Admission Of Guilt Research Articles

Elegy under the Knife: Geoffrey Hill and the Ethics of Sacrifice

We read in sacred scripture: And God tempted [fristede] Abraham and said: Abraham, Abraham, where are you? But Abraham answered: I. You to whom these words are addressed, was this the case with you? --Kierkegaard (21) The great experiences of our life have properly speaking never been lived. Are not religions said to come to us from a past which was never a pure now? Their grandeur is due to this exorbitance exceeding the capacity of phenomena, of the present and of memory. To the voice that calls from the burning bush, Moses answers, Here am, but does not dare to lift up his eyes. --Levinas (Phenomenon and Enigma 68) The Here am of the Hebrew Bible sounds different after Descartes's cogito; after Kierkegaard and Levinas, the cogito sounds different with their re-sounding of the Here am. The apodictic elegance of Descartes's certification of the subject contrasts with the Bible's tentative performative: the Here am names a self at risk of failing in its response to a call, and a self falling into danger if it succeeds. While the cogito names a self transparently present to itself--a coincidence of thought and being in the act of self-consciousness (Zizek 15)--the Here am is a subject without sovereignty over thought or being, a subject in the vicinity of an infinite alterity and exteriority. The Here am is an identity that is not simply itself because it finds itself among unreadable signs and confronted with a demand or challenge still to come. It is a creature uttering its fragility, and for modern thought about subjectivity this utterance is a revelation of an excess in the self, a dramatic noncoincidence between being and the experience of selfhood, an ontological charge that exceeds the circuitry of identity. The Here am--an admission of guilt as much as presence, of obedience more than self-assertion--can never be the divine that am. Kierkegaard himself is not simply Kierkegaard; in Fear and Trembling it is Johannes de Silentio who speaks, a pseudonym or alter ego displacing a proper name. It is in this moment of displacement that we find a capacity of the self to answer to alterity, precisely in its incapacity to sustain the cogito's seamless equation between being and consciousness. Levinas finds a decertification of the cogito even in Descartes's thought: In meditating upon the idea of God, Descartes sketched, with an unequaled rigor, [...] a thinking going to the point of the breaking up the think (God, Death, and Time 215). The Cartesian self, after Levinas, ruptures under the thought of God that overflows every capacity; the 'objective reality' of the cogitatum breaks up the 'formal reality' of the cogitatio (God and Philosophy 173). What remains of selfhood, for Levinas, is an in which the nucleus of the subject is uprooted, undone, [...] an torn from the concept of the ego [...]. This is the that is not but which says 'here am' (181-82). One way to understand this assignation that is not designated, or this I without ego, is as subjectivity attuned to an absolute that exceeds itself, an absolute that cannot be correlated with its own being or knowledge, and that brings that being and knowledge to crisis. Kierkegaard and Levinas imagine this absolute relation in different ways--Kierkegaard's Here am is a response directed first to God, Levinas's first to the human other--but even in their different maps of transcendence they share an essential concern: that we notice the modern subject trembling at its implication in an alterity it can neither avoid nor understand. The trembling represents Kierkegaard's theological critique and Levinas's ethical critique of thought that coerces the subject into abstraction and subsumes irreducibly particular identities into universal totalities. Kierkegaard and Levinas, in their distinct (and at moments antagonistic) critiques of philosophical abstraction and totalization, want us to understand that the human is realized as a nearly unthinkable singularity, its uniqueness derived from its untransferable obligations and unrepresentable commitments to an alterity that cannot be reduced to the terms of the self. …

Filling the Regulatory Gap: The Emerging Transnational Regulator

When European or international corporations or financial institutions hear the term regulator, the European Union's powerful antitrust regulators who took on the likes of Microsoft come to mind. In addition to the EU, there are many domestic regulators in Europe, such as the Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF) in France, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the United Kingdom, and the Financial Market Authority in Austria, that play critical regulatory roles in Europe. In the landmass of Europe alone, there are twenty-eight known domestic regulators among the member countries of the Federation of European Securities Exchanges. This regulatory architecture creates business challenges and costs for public companies doing business in Europe. Additionally, within the United States, regulators, such as those of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and their enforcement division, also come to mind as powerful transnational regulators. The SEC has been the primary regulator of the US securities market for decades. This primacy, however, is not exclusive. Other secondary regulators make use of SEC enforcement actions to assist their regulatory efforts. The US banking agencies, for example, have adopted rules that make signing an SEC consent decree (which contains no admission of guilt) a presumptive disqualifier of an applicant who wishes to take control of an insured depository institution. Similarly, the Department of Defense (DoD) may debar a contractor from doing business with DoD for a variety of reasons linked to or independent of SEC enforcement action. (1) The agencies that govern and regulate essentially piggyback on each other's enforcement orders. While the reach of European and US regulators is extensive, it is not all-encompassing. European or US regulatory action has not, to date, found its mark in the international development sector. This sector, generally the domain of the international financial institutions (IFIs), most notably the World Bank, provides developmental financing throughout the world. The IFIs have, until recently, largely escaped the regulatory scrutiny placed upon private and multinational investment banks. It is not surprising then to find that IFI-financed transactions are replete with incidences of fraud and corruption by the governmental officials who administer the money received from the IFIs, the contractors who are given IFI-financed contracts to implement the purposes of the loan, and sometimes the officers and staff of the IFIs themselves. (2) This regulatory gap exists because development institutions are international in character and thus generally immune from domestic regulation. (3) To fill these gaps, the IFIs themselves have begun to emerge, some more than others, as regulators of the very monies they provide. The IFIs have begun to act like regulators as they come under increasing pressure from their majority shareholders (e.g., member governments), donors, and civil society to sanction companies found to have engaged in corrupt or fraudulent acts in contracts financed by an IFI and to take robust action against systemically corrupt governments. Concerns about the impact of significant corruption on loan effectiveness, transparency, accountability, ethics, and integrity underlie these initiatives, all of which are part of the broader public agenda of ensuring good governance of public and private institutions to ensure that public money is used for its intended purpose. (4) The scope and impact of IFI regulatory activity is only now beginning to take shape, and some companies are taking notice. One thing is clear, however, from the record of debarment actions taken against corporate and individual entities: the regulatory jurisdiction of these IFIs is transnational and not limited by nationality or place of business of the implicated entity. (5) Although more international businesses have come within the scope of IFIs, there are still many commercial entities that are unaware that they fall within the reach of an IFI's regulatory jurisdiction. …

Silence isn't necessarily an admission of guilt

Silence isn't necessarily an admission of guilt

In Booker's Shadow: Restitution Forces a Second Debate on Honesty in Sentencing

This article explores the question left unanswered by the Supreme Court's January, 2005, decision in United States v. Booker. Specifically, it looks at whether the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act of 1996 (MVRA), which governs restitution in federal criminal cases, violates the Sixth Amendment. The MVRA expressly requires that judges, rather than juries, decide issues of restitution. The process mandated by the MVRA often results in orders of restitution that are much harsher than a defendant could have reasonably predicted from the indictment, the evidence presented at trial, and/or the defendant's admission of guilt. This article concludes that such unexpected consequences violate Rule 11, Fed. R. Crim. P., which directs the district judge to inquire whether a defendant who pleads guilty understands the nature of the charge against him and whether the defendant is aware of the consequences of his plea. The federal appellate courts have uniformly held that the MVRA is unaffected by the Sixth Amendment. This article employs a Booker-type analysis to show that the circuit courts are misapplying the principles of Booker in reaching such a conclusion. It argues that contrary to the conclusion of the appellate courts, the MVRA has a statutory maximum for purposes of Booker and that maximum is the full amount of each victim's losses. The article also contends that the appellate courts have failed to understand the constitutional impact of the mandatory nature of the MVRA for certain crimes and that assuming (as the courts have decided) that there is no statutory maximum on restitution under the MVRA, there would be no limit on the sentencing judges' discretion. Such unfettered judicial discretion would also result in constitutional weaknesses in the MVRA. Finally, the article urges Congress to amend the MVRA to remedy the constitutional weaknesses and concludes that, in the meantime, the courts can help preserve defendants' Sixth Amendment rights by strictly adhering to the Supreme Court's restitution precedent established by the 1990 decision, Hughey v. United States, in which the Court held that a defendant may only be ordered to make restitution for losses proximately resulting from the offenses for which he is convicted, not for additional losses.

Priznanje okrivljenog kao dokaz u francuskom krivičnom postupku

Priznanje okrivljenog kao dokaz u francuskom krivičnom postupku

Exploration of the association between apology and forgiveness amongst victims of human rights violations

Forgiving may lead to an improvement of mental health, and from a therapeutic jurisprudence perspective it is important to establish what aspects of judicial procedures can be changed to promote forgiving. The literature suggests that receiving an apology may encourage forgiving. However, there is a dearth of empirical research regarding the association between forgiving and apology in judicial settings. This paper reports the findings of a study that examined the association between forgiving and four restorative situations (i.e. excuse, admission of guilt, apology, and true sorriness) in a group of 134 victims of gross human rights violations who were actual or potential participants in the proceedings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The best predictors of forgiveness in this sample were gender and whether victims perceived wrongdoers to be truly sorry.

La négociation des plaidoyers de culpabilité : une pratique hétérogène

This article presents the principal results of a study on plea bargaining at the Montreal Justice Hall. Various methods were adopted: observations, a thorough study of the files, interviews and analyses of the judicial statistics. The results show that negotiations vary considerably depending on the gravity of the offence concerned. In the case of a minor charge or a murder charge, the characteristics as well as the stakes and consequences of the plea bargaining are very different. In minor cases, the negotiations are reduced to their simplest form. They are a routine process of cooperation between the parties rather than bargaining to get an admission of guilt by promising the accused a reduced charge or sentence. On the contrary, the negotiations in murder cases take the traditional form of plea bargaining in which the power struggle is dominant. The study shows that it is in cases of murder than plea bargaining presents most difficulties.

Who Is Trying to Keep What Secret from Whom and Why? MI5-FBI Relations and the Klaus Fuchs Case

Klaus Fuchs was one of the most infamous spies of the Cold War, whose espionage feats altered the nature of the early postwar period. Drawing on newly released archival documents and witness testimony, this article considers the events surrounding his arrest and conviction. These sources reveal that even before Fuchs was arrested, he was used as a pawn.Because of his supreme importance to the British nuclear weapons program, some British of ficials initially believed that he should remain in his position, despite his admission of guilt. Until the matter was resolved, Fuchs was used unwittingly as a wedge between the British and U.S. intelligence services.Moreover, when the United States criticized British security standards, the Fuchs case was used by MI5 to cajole and mislead Parliament and the public.

Sicherer oder möglicher letaler Behandlungsfehler: Was ist danach zu tun?

In case of a possible or certain lethal case of medical malpractice the following procedure is recommended: 1. Scrutinize every death of a patient during or after a medical treatment. Address the following questions: "Did everything proceed correctly?", "Could death have been prevented?", "This should not have been happened". 2. Report to the head physician, to the hospital management and administration in order to coordinate the further procedures. 3. Save all the evidence: Perfusions, empty phials, opened drug packages. Leave all catheters, tubes, drainages on the body! Leave any technical equipment, for example anesthetic machines untouched. Save all prior blood and urine samples taken from the patient. Seal medical history and documentations. 4. Order a memory protocol of the events by all involved persons. 5. Refrain from clinical autopsy. Forensic autopsy, indicated in these circumstances, can only be authorized by the district attorney (see point 7). If in doubt, seek counseling from an institute of forensic medicine by telephone (if requested: anonymously). 6. Put "non natural death" on the death certificate in case of a certain and unclear death in case of a possible medical malpractice. 7. Report any possible or certain case of lethal medical malpractice to the district attorney (obligation to report). The district attorney will authorize a 8. Inform the relatives of the deceased. Apologize, show regret and concern but do not address the question of guilt. 9. Inform your third party insurance (this does not mean an admission of guilt).

Admission of Guilt before the ICC and in Continental Systems

Admission of Guilt before the ICC and in Continental Systems

Measuring motivation to change in sexual offenders from institutional intake to community treatment.

Changes in motivational levels occurring during various stages of treatment (institutional and community) were measured among 101 federally sentenced sexual offenders in the Ontario region. Motivation was conceptualized as a dynamic process that can be construed from behavioral referents and more global evaluations of internal features/readiness/psychological stance. Five motivational indices were examined: acceptance of guilt for the offense; acceptance of personal responsibility for the offense; disclosure of personal information; motivation to change behavior; and participation in treatment. Offender scores on these indices were evaluated using the Goal Attainment Scaling protocol (T. Hogue, 1994), at four stages of the treatment process: (1) at institutional assessment, (2) following institutional treatment, (3) upon conditional release to the community, and (4) following a 12-week period of community treatment. Results showed that motivation to change sexually deviant behavior was higher at the end of institutional treatment relative to the initial assessment. However, levels of motivation decreased upon conditional release to the community, with few offenders making significant rebounds following 12 weeks of community treatment. Admission of guilt and acceptance of personal responsibility (measured at community treatment) were both significantly associated with treatment outcome.

Identifying the source of critical details in confessions

Interrogations leading to confessions can elicit both an admission of guilt and details to help validate the confession. Using a novel means of analysis, the interrogation was treated as a series of dynamic informational exchanges and the source of key details was identified. Questions and answers were classified according to the degree to which they provided information. Using a test case, in 212 of 340 questions the interrogators provided details to confirm or deny. In other questions, critical details were provided by the police without requesting confirmation. This pattern was reflected when the confession was divided into individual topics. None of the key, specific, verifiable details were provided by the confessor. This method of analysis is presented as a means of assessing the degree to which a confessor demonstrates guilty knowledge.

Moral Political Dissent in German-Czech Relations

Since 1989, the German-Czech relationship has been burdened by the problem of a just assessment of World War II and the following forced transfer of the Sudeten Germans. Why are democrats on both sides, who acknowledge the same values and principles, unable to reach an agreement about crucial events in the past? The political and legal differences imply a moral dissent which is not being discussed systematically. The article tries to investigate the deficits of the moral arguments on both sides. Czech Sociological Review, 1998, Vol. 6 (No. 2: 173-186) 1. Problems with the Recognition Controversy When in 1989/1990 Vaclav Havel publicly expressed a moral apology for the expulsion of Germans from post-war Czechoslovakia, he hardly suspected that the very foundations of detente policy – which had been interpreted by East Europeans as a German step towards reconciliation, based on their acknowledgement of the political status quo resulting from World War II – could ever be questioned. German unification was seen as the sine qua non of peaceful European integration and was consequently welcomed with something approaching euphoria. It was not only because of the East German and Czech (Czechoslovakian) revolutions of November 1989 that Vaclav Havel selected Munich and Berlin as the destinations for his first foreign trips. His apology was intended as a gesture which would contribute to overcoming the burdens of the past and reflected the policy later advocated by the Czech government, i.e. making a clean break with the past, at least on a political and legal level. If the only reactions to Havel’s apology had been the amiable reply of then German Federal President Weizsacker and the prompt signing of a new friendship treaty between the two neighbours, many of the tensions which later arose would have been avoided. But the Sudeten Germans, the audience which Havel was in fact addressing, were – at least as far as their strongest public voice, the Sudetendeutsche Landsmanschaft (SL), was concerned – incapable of a similarly generous gesture. Instead, Havel’s words were interpreted as a Czech “admission of guilt”, which must be followed by practical steps *) Due to lack of space, part of the original text of this article was excluded. This part described and assessed the typology of moral discourses (e.g. the Christian ethic of forgiving, the ‘ius talionis’ ethic, discourse from the point of view of the victim, the sceptical use of morality and war as the end of morality, empathetic discourse on morality), which are found in many studies and articles on German-Czech relations. This text is based on a study entitled Moralischer Diskurs und die Deutsch-tschechischen Beziehungen carried out at the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universitat Bremen (Research Institute for Eastern Europe at the University of Bremen). A German version (Moralisch-politischer Dissens in den deutsch-tschechischen Beziehungen) was published in WeltTrends 19, Sommer 1998, pp. 67-68. **) Direct all correspondence to: Dr. Jan Pauer, Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universitat Bremen, Osteuropa-Gebaude, Klagenfurter Str. 3, D-28359 Bremen, e-mail: pauer@osteuropa.uni-

Tituba's Story

witchcraft is historically significant, for it confirmed witchcraft activity in the community.2 Although not the only slave caught up in the 1692 episode, Tituba has a unique role in the literature about Salem, for her story has taken on nothing short of mythical dimensions. As in the originary myth of the Fall, a woman, here a dark-skinned one, has carried the burden of having introduced sin and loss. As the events of 1692 unfolded, interest in Tituba receded. New charges, new confessions, and a new cast of participants emerged to catch the interest of the community. Following the record of circumstances surrounding her admission of guilt, very little contemporary commentary appeared on Tituba, the most significant being assertions that her confessions were prompted by beatings from her master, the Reverend Parris, and that she herself was afflicted by witches.3

Ułaskawienia Prezydenta Bieruta. Losy wniosków o ułaskawienie skazanych przez sądy wojskowe (1947-1952)

The study deals with the procedure and practice of granting pardons by the President of Republic of Poland Bolesław Bierut to persons convicted ty mortial courts. Analyzed have been the years 1947–1952, that is President Bierut’s term in office. Before, in the years 1944–1947, he was President of the National People’s Council, and afterwards, from 1952 till his death in 1956 – President of the Council of State. The 1947–1952 period has been selected for analysis not only for the above formal reason of President Bierut’s term in office. Bierut had the powers to grant pardons also as President of the National People’s Council (1944–1947) and, later on, as President of the Council of State (1952–1956). Thus the years 1947–1952 have been chosen for substantive reasons, too, as they were the period of particularly intense penal repression applied by courts mortial in Poland. It was directed chiefly against political opponents – real and alleged alike – of the new regime. Finally, the archival resources of the Civil Chancellery of President of Republic of Poland, kept in the Archives of New Files in Warsaw, make it possible in principle to fully reconstruct the procedure and practice of granting pardons. In the years 1947–1952, while holding the office of President of Republic of Poland, Bolesław Bierut was also leader (lst Secretary) of the ruling Colmmunist Party: first the Polish Workers’ Party and then, from December 1948 on, Polish United Workers’ Party. The author discusses the particularly repressive nature of law as applied by courts mortial to which also common courts reported. He also points out that the law was infringed quite freely by the investigating agencies, public prosecutors, and finally by courts mortial. Severe penalties were therefore imposed not only on the real but also on alleged opponents of the new regime. The investigating and prosecuting agencies concocted criminal cases of persons who were innocent under the law, and the courts sentenced those persons. This way, the Polish administration of justice was involved in political struggle. Its ideological justification was provided by Joseph Stalin’s theory of intensification of class struggle with progressing building of so-called “socialism” which found it legal expression in a theory, formulated by a Soviet politician and lawyer Andrei Vishinsky, on the defendant’s admission of guilt (forced by torture, of course) as the crown evidence in judicial proceedings. The author stresses that in his capacity as leader of the ruling Party and at the same time Head of State, Bolesław Bierut actually initiated many political trials based on faked investigation and often leading to the defendant being sentenced to death by a court mortial. According to the statutory procedure, such defendants then petitioned President Bierut for pardon which means that the case actually made a full circle. The author states that the middle level agencies of administration of justice notified the leaders of the ruling Party of glaring breaches of the law but the information never met with any response. The author points to numerous formal defects in the application of the pardon procedure; for example, some decisions refusing pardon do not even bear the President’s signature. The petitions, filed by the convicted person or his family or examined ex officio were in most cases accompanied by a negative opinion of the Supreme Military Court and Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office. There were cases in which a person sentenced to death in summary proceedings was actually executed without the obligatory pardon procedure. In one case, pardon was probably refused after the actual execution. The opposite also happened: convicted persons were not executed despite the fact that pardon had been refused to them. The reason was that they were needed in other penal proceedings. The duration of pardon proceedings – of special importance in the case of death sentences – was not regulated by law and ranged from three days to three months. The author analyzes petitions for pardon filed by persons convicted by courts mortial. There were the total of 2,591 such petitions, including 1,813 (about 70%) filed by persons sentenced to capital punishment. The President of Republic of Poland pardoned 589 persons or 32% of all those sentenced to death. There were among them both common criminals and political offenders. It is most difficult to guess the motives of the President (or his closest associates) which guided his decisions on pardon. In some cases, he simply followed the opinion of persons with whom he reckoned. The President’s discretion – the essence of the right of pardon – can be supposed to have played the smallest part. The procedure and practice of the exercise by President of Republic of Poland of his right of pardon was among the elements of the practice of lawbreaking in Poland in the years 1947–1952.

Admission of guilt as a communicative project in judicial settings

Admitting, or denying, that one has done something is a prototypical example of a so-called speech act (Searle 1969, 1975). Searle conceives of speech acts as doings by individual speakers. For example, admitting guilt would be something enacted by one single-person, the perpetrator, who thereby assumes responsibility for a particular, possibly unlawful, action performed in the past. In this paper, we will look at data from two judicial contexts, criminal court trials and police interrogations, in which admissions (and denials) obviously constitute significant, and institutionalized, elements. In opposition to speech-act theory, we will demonstrate that admissions or denials of guilt are communicative acts, performed in collaboration between two parties, i.e. the professional interviewer (judge or police officer) and the person, defendant or suspect, who allegedly had to admit or deny responsibility for a criminal action. In a comprehensive corpus (70 court trials and 30 police interrogations) we will study the sociolinguistic variation in the communicative acts involved.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being a Masterpiece

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being a Masterpiece Perry Nodelman (bio) Canemaker, John . Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. New York: Abbeville Publishers, 1987. I must begin with an admission of guilt: it has taken me an outrageously long time to write this review. Valid excuses I have none—but I do have an excellent explanation. I like to read in bed. Upon receiving my review copy of Winsor McCay: His Life and Art, I did what comes naturally. I unwrapped it, admired its physical beauty in anticipation of the pleasures it promised, and took it to bed with me that very evening. And quickly discovered the exercise to be impossible. This book cannot be read in bed. It's too big. And it weighs too much. Winsor McCay: His Life and Art is 13½ inches high by 11½ inches wide—more than two feet wide when opened. It's what's usually called a coffee table book, presumably because all you'd need to do with one in order to serve coffee from it is screw a leg into each of its corners. Winsor McCay: His Life and Art would make a fine coffee table. It could easily handle the coffee pot, the cream, the sugar, and enough cups for a considerable klatsch—not to mention an interesting selection of other coffee table books. But its size wasn't why I didn't get around to reading it. It was the weight. This is one heavy book. Scientific experimentation reveals that my bathroom scale registers five pounds heavier when I'm carrying Winsor McCay: His Life and Art than when I'm not. Five whole pounds. Every time I tried to read the book in bed, I got a dent in my chest. It was an ugly looking dent. If I'd been of a Winsor McCay cast of imagination, I might have fallen into a dream after trying to read it, like the ones he himself once used to imagine followed upon the ingestion of rarebit, and found my body being gradually sliced into two separate pieces by the bulk of this dangerously weighty tome. At the end of my dream, I'd awake in one piece again and say something like. "Oh my, what a dream! That's what I get for reading heavy books in bed!" What I actually got was just the dent. While it was usually gone by morning, reading the book was a painful process—one I chose to avoid. And so Winsor McCay: His Life and Art has been gathering dust by my bedside for so long now that the family has come to [End Page 45] think of it, even without legs, as part of the furniture. It's only after much impassioned urging from both the Quarterly review editor and the person who does the dusting that I've finally brought myself to sit upright at a table with it long enough to finish it. Even then I've had trouble—the pages are printed on stock so thick that I constantly found myself turning back to check because I thought, incorrectly, that I'd turned two at once. Having, finally, made my way through this weighty tome, I can report the following: the weight is mostly physical. There isn't much weight in the text, which contains an astonishing amount of speculation. John Canemaker, the author, managed to find out less about the sizeable unknown areas of his subject's life than might actually warrant a biography. More significantly, there isn't much weight in the life or art of the subject. This isn't to say that Winsor McCay was an uninteresting person or an insignificant illustrator. He was both. A self-taught artist, McCay lived at a time, at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, before photography became omnipresent and there were still an astonishing variety of ways for an illustrator to make use of his talent. At various times in his life, McCay was a quick sketch artist, first in a dime museum and later in vaudeville; he designed advertising posters; he became a leading editorial cartoonist for Hearst; and he...

Back to justice for juveniles: The rhetoric and reality of law reform

Motivated by growing doubts about the value of a welfare approach towards the processing of young offenders, law reformers in recent years have advocated a shift towards more traditional “justice” principles. This article examines the rhetoric of the “back to justice” trend in one Australian State, South Australia, where in 1976, a Royal Commission into juvenile justice argued in favour of a system which, at least at the adjudication stage, was based firmly on the notions of adversarial justice and due process. Central to this traditional approach is the trial where accused persons invoke their rights by pleading not guilty and putting the prosecution to the test. Yet, as this article demonstrates, the overwhelming majority of young persons in South Australia forego these rights by admitting the allegations made against them. Thus the rhetoric of adversarial justice and the Due Process Model is incompatible with the reality of the routine admission of guilt.

A strategy of explanation: Richard M. Nixon's August 8, 1974, resignation address

This essay uses the nature of the genre of apologia as outlined by speech communication scholars as a framework to examine Richard Nixon's apology to the nation on the occasion of his resignation. Mr. Nixon conformed well to the requirements of the subgenre, explanation, but erred in areas not suggested in contemporary writings on apologia. The gravity of Nixon's misdeeds and the incongruity of his admission of guilt overshadowed the strategy of explanation which he employed to defend himself.

The "New Course" in the Soviet Economy

Soviet people have the right to demand of us... durable, well-finished and high quality articles, said Malenkov in his speech before the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in August of 1953. It is our task to make sharp improvement in the production of consumer goods and to ensure faster development of light and food industry.' Malenkov's speech thus gave an official sanction to series of unusual developments, both in the Soviet Union and on the satellite scene. So divergent did those developments seem to be from the happenings of the last years of Stalin's era that there was strong temptation, among outside observers as well as among the Communists themselves, to coin new terms, and the post-Stalin developments were referred to as the New Course, 'New Line, New Look, and even as New Economic Policy. No lesser person than the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, K. Voroshilov, designated the envisaged changes as a new stage in the development of Soviet economy.2 Yet less than one-and-one-half years later the New Course came under sharp attack. Under the leadership of Nikita S. Khrushchev campaign was launched, in December of 1954 and January of 1955, against the vulgarizers of Marxism who had abandoned the only correct line of all-round development of heavy industry.3 Malenkov's subsequent demotion and admission of guilt on February 9, 1955, though primarily result of the clash of personal rivalries, was adroitly used to dramatize the reversion to the Marxian-Leninist orthodoxy. The industrial ingredient of the New Course was cut out. Only its agricultural facet was allowed to extend into the Khrushchev-Bulganin era, although even there the screw began again to be tightened after the relative ease of the first post-Stalinist year. Now that that peculiar episode of the New Course has been virtually brought to its close, the time has come to strike and assess its balance. That is the purpose of this article.