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Complicity, Cause and Blame: A Study in the Interpretation of Doctrine

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This is a study of a body of doctrine, the doctrine of complicity, that determines when one person is liable for a crime committed by another. Doctrine may be studied in several ways depending on the question asked. One question asks what the doctrine is in some jurisdiction. This is the question primarily addressed by treatise writers. Another question asks whether the doctrine serves the purposes of the law and, to the extent it does not, how it should be altered. This is the question addressed by those engaged in revising the law. I do not mean that these questions can be answered independently of one another, only that they are different questions. In any event, the question this study addresses is distinguishable from both. It asks how the doctrine of complicity can best be interpreted as a coherent concept. This entails articulating the relationships between different parts of complicity...

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Church Employees or Independent Contractors?

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In one form or another, this question has been asked literally hundreds of times in financial seminars, correspondence, and telephone conversations. The questions come as a response to the increasing responsibilities of churches and other employers for reporting employee compensation information to the IRS. Fortunately, the answer is fairly straightforward. How ever, it is frequently not the answer desired by the questioner. Who Are Employees? There are basically two types of employees defined by the Tax Code: statutory employees and common law employees. Statutory employees have specifically defined jobs that on the surface might appear to be self-employed positions were it not for the statutes that define the work as that of an employee. The common law employee is the category which affects local churches most often. A common law employee is generally anyone who performs services that can be controlled by the employer. That is, the employer has the legal right to control (even if ...

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Couple Age Discrepancy and Risk of Intimate Partner Homicide

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Although national level studies in the United States and Canada find that extreme partner age discrepancy is a risk factor for intimate partner homicide in opposite-sex couples, these studies carry two caveats: They are limited to cohabiting marital or common-law couples and they are not detailed enough to explore alternative explanations for the age discrepancy-homicide risk association. Using the Chicago Homicide Dataset, which includes all homicides that occurred in Chicago from 1965 to 1996, we analyze the 2,577 homicides in which the victim was killed by a current or former legal spouse, commonlaw spouse, or heterosexual boyfriend or girlfriend, and in which the woman was at least 18 years of age. Within each of 14 categories of couple age discrepancy, we estimate the population of intimate heterosexual couples and calculate the population-based risk of homicide. The results replicate national level findings showing that the risk of intimate partner homicide is considerably elevated for couples...

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A Review of Weapon Choice in Violent and Sexual Crime

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Introduction

Weapon use in sexual and violent offences is a key consideration for police agencies and governments alike (Home Office, 2011). For the current paper, a weapon is defined as “an object used to cause or threaten injury to another”. Prevalence data pertaining to weapon enabled crime exists for England and Wales through Home Office statistical releases utilising both public survey and police statistics. For example, in the year ending March 2012, 51 per cent of attempted murders, 22 per cent of robberies, and one percent of rapes involved a knife or sharp instrument (ONS, 2012). Prevalence data is collected in many countries (Catalano, 2005; Home Office, 2011; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004) and is valuable for understanding trends, developing policies or preventative strategies and the like. However, it reveals little on the motivations or whether weapon type has the ability to differentiate between offenders. The question at hand is...

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Family Survivors Of Homicide Victims: Theoretical Perspectives And An Exploratory Study

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INTRODUCTION

The burgeoning literature on the psychological impact of crime has neglected a group of profoundly traumatized victims: surviving family members of criminal homicide victims (henceforth referred to as survivors). Criminal homicide is defined as "the willful (nonnegligent) killing of one human being by another" (FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 1985, p. 7) and includes the crimes of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter. Few would dispute the seriousness of homicide. A national survey asking respondents to rate the severity of 204 illegal acts found the six rated as most serious involved homicide (Rand et al., 1983). Yet, the indirect victims, those who have lost a loved one to homicide, are nearly invisible in the existing literature. We have no information concerning the number of survivors, and have only scant information about the impact of homicide on their psychological adjustment. Experts have recently begun to acknowledge that homicide produces indirect victims who suffeice...

Additional Resource: Family Survivors of Homicide Victims: Theoretical Perspectives and an Exploratory Study

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Automobile Theft

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A. THE NATURE OF AUTO THEF' (1, 11, 12)

The necessary first step in any discussion of auto theft in the United States is to become aware of certain legalistic peculiarities in American law as they apply to the crime of theft. The common law definition of larceny (or theft) hias, historically, come to include in it an element of attempted, or actual, permanent deprivation of the rightful owner of his chattel. A major legal problem, therefore, arose in the past, as to whether an individual who only "borrowed" someone's car for "joyriding" purposes could be classified as a thief. Not infrequently the accused, after convincing the court that he did not intend to keep or sell the car or, indeed, was returning it to its rightful owner when apprehended, was found not to have violated existing larceny statutes and was set free. Thus in one precedent ...

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Surgical Judgment in the Management of Stab Wounds of the Abdomen:

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SINCE 1830, the management of stab wounds of the abdomen has alternated between operative and non-operative, but the policy of routine exploration of these wounds has dominated since World War I. In that military setting, it was first shown that mortality could be lowered from 90%o to 53% by exploration of all penetrating wounds. This approach was reinforced by the experiences in World War IL and in Korea when the mortality was, respectively, 25% and 12%.29 These military precepts were enthusiastically applied to civilian wounds. At Charity Hospital in New Orleans, a rigid policy of mandatory laparotomy for all patients with wounds which might have entered the peritoneal cavity was instituted by Miles in 1891 and continued off and on9 11, 26 until 1967. Both university services at Charity Hospital adhered faithfully to the policy, the philosophy which was epitomized by Moss, Schmidt and Creech16 in their review o...f

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Gesture Based Interface for Crime Scene Analysis: A Proposal

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Abstract.

Within crime scene analysis, a framework providing interactive visualization and gesture based manipulation of virtual objects, while still seeing the real environment, seems a useful approach for the interpretation of cues and for instructional purposes as well. This paper presents a framework providing a collection of techniques to enhance reliability, accuracy and overall effectiveness of gesture-based interaction, applied to an interactive interpretation and evaluation of a crime scene in an augmented reality environment. The interface layout is visualized via a stereoscopic see-through capable Head Mounted Display (HMD), projecting graphics in the central region of the user’s field of view, floating in a close-at-hand volume. The interaction paradigm concurrently exploits both hands to perform precise manipulation of 3D models of objects, eventually present on the crime scene, or even distance/angular measurements, allowing to formulate visual hypothesis with the lowest interaction effort. A real-time adaptation of interaction to the user’s...

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Concealment of Psychopathology in Forensic Evaluations: A Pilot Study of Intentional and Uninsightful Dissimulators

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Both clinical and forensic psychiatrists recognize that individuals whom they evaluate may be unreliable historians. Clinical psychiatrists are diligent in attending to the possibility that patients may not be forthcoming with all of their symptoms, beliefs, or personal history. For example, consider a clinician’s skepticism about the claims of a delusional paranoid schizophrenic brought to a clinic by his concerned family members or about the denials of suicidal intent of a depressed patient brought to the emergency room for a drug overdose. Clinicians approach cases such as these recognizing that patients may withhold critical information about their psychopathology, whether because of paranoid fears, in response to voices they hear, covert suicidal intent, desires to appear “normal,” or other motives. Forensic practitioners approach evaluations with a somewhat different focus, colored chiefly by inclusion of strategies to detect the possibility of malingering. It is certainly reasonable to be skeptical of a forensic evaluee’s...

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Rhetoric vs Reality Investigating the Skills and Accuracy of Criminal Profiling

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INTRODUCTION

Arguably, the most fundamental question underpinning criminal profiling is whether the technique actually works, or more specifically, whether the predictions of profilers in describing the characteristics of an unknown offender are accurate. Despite the seemingly obvious nature of this question, rigorous empirical data to answer it has been in short supply. This observation, however, should not be interpreted as implying that the development of criminal profiling has occurred within a total vacuum. On the contrary, much material in the form of anecdotal accounts attesting to the merits of criminal profiles has been promulgated in support of their accuracy. Unfortunately, these anecdotal examples seldom appear in publications that are subject to the rigors of independent scientific review. Instead, they frequently originate from true crime novels often co-authored by retired profilers (1–3). Furthermore, although such anecdotal examples may illustrate the application of a criminal profile, the various studies...

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Recovery and Interpretation of Burned Human Remains

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ABSRACT

Victim remains at fatal fire scenes are typically difficult to detect, recover and handle. All of the burned material at the scene, including biological tissue, is often modified to a similar appearance, and bones, in particular, become discolored, brittle, and highly fragmented. As a consequence, these remains are often missed, disturbed, altered, or even destroyed during scene processing with the existing protocols. The added postmortem fracturing, fragmentation and bone loss resulting from these recovery techniques hinder the already difficult task of autopsy and laboratory analysis of burned human remains. This is especially problematic for bone trauma analysis, as its most immediate goal is distinguishing perimortem (forensically significant) trauma, from postmortem (not forensically significant) alteration. The substantial addition of trauma features created by fire and then recovery can result in a daunting analytical task. Lack of on-scene recordation of relevant information related to body positioning and contextual relationships of remains as well as other...

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Ethnicity and Identity in the Caribbean: Decentering a Myth

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The Caribbean as an unified region that confers a sense of common citizenship and community is a figment of the imagination. To be sure, there is a geographical expression called ‘the Caribbean’ often associated with a site, a sea, and several islands. There are also many people who describe themselves as Caribbean persons, claiming an unique identity which has its own cohering characteristics that distinguish them from others. And there are many tourists and other foreigners who can swear that they went to this Caribbean place and met real Caribbean persons. They will all convincingly attest to a Caribbean reality. The truth, however, is that the Caribbean even as a geographical expression is a very imprecise place that is difficult to define. Some analysts include Florida, the Yucatan, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Venezuela, while others exclude them altogether. It is not only an imaginary region but one that is...

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Aspects of Morbid Jealousy

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Jealousy is a common, complex, ‘normal’ emotion. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word jealous as ‘feeling or showing resentment towards a person one thinks of as a rival’. This definition indicates that it is the belief in the presence of rivalry that is the key issue, and that whether or not such a rivalry truly exists is less important. Jealousy within a sexual relationship has clear advantages in evolutionary terms: behaviour that ensures the absolute sole possession of a partner allows the propagation of one’s own genes at the expense of those of a true rival (Daly et al, 1982). However, when the belief in rivalry is mistaken, much time and effort may be wasted in attempting to eliminate a false threat. Morbid jealousy describes a range of irrational thoughts and emotions, together with associated unacceptable or extreme behaviour, in which the dominant theme is a preoccupation with a partner’s sexual...

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Legal versus Moral Complicity

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Abstract

Since the publication of Kadish’s article ‘Complicity, Cause, and Blame’ in 1985, legal scholars have taken great interest in the notion of complicity and have produced a significant number of publications on the subject. With the exception of Christopher Kutz, these scholars have largely ignored the moral, as opposed to legal, aspects of complicity. In this paper I make an attempt to compare the moral and legal notions of complicity. I will argue that, unless one takes a position of strict consequentialism, the moral notion of complicity casts a wider net than the legal notion. This is a point of no small importance. People need to realize that if they skirt the boundaries of legal complicity, their behavior might well still qualify as complicity on moral grounds.

1. Since the publication of Kadish’s article ‘Complicity, Cause, and Blame’ in 1985, legal scholars have taken great interest in the notion of...

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Paranoid Personality Disorder

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Paranoid personality disorder (PPD) is characterized by a pervasive mistrust of other people (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1994; Bernstein, Useda, & Siever, 1995; Miller, Useda, Trull, Burr, & Minks-Brown, 2001). Other common features of the disorder include quarrelsomeness, hostility, emotional coldness, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, stubbornness, and rigidly held maladaptive beliefs of others’ intents (APA, 1994; Bernstein et al., 1995; Miller et al., 2001). The prototypical picture is of someone who is preoccupied with real or imagined slights or threats, mistrusts the intentions or motives of others, and rarely trusts the seemingly benign appearance of things. The guiding underlying assumption is that others are malevolent they can betray, hurt, take advantage, or humiliate. Thus, measures must be taken to protect oneself by keeping one’s distance from other people, not appearing weak or vulnerable, searching for signs of threat even in seemingly innocuous situations, preemptively attacking others who are viewed as threatening, and vigorously...

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Federal Question, 28 USCA § 1331

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CASES ARISING UNDER CONSTITUTION OF UNITED STATES
---- Substantial constitutional issue, relationship between claim and constitutional issue, cases arising under constitution of United States
Medicare provider had no right to judicial review of reimbursement decision made by provider appeals committee that was established by the fiscal intermediary where the provider did not present a substantial constitutional claim and where it did not question the legality of regulations established by the intermediary or by the Government but only challenged the methods and decision of its own intermediary. U.S. v. Bellevue Hospital, Inc., D.C.Mass.1979, 479 F.Supp. 780. Health 556(1)

CASES ARISING UNDER LAWS OF UNITED STATES
---- Substantial question, relationship between federal law and claim, cases arising under laws of United States Determination of non-profit environmental organization's removed breach of fiduciary duty claim against its sponsor, brought under District of Columbia law, which alleged sponsor was entrusted to manage money received from United States Forest Service (USFS) belonging to the non-profit, and that fiscal sponsorships, by their nature, were relationships

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