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Titles of Interest

Multiple Homicide Offenders Offense Characteristics Social Correlates And Criminal Careers

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Because investigations of multiple homicide offenders (MHOs) are usually case studies, there is limited understanding of the linkages between them and other criminal offenders. Using data from an exploratory sample of 160 MHOs and a control group of 494 single homicide offenders, this study examines MHOs from a criminal career perspective and finds that nearly 30% of them were habitual offenders before their final homicide event. Those with prior rape convictions, misdemeanor convictions, more extensive prison histories, and current involvement in rape and burglary are more likely to kill multiple victims. Curiously, nearly 40% of MHOs had zero prior arrests. Overall, arrest onset occurs later in the life course and is not predictive of offending. In conclusion, the study of MHOs could enrich the criminal career perspective, while posing some empirical and theoretical challenges to that paradigm.

Multiple homicide offenders (MHOs), defined as criminal defendants who murder more than one person during a criminal episode,1 occupy a peculiar place in criminology. Because of

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Killing The Beloved: Homicide Between Adult Sexual Intimates

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When a couple marry and repeat their vows, often including the preceding lines, who would imagine that for some of them the 'death' that will sever the marital tie would be the result of the other's action? That one day, perhaps in a moment of rage, the once beloved partner will pick up a gun or knife and kill. Just in a nine-month period, a spate of these tragic acts, which included the suicide of the offender (and thus received a good deal of publicity), took place throughout Australia: October 1990, Sydney, man kills his wife, mother-in-law and himself; December 1990, Canberra, estranged husband killed wife, two children and himself; January 1991, Adelaide, woman and three children killed, husband missing; January 1991, Brisbane, estranged husband kills former de facto, father-in-law, his 11-month old baby and himself; May 1991, Adelaide, man kills his defacto and himself; June 1991, Tasmania, man kills his girlfriend and himself....

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Personality, Context, And Resistance To Organizational Change

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The term resistance to change is used frequently in the research and practitioner literature on organizational change, usually as an explanation for why efforts to introduce large-scale changes in technology, production methods, management practices, or compensation systems fall short of expectations, or fail altogether. Despite the popularity of the term, a number of works (e.g., Dent & Goldberg, 1999; Merron, 1993) suggested to abandon it in the claim that it misrepresents what really happens in the change dynamic. According to Dent and Goldberg (1999), organizational members resist negative consequences (e.g., losing one’s job) and not necessarily change in itself. Therefore, the belief that people resist change hinders organizations’ chances of understanding and dealing with real organizational problems. Similarly, Nord and Jermier (1994) argue that the term is often used as part of an agenda that may overshadow employees’ legitimate reasons for objecting to change. However, according to Nord and...

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Lies And Coercion: Why Psychiatrists Should Not Participate in Police and Intelligence Interrogations

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Police interrogators routinely use deceptive techniques to obtain confessions from criminal suspects. The United States Executive Branch has attempted to justify coercive interrogation techniques in which physical or mental pain and suffering may be used during intelligence interrogations of persons labeled unlawful combatants. It may be appropriate for law enforcement, military, or intelligence personnel who are not physicians to use such techniques. However, forensic psychiatry ethical practice requires honesty, striving for objectivity, and respect for persons. Deceptive and coercive interrogation techniques violate these moral values. When a psychiatrist directly uses, works with others who use, or trains others to use deceptive or coercive techniques to obtain information in police, military, or intelligence interrogations, the psychiatrist breaches basic principles of ethics.

Direct or indirect participation of a psychiatrist with police, military, or intelligence personnel when interrogators use deception or psychological or physical coercion violates basic principles of ethical forensic psychiatric practice. Such involvement leads our profession down the slippery slope of designing, endorsing, and participating in

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Amnesia and Crime

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Amnesia for serious offenses has important legal implications, particularly regarding its relevance in the contexts of competency to stand trial and criminal responsibility. Forensic psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are often required to provide expert testimony regarding amnesia in defendants. However, the diagnosis of amnesia presents a challenge, as claims of memory impairment may stem from organic disease, dissociative amnesia, amnesia due to a psychotic episode, or malingered amnesia. We review the theoretical, clinical, and legal perspectives on amnesia in relation to crime and present relevant cases that demonstrate several types of crime-related amnesia and their legal repercussions. Consideration of the presenting clinical features of crimerelated amnesia may enable a fuller understanding of the different types of amnesia and assist clinicians in the medico-legal assessment and diagnosis of the claimed memory impairment. The development of a profile of aspects characteristic of crime-related amnesia would build toward establishing guidelines for the assessment of amnesia in legal contexts.

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Alcoholic Blackout for Criminally Relevant Behavior

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Some criminal suspects claim to have had an alcohol-induced blackout during crimes they have committed. Are alcoholic blackouts a frequently occurring phenomenon, or are they merely used as an excuse to minimize responsibility? Frequency and type of blackout were surveyed retrospectively in two healthy samples (n  256 and n  100). Also, a comparison of blood alcohol concentrations was made between people who did and those who did not claim a blackout when stopped in a traffic-control study (n  100). In the two survey studies, blackouts were reported frequently by the person himself (or herself) and others (67% and 76%, respectively) in contrast to the traffic-control study (14%), in which blackouts were reported only when persons were involved in an accident. These results indicate that although blackouts during serious misbehavior are reported outside the court, both the denial and the claim of alcoholic blackout may serve a strategic function.

The following vignette is based on a real case. Amsterdam, 1999. A 30-year-old man consumed a considerable

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Descriptive Study Of Recall Of Local And Network News Anchors And Their Association To Television Affiliates And Networks

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INTRODUCTION

Since the dawn of network television news in 1944, the news anchor behind the news desk was in a position to influence audiences. The anchor was the person Americans trusted and depended on to deliver the nightly news. CBS, NBC and ABC created the anchor person who influenced the way the American public received its news. These three networks continue to provide the nightly news to millions of Americans in thirty-minute time periods. The anchors who represent the big three networks are icons to the public (Diamond, 1986). The news coverage may be the same on the three networks on any given night, but the messengers are quite different. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw may appear to be three white middle aged males, but their differences go beyond the surface. And the audience, subconsciously, knows this. Viewers have read the implicit iconography of the evening news and aligned themselves in accordance with their understanding of...

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Differences between Politically Connected and Nonconnected Firms: A Cross-Country Analysis

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Despite the fact that corruption has a negative aggregate economic effect on a country’s investment and growth, a growing body of literature has pointed out that political connections may be beneficial to specific firms. Academic studies reporting evidence on how connections provide sources of value have identified only a few differences between connected and nonconnected firms, such as preferential access to credit (Johnson and Mitton, 2003; Chiu and Joh, 2004; Dinc¸, 2004; Cull and Xu, 2005; Khwaja and Mian, 2005), government contracts (Goldman, Rocholl, and So, 2008), regulatory protection (Kroszner and Stratmann, 1998), and government aid for financially troubled firms (Faccio, Masulis, and McConnell, 2006). Additionally, most of these studies look at individual countries and highly dissimilar types of connections, making cross-country comparison virtually impossible. By contrast, the purpose of this paper is to analyze how connected firms differ from nonconnected firms across a large number of countries...

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Naked Suicide | Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law

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Marilyn Monroe was found lying nude, face down, with a sheet pulled over her dead body.1 After much publicity and controversy, the coroner ruled that she had died of acute barbiturate poisoning by overdose. The controversy about the cause of her death continues to this day. The naked body of Robert Maxwell, billionaire British tycoon, was found floating some distance from his yacht in the waters off Grand Canary Island. Maxwell was facing a scandal on his return to England involving the disappearance of corporate assets and pension fund monies. Although his death was ruled an accidental drowning, there was much doubt about the cause of his death. Theories of his demise included murder, suicide, heart attack, and accident. Cleopatra completed suicide shortly after Mark Antony fell on his sword. The legend is that she committed suicide by allowing herself to be bitten by a poisonous snake, an asp. A famous painting by the French artist Jean Andre´ Rixens (1846 –1924) depicts

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Correlates of Specialization and Escalation in the Criminal Career: Summary Report

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Do offenders specialize in a single crime type or cluster of similar crime types? Do offenders increase the seriousness of their criminal offenses over the course of their criminal careers? Blumstein et al. (1986, 1988) and LeBlanc and Frechette (1989) have suggested that at the onset of the criminal career, offenders will tend to commit a wide variety of offenses. However, as offenders age, and gain more experience in committing criminal acts, they should become more proficient at some crimes and should be increasingly likely to repeat those crimes where they have been more successful. Alternatively, though not to the exclusion of the notion of specialization, some offenders are also expected to increase the severity of the crimes they commit across their criminal careers, ultimately specializing in a more serious type of crime. The reasoning here is similar: offenders who have gained a certain level of expertise in one type of crime (or cluster of similar types of crime) may be

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Managing Mentally III, Nuisance Offenders: The Consequences of Restricted Civil Commitment and Decentralized Funding

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High rates of mental illness among the growing, visible, urban homeless population provoke public pressure to "do something" to eliminate this "public nuisance." Conviction and jailing on misdemeanor charges provides only temporary incarceration in alneady overcrowded local jails, while, since the 1970s, restrictive commitment standards have limited the availability of civil commitment to hospitalize non-violent mentally ill people.

To encourage development of community-based mental health services and reduce the fiscal domination of state mental hospitals, some states have decentralized funding of mental health services. Under decentralization county officials make commitment decisions and distribute funds to state hospitals and community programs, on a fee-for-service basis.

Many political compromises were required to pass this decentralizing legislation in Ohio. One such compromise has the state retaining financial responsibility only for those state hospital patients committed through criminal processes. The resulting structure of financing and decision making may encourage some local officials to use criminal commitment procedures to manage nuisance offenders.

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Staged Crime Scenes: Crime Scene Clues to Suspect Misdirection of the Investigation

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Abstract

In the course of their career, most detectives and forensic practitioners will come into contact with a staged crime scene; a scene altered by the offender to either mislead a police investigation or for other reasons understood only by the offender. Staged scenes are possible in nearly every type of criminal offense ranging from property crimes to violent crimes. To better understand the dynamics and general nature of “staging” this article introduces three new categories of staged crime scenes based on the motive of the offender’s scene alteration. The benefit of understanding these categories is to recognize that the offender’s staging actions can be identified through common findings that are often found when crime scenes are altered.

Introduction

After the preliminary screening of a cold case has been completed and a decision is made to reopen the investigation, one of the first steps is to sit down and read the file; paying particular attention to the autopsy and forensic analysis reports,

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The Impact of Sponsorship Awareness in Low Involvement Settings

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ABSTRACT

The rapid growth of corporate sponsorship (USD $44 billion worldwide), has led to the emergence of ‘sponsorship clutter.’ As a large proportion of companies that are involved with sponsorship have a primary objective of increasing brand awareness, it has become increasingly important to determine how awareness influences consumer responses to sponsorship. However, despite a breadth of understanding surrounding sponsorship and how it impacts consumer behavior, few studies have considered sponsorship from a packaging perspective; particularly in low involvement settings. Using structural equation modeling, this research empirically investigated the relationship between awareness of sponsorship arrangements and consumer response to sponsorship packaging. Results indicate that while leveraging sponsorship on grocery packaging positively impacts consumer responses toward the brand, prior awareness appears to have little impact on this response. Further, awareness of the sponsorship arrangement moderates the relationship between the perceived fit of the arrangement and a consumer’s response to the sponsorship packaging. That is, for

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The Worth Of Sport Event Sponsorship: An Event Study

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Abstract

The authors investigate the relationship between sports-related event sponsorship and stock market valuation and identify factors that influence the financial rewards of sponsorship using World Cup and PGA tour sponsorship data. In particular, relationship between sports sponsorship with financial performance is examined in terms of sponsorship fit, event characteristics, and brand equity. Event study results show that sponsorship for World Cup and PGA is positively related to abnormal stock returns for sponsors but not every sponsor enjoys significantly positive cumulative abnormal returns. Regression analysis indicates that unexpectedly brand equity and U.S. country of origin is negatively associated with financial performance. However, U.S. sponsors with top brand value boost their abnormal stock return. Product fit enhances short-term financial performance but the significant impact of event type on financial outcome was not observed.

Introduction

Many companies make investment to sponsor the big sports events such as Olympic, World Cup and popular sports games. Although being official sponsor requires a huge amount of financial resource

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The Buck Stops Where? Defining Controlling Person Liability

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I. INTRODUCTION

From 1929 to 1933, the securities markets lost half of their value, a startling 20% of the workforce was unemployed, and productivity was 50% less than it had been in previous years. As the United States grappled with the Great Depression, it asked why such catastrophes had happened. It became apparent that the structural flaws of Wall Street—that is, its anemic self-regulation deserved a large part of the blame. Congress sought to implement legislation in the form of the Securities Act of 1933 and Exchange Act of 1934, which would prevent such a catastrophe from ever occurring again. These statutes established liability for those who commit securities fraud, and were designed to restore investor confidence in a badly shaken market. These Acts went even further, however, by creating liability for those who “control” the company behind the scenes. Section 15 of the 1933 Act and Section 20(a) of the 1934 Act established that the...

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Reach Report | Spatial Patterns Of Serial Murder: An Analysis of Disposal Site Location Choice

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Abstract

Although the murders committed by serial killers may not be considered rational, there is growing evidence that the locations in which they commit their crimes may be guided by an implicit, if limited rationality.

The hypothesized logic of disposal site choice of serial killers led to predictions that (a) their criminal domains would be around their home base and relate to familiar travel distances, (b) they would have a size that was characteristic of each offender, (c) the distribution would be biased towards other non‐criminal activities, and (d) the size of the domains would increase over time.

Examination of the geographical distribution of the sites at which 126 US and 29 UK serial killers disposed of their victims' bodies supported all four hypotheses. It was found that rational choice and routine activity models of criminal behavior could explain the spatial choices of serial murderers. It was concluded that the locations at which serial killers dispose of their victims' bodies

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