popular and political will to pass the reforms must extend beyond the passage of the law and must also create mechanisms to scrutinize, guide, and support the judiciary’s implementation of the law.
The reliability of evidence in a criminal trial is a multidimensional issue and relates to the assessment of the evidential value of a specific circumstance established in the case through activities ...performed by expert witness or authorities. The reliability (trustworthy) of the source of evidence and identification methods, performance of research, deduction and the context of other evidence seem to be one of the important implications for the evidential value.Results of the survey of participants of the criminal trial (police officers, prosecutors and experts) and comparative group on the perception of various features of identification methods and selected aspects related to the status of a forensic expert is presented in the article. In the first part of the study, the identification methods were ranked in terms of their scientificity, reliability and willingness to convict on the basis of the method’s results. The research shows that the assessment of the method’s reliability is significantly correlated with the assessment of its scientificity. However, some exceptions to this relationship have been identified, indicating that the reliability of the method may also be the result of an assessment of its suitability and effectiveness. The second part of the research was focused on assessing the reliability of various expert opinions. The place of examinations carried out by an expert is important for the participants of the criminal trial. Opinions of forensic experts performed at specialist institutions were assessed as the most reliable.
Criminal sentence is supposed to be just reflection of the gravity of the violations of social norms by an individual in given circumstances. It therefore should be a reliable base for measurement of ...antisocial tendencies in offenders. Decades of research consistently show that autonomic under-arousal is a significant predictor of crime, violence and antisocial behaviour (AB). No research to date tried to study relationship between length of criminal sentences and physiological measures of autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity. Our study aimed to check if parameters of criminal sentences are good quantification of antisocial tendencies by correlating it with their known physiological correlate – resting heart rate (HR). We correlated sum of sentences, largest individual sentence and legal limits for most serious offence as documented in criminal records with resting HR in 74 young adult incarcerated criminal offenders aged 18–20. In line with the hypothesis we obtained Pearson’s coefficients of r = -.443; r = -.451 and r = -.397 respectively as well as Spearman’s coefficients ρ = -.408; ρ = -.492 and ρ = -.406 respectively, all significant at p < .001.
Our research shows that resting heart rate can be a robust predictor of criminal conduct when the latter is quantified precisely and objectively with criminal records. This directs further research in this field towards measuring AB using methods less sensitive to impression management and informant bias, not relying on self-report but on documented behaviour vides empirical support to the validity of codified principles of criminal law as ways of expressing offenders’ level of social misconduct.
The aim of the study was to evaluate the novel kits – Investigator 26plex QS and SureID PanGlobal in forensic analysis and confront with commonly applied NGM PCR Amplification Kit. The internal ...validation study involved sensitivity, reliability, stochastic, DNA mixtures, inhibition parameters analysis and 15 casework samples extracted from blood, saliva, semen, tooth, bones, soft tissue and epithelial cells. The sensitivity experiments were performed on a total of 24 samples from seven serial dilutions of 007 control DNA. Mixture analysis was performed for two persons in different proportions using 9947 and 007 control DNA. Inhibition effect was tested using PCR inhibitor – humic acid. Among three compared kits the highest sensitivity was noted for Investigator 26plex QS considering the total number of the markers in each system, as well as the shared set of markers. However, low PCR efficiency of D6S1043 locus was observed with aforementioned kit. Mixture analysis performed with Investigator 26plex QS, SureID Pan Global and NGM kits, considering shared set of markers revealed that NGM Kit is the most sensitive for detecting minor components in a mixture. Similarly, we demonstrated that NGM is the most successful in the analysis of challenging forensic samples. The internal validation showed that the Investigator 26plex QS and SureID PanGlobal have weaker performance for routine forensic application in comparison to NGM Kit. However, thanks to increased number of markers, these systems could be helpful in analysis of complex cases in paternity testing and kinship analysis, in which standard genetic analysis is insufficient.
The article describes the current possibilities of forensic medicine in the diagnosis of death by drowning, as well as reflects the different views of the authors and the evolution of approaches to ...this issue. Despite the constant interest of scientists in the topic of drowning and extensive research on this issue, there are still many white spots. Researchers are trying to identify more specific changes characteristic of drowning and possible methods to detect them.The main evidence based method of diagnosing drowning at present is the detection of diatomic plankton in the tissues of isolated kidneys by light optical microscopy. However, microscopic examination and identification of diatomic plankton require a lot of time and accurate taxonomic examination. Also, a disadvantage of this method is that the methods of processing the material sent for research, as a result of the use of concentrated acids for the destruction of organs, greatly complicates and sometimes eliminates the possibility of detection of diatomic plankton. In some cases, the presence of diatoms during drowning is so small that it is impossible to detect them by microscopy. In such cases, the presence of phytoplankton DNA detected by PCR in tissues during drowning is almost the only method for diagnosing drowning. Nowadays there has been a lack of research in the field of forensic medicine related to the use of evidence-based medicine, especially in the field of drowning.
