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Polygraph Verification Test

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Abstract

This paper involves fifty-one re-examinations of original polygraph tests that resulted in conflicted outcomes and examinations where deliberate distortions were believed to have been employed. The Polygraph Validation Test (PVT) was successfully employed in these re-examinations to rectify the original problems and/or confirm attempts by examinees at countermeasures or augmentations.

Additional Resource: Using the Polygraph Validation Test (PVT) in Solving Conflicted Polygraph Results and Confirming Deliberate Distortions by Examinees (2945 downloads )

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The Role of Brain Fingerprinting in Criminal Proceedings

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The application of Brain Fingerprinting® testing in a criminal case involves four phases: investigation, interview, scientific testing, and adjudication. Of these four phases, only the third one is in the domain of science. The first phase is undertaken by a skilled investigator, the second by an interviewer who may be an investigator or a scientist, the third by a scientist, and the fourth by a judge and jury.

This is similar to the forensic application of other sciences. For example, if a person is found dead of unknown causes, first there is an investigation to determine if there may have been foul play. If there is a suspect involved, the suspect is interviewed to determine what role, if any, he says he has had in the situation. If the investigation determines that the victim may have been poisoned using ricin or cadmium, two rare and powerful poisons, then scientific tests can be conducted to detect these specific substances in the body. Then the evidence

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Identifying Facial Markings

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As early as 1200 BCE, the ancient Egyptians were practicing a range of restorative techniques on the emaciated features of the dead from filling the inside of the mouths with sawdust to improve hollowed cheeks to stuffing linen under the eyelids or replacing eyes with stones. They would continue this procedure, tending to any disability, injury or disfigurement until the face and the body were contoured to approximate the original features and shape of the person they were preparing for their death ceremony.

Since then, modern restorative techniques, renamed restorative arts in 1930, became an important sub-discipline of the aftercare services; mending the body when it exhibited obvious signs of trauma, disease or wounds from war to provide comfort to the bereaved by presenting a loved one who appears familiar in death as they did in life.

It was in 1912, when well-known embalmer, Joel E. Crandall introduced demisurgery, a practice he described as “the art of building or creating parts of...

Additional Resource: A Brief History Of Restoratie Arts

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PARTNERS IN CRIME A Comparison of Individual and Multi-Perpetrator Homicides

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Homicide is a heterogeneous crime associated with diverse contexts, motives, offender– victim relationships, and offender characteristics. Although cleared at a higher rate than that of other violent crimes likely because of the resources channeled into such investigations (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2007) homicide remains poorly understood, and stranger homicides in particular can be challenging for investigators (Dauvergne & Li, 2006). In 2006, the United States experienced an estimated 17,034 homicides, only 60% of which were cleared by police investigation and, most typically, the arrest of at least one person (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2007). In Canada, 70% of solved homicides between 1991 and 2005 were cleared within 1 week of the incident, with the likelihood of success dropping drastically after that time. Given the urgency associated with a homicide investigation and the temporal constraints associated with a positive outcome, a valuable asset to investigators would be the ability to predict perpetrator characteristics based on the crime scene and the victim left behind. If specific

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Child Pornography, Prostitution And Predators: Has The Internet Placed Our Children At Risk?

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INTRODUCTION

Child exploitation and abuse is not a new phenomenon and has occurred since the beginning of time in all societies irrespective of culture, race, ethnicity, economic strength, religion and many other factors. The abuse of children can take many forms including physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse and neglect. Nearly one million children are victims of child abuse and neglect in the United States each year. Every day nearly four children die as a result of abuse and neglect, most under the age of five. Globally, the number of maltreated children, the various ways in which they are maltreated and the differing ways in which societies define maltreatment or abuse make it difficult to enact standards which protect children from abuse and maltreatment. The molestation and sexual exploitation of children has been identified as a major public health issue. One in four girls and at least one in ten boys are sexually abused in some way by the age of 18.

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Remorse, Apology, and Mercy

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I. INTRODUCTION

It is commonly even if not universally believed that the very worst of evildoers are those who are utterly without remorse for the evil that they have done an absence often understandably inferred from their unwillingness to express remorse by apologizing or begging forgiveness or by their not engaging in appropriate non-verbal expressive behavior seeking out punishment, for example. Such absence of remorse may, in the words of Wislawa Szymborska, be a “sign of bestiality” or, in the phrase of Seamus Heaney, reveal them as “malignant by nature.” In the legal world, such judgments can be found at various points in the criminal process—where absence of remorse may be cited as an aggravating factor that legitimately should incline us to greater harshness and certainly not to greater compassion or mercy. Here are a few examples one from a clemency decision, one from a prosecuting attorney’s argument at the sentencing stage of a criminal trial, one from a trial judge justifying a sentence, one from a

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Motivated Thinking

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At one time or another, every one of us has engaged in “wishful thinking,” or “let our hearts influence our heads.” That is, every one of us has felt the effects of our motivations on our thought processes. Given this common everyday experience, it is not surprising that an essential part of early psychological research was the idea that drives, needs, desires, motives, and goals can profoundly influence judgment and reasoning. More surprising is that motivational variables play only a small role in current theories of reasoning. Why might this be? One possible explanation is that since the cognitive revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers studying motivational and cognitive processes have been speaking somewhat different languages. That is, there has been a general failure to connect traditional motivational concepts, such as drives or motives, to information processing concepts, such as expectancies or spreading activation, which form the foundation for nearly all contemporary research on thinking and reasoning.

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Political Restraint or the Market Levels of Criminal Homicide: A Cross-National Application of Institutional-Anomie Theory

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Abstract

This article examines the effects on national homicide rates of political efforts to insulate personal well-being from market forces. Drawing upon recent work by Esping-Andersen and the institutional-anomie theory of crime, we hypothesize that levels of homicide will vary inversely with the "decommodification of labor." We develop a measure of decommodification based on levels and patterns of welfare expenditures and include this measure in a multivariate, cross-national analysis of homicide rates. The results support our hypothesis and lend credibility to the institutional-anomie perspective. The degree of decommodification is negatively related to homicide rates, net of controls for other characteristics of nations.

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Murder By Numbers: Researchers Compare The Crimes And Minds Of Individual Vs. Multiple Killers

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Crime investigators such as the RCMP, FBI and even the CIA have powerful new knowledge at their disposal to potentially help solve murders, thanks to a ground-breaking study involving UBC Okanagan forensic psychology researchers. Their findings could help police generate predictions about the characteristics of a killer or killers based on the crime scene evidence and victim. The study, Partners in Crime: A Comparison of Individual and Multi-Perpetrator Homicides, looked at 124 cases of convicted Canadian male offenders a third of the cases involving multiple people during the crime to determine what the crime scene could reveal about the nature of the suspect, and the likelihood of multiple perpetrators being involved. “It was the first empirical study of this nature,” says Stephen Porter, professor of psychology at UBC Okanagan and a practicing forensic psychologist. “We really had no literature to draw upon to come up with predictions, so it was very exploratory in nature.”

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The Media, the Jury, and the High-Profile Defendant: A Defense Perspective on the Media Circus

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I. INTRODUCTION

Throughout American history, there has been tension between the Sixth Amendment right of a criminal defendant to receive a fair trial and the First Amendment right for freedom of the press to publish news about criminal trials. Over the last seventy-five years in particular, media coverage of trials has steadily increased as a result of rapid advancements in technology. The increase in media coverage has led to the use of the term “high-profile” to define cases and defendants subjected to heightened media scrutiny. Initially, the use of cameras, and then television, in the courtroom triggered the heated constitutional debate over the proper balance of the First and Sixth Amendments. Beyond the traditional types of mass media, including newsprint and television reports, the Internet is a phenomenon that has rapidly and immeasurably changed the way in which the general public accesses information; its relative speed and broad, global reach portend an age where media has an even greater effect on juries

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Murder in a Comparative Context

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The very scary, yet fascinating, thing about murder is the perception that it is a random occurrence that could happen to anyone at any time anywhere. These perceptions might seem validated by the FBI Crime Clock telling of a murder every 31.5 minutes (FBI, 2006) and by news stories detailing random killings, such as the recent execution-style killings of four college kids in Newark, NJ by robbers and the murderous gun rampage of a Virginia-tech student. Despite these images of murder, the reality is that murder most often is not “random violence.” That is, there are statistically identifiable, predictable patterns to murder offending. This chapter explores these statistical patterns of criminal homicide, primarily in the United States, and offers qualitative accounts of various types of murder. This chapter aims to answer the following questions: How common is murder? When and where has murder been most frequent? Who is most likely to commit murder? And, most importantly, Why would someone

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A Bibliography Related to Crime Scene Interpretation with Emphases in Forensic Geotaphonomic and Forensic Archaeological Field

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Introduction

The following bibliography consists of resources that contain information related to the recovery of evidence in outdoor contexts. In practice, archaeology and criminalistics share the goal of systematically documenting, collecting and interpreting physical evidence for the purpose of understanding the factors which affected the depositional history of that evidence. Archaeological method and theory can extend far beyond the recovery of buried remains. The goals of forensic science in general, and archaeology specifically, are similar in many ways. This is evident in their respective definitions. Archaeology may be defined as “the systematic recovery by scientific methods of material evidence remaining from man’s life and culture in past ages, and the detailed study of this evidence” (American Heritage Dictionary, 1978:67). If the temporal references in this definition are removed it becomes interchangeable with broader definitions of “forensic science”. One of the most often addressed areas in forensic science literature is that of homicide victims. Among outdoor crime scenes, an

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Psychological and Behavioral Characteristics of Child Pornography Offenders in Treatment

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Abstract

Child pornography (CP) offenders represent one of the fastest growing groups in the criminal justice system. These offenders often present with diverse backgrounds that differ from most criminal groups. Many have no prior criminal history. Some are deeply immersed in highly sophisticated criminal networks involving the sexual abuse and exploitation of children. Understanding the diversity of these offenders is crucial to the development of effective public policy. This paper provides an overview of the results of a study that examined the incidence of hands-on sexual criminality, crossover behavior, and the onset of (online and offline) sexual criminality among a sample of CP offenders who participated in a prison-based treatment program. The paper concludes with recommendations for a research agenda based on existing empirical and theoretical work in other, but related, areas of study. Introduction Child pornography offenders, the vast majority of whom are first time offenders, have been entering the criminal justice system at an alarming rate for the past two

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Live Casualty Simulation

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Live Casualty Simulation

Instructors/Senior Medics make the BEST live simulated casualties. Instructors understand what happens to the human body once a traumatic injury is inflicted. In most cases, Instructors/Senior Medics have SEEN and TREATED an actual traumatic casualty. They will have a substantial understanding of what a traumatically injured patient should LOOK and ACT like. Therefore, if an Instructor/Senior Medic is used as the live simulated casualty, the simulation training will be more realistic. Moreover, what better way to test students than to have them ACTUALLY TREAT their instructors? If an Instructor/Senior Medic is not used as the live simulated casualty, a student or non-medical person should be briefed in detail on how they should ACT as a live simulated casualty.

Section 1 – Brief the Casualty

Each live simulated casualty must be briefed on EACH of their injuries BEFORE the training event is conducted. Live casualties must understand the impact of each wound on their body

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Deliberation and Premeditation in First Degree Murder – Cummings v. State

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An intimate, clandestine relationship had developed between defendant and decedent, and they often took long automobile trips together. On July 28, 1960, the decedent drove from Chicago with her sister to the home of relatives in Baltimore. The defendant, who had expected to make the trip with the decedent alone, followed in his car the next day. Pursuant to plans made by telephone, defendant met the decedent for breakfast early in the morning of July 30, at a shopping center in Baltimore, but the decedent hurried off saying she would meet defendant later in the day. She returned at approximately 12:30 p.m., parked the station wagon she was driving near defendant's Cadillac, and walked over to his car. The defendant said he was tired and felt miserable and needed a place to stay. When the decedent refused to show him a place where he could rest or direct him to the route to Chicago, a "heated" argument erupted. Defendant said

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Using Infrared Photography to Document Clothing Evidence in the Reconstruction of a Homicide

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Background on Infrared Photography

The use of infrared (IR) photography in forensic casework has been well documented in the forensic literature. It has primarily been used for the documentation of gunshot residue patterns and blood staining on dark colored clothing (1, 2), although it has also been used for the photography of latent tattoos and for the characterization of different types of inks. The principle behind the infrared photography of blood stains is that many dyes and fabrics reflect a large amount of infrared radiation, whereas blood stains absorb most wavelengths of visiblelight (400-700 nm) and near infrared light (700-900 nm). This results in the fabric appearing gray or white with the contrasting blood staining darker in color. The enhanced contrast between the fabric and the evidence (blood) allows the examiner to better interpret the evidence and assists in sample selection for further testing (i.e. phenolphthalein, DNA). This technique is especially useful due to its non-destructive nature, its lack of

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