Criminal Court Cases Research Articles

A New Method for an Objective Measurement of the Judicial Workload – the Application of a Prediction Model Based on an Algorithm Formed by Multiple Linear Regression in Court Administration

The timeliness of judgments is mostly influenced by the workload of judges, which, in addition to the number of court cases, to a large extent depends on the amount of judicial working time necessary to resolve them, i.e. their complexity. Regarding the latter, there are significant differences among each of the cases, and the territorial distribution of cases of different complexity is not even. Therefore, in order to measure the judicial workload reliably, to distribute it fairly, and to ensure timeliness, it is also essential to take into account the complexity of court cases. The question is: How is this possible? My retrospective empirical studies on the records of resolved first instance criminal court cases have proved that the amount of judicial working time demand, to conclude cases as a dependent variable, is related to certain substantive and procedural attributes of the case file, as independent variables. Therefore, a prediction model based on an algorithm created by multiple linear regression can be constructed. The amount of judicial working time demand to conclude a given case, can be reliably estimated with it in advance, when a case is submitted and a weighting can be assigned to the case, expressing its complexity with reasonable accuracy. Thus, a system for measuring and allocating the workload of judges can be developed after appropriate adaptation, and it can take into account the differences in the complexity of individual cases more accurately, than currently used methods, and which can be applied independently of the jurisdiction, court, legal system and judicial system.

Digital financial inclusion and illegal fundraising in China

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the impact of digital financial inclusion on illegal fundraising activities in China. From the China Judgments Online website, we extract data of criminal court cases of illegal fundraising from 2013 to 2019, during which both the illegal fundraising court cases and the development of digital finance displayed a rising trend. We then evaluate if digital financial inclusion may have worsened illegal fundraising activities. We find that digital financial inclusion has a positive effect on illegal fundraising activities. This effect remains robust under alternative measures of the intensity of illegal fundraising activities and when instrumental variable estimations are used to tackle potential endogeneity problems. Furthermore, convenient banking services are an important channel through which digital financial inclusion exerts its positive impact on illegal fundraising. Therefore, while active promotions of digital finance could benefit economic development, it is also necessary to timely improve the supervision of emerging finance to guard against financial risks.

Hysteria as a Shape‐Shifting Forensic Psychiatric Diagnosis in the Netherlands c. 1885–1960

AbstractBased on criminal court cases found in archives and newspapers, this article traces how the diagnosis of hysteria functioned in trials and Dutch forensic psychiatric practice c. 1885–1960. Informed by Science and Technology Studies and praxiography, hysteria is studied as a ‘fire object'. It can make multiple relations with gender, which can be absent or present. This approach asks whether and how gender is important regarding hysteria. Gender only ‘stuck’ to hysteria in certain situations. In rape cases, hysteria took the form of lying and was connected to women. Although a woman's hysteria could be used as a reason to exonerate the male perpetrator's crime of murder, a man's hysteria never served to exculpate a female perpetrator of a crime. Signs on the body appeared to be very significant but did not suffice for a clear diagnosis. Inconsistencies during the psychiatric examination of the body therefore needed to be coordinated by pointing to other bodily symptoms, personal life stories, academic literature or logical reasoning. To analyse the ways hysteria functioned as a versatile fire object in the courtroom and pre‐trial investigation alerts us to hysteria's shapeshifting potential that might explain the power of the hysteria label in twentieth‐century medicine and culture.

Analysis of Vehicle Collision Cases in Criminal Court following an Epileptic Fit of the Driver: A Comparative Study before and after the Enforcement of the New Law (Act on Punishment of Acts Inflicting Death or Injury on Others by Driving a Motor Vehicle, etc.)

Analysis of Vehicle Collision Cases in Criminal Court following an Epileptic Fit of the Driver: A Comparative Study before and after the Enforcement of the New Law (Act on Punishment of Acts Inflicting Death or Injury on Others by Driving a Motor Vehicle, etc.)

Historic feminist intervention at the International Criminal Court—the appeals hearing in Prosecutor v Dominic Ongwen

ABSTRACT Australian academics formed part of a feminist collective contributing as amici curiae to the appeal stage of International Criminal Court case Prosecutor v Dominic Ongwen. This comment discusses the significance of these amici curiae interventions.

Medical Liability in Neurosurgery: Greek Courts Decisions Analysis.

The purpose of the research was to assess the current situation regarding medical liability in Neurosurgery in Greece, the involvement of Anesthesiologists in court decisions, the impact of court cases and decisions, the time until the final decision, and the relationship between these issues and judicial results. Published court decisions of criminal, civil, administrative and disciplinary content were searched in legal information banks, from 1985 to 2021. A total of 52 court decisions were retrieved, 11 criminal court cases and 10 civil cases, involving 7 cases of negligent homicide and 14 bodily injuries were retrieved. The duration of litigation in 17 cases was 5.5 years, while in 4 cases the duration was 14.5 years. The average compensation paid was € 101,701. Neurosurgery has a relatively small number of reported complaints of medical negligence compared to other surgical specialties in Greece. Complications of spinal surgeries represent the majority of court cases. There is a need for immediate judicial - legislative reform of the framework for seeking medical liability of doctors.

An examination of the direct and interactive effects of race/ethnicity and gender on charge reduction

ABSTRACT Much of the prior literature on criminal court case processing has focused on judicial decisions regarding bail and sentencing. Fewer studies have examined prosecutorial decision-making, particularly charge reduction. Framed within the focal concerns perspective, this paper examined racial and gender disparity in charge reduction and whether disparity existed across different types of charge reduction. Findings demonstrated partial support for the focal concerns perspective with men and minority defendants less likely to receive a severity reduction.Implications for plea negotiation policies are discussed.

Critical stasis and disruptive performances: ICJ and the Anwar R trial in Koblenz

This article explores the extraterritorial criminal court case against Anwar R, a high-ranking member of the Syrian regime on trial for crimes against humanity in Koblenz, Germany. Empirically anchored in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Koblenz and with the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, the article illuminates the trial as a ‘disruptive performance’. The case against Anwar R punctuates two instances of negative stasis and unsettles two accounts of chronicity, namely, those of the Syrian conflict and of the field of international criminal justice. In order to illuminate the trial as a disruptive performance, the article empirically situates the Koblenz case both in relation to the Syrian war that it relates to, to the international criminal justice apparatus that it is a part of and to the underlying compilation of evidence that substantiates it. It thus clarifies both the symbolic potential and the constitutive process that has brought it into being.

Ester, a Missing Clasp, and Jewish Pawnbroking Networks in Renaissance Prague

AbstractIn 1577, a petty pawnbroker named Ester lost a clasp belonging to a Prague noblewoman, Lady Juliana the Fifth. Having been traded repeatedly between anonymous pawnbrokers, the clasp was eventually tracked down in the Polish city of Poznań, by which time Ester had already fled Prague and taken refuge in Cracow. In this essay, I use the subsequent criminal court case to explore this illuminating episode in the history of the city's Jewish Quarter. Taking place in the late Renaissance, during what has often been referred to as the Jewish “Golden Age,” I argue that this dramatic event provides access to the realities of an era often characterized as harmonious. I position pawnbroking as an industry that invited intimate and regular cross-confessional contact, and one that therefore offers up new opportunities to consider the nature of coexistence. By following the movement of both Ester and the pawned clasp from Prague to Poland, I also show how attention to pawnbroking can illuminate a constellation of transregional connections that stretched from Bohemia to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to its east, revealing the otherwise unrecorded ways in which Prague's Jews were connected to the Ashkenazi diaspora.

“Inhuman!” Transgressions: A Picture of Torture in Iffland’s the Foresters

As a playwright, August Wilhelm Iffland is best known for his sentimental domestic plays and dramas which enjoyed wild popularity amongst theater audiences from the late eighteenth century until about the early to mid-nineteenth century. One of Iffland’s earliest successes, The Foresters (1785), draws on a criminal case involving interrogational torture for a late-stage conflict in act five. Iffland’s source material for The Foresters was the author’s first dive into the popular practice of adapting the contents of criminal court cases into literary or theatrical narratives and announcing them as such. This essay analyzes the play’s engagement with contemporary discourses on legal reform in the 1780s, and the extent to which Iffland’s early work actually explores these problems. By staging serious legal themes such as torture in a domestic, middle-class setting for an enlightened audience, The Foresters allows us a glimpse at how popular plays might try to make sense of the complex relationship between the progressive legal reform efforts in the German territories and the legacy of seemingly outdated legal institutions.

International Criminal Court and Darfur Region Case.

International Criminal Court and Darfur Region Case.

A computational forensic framework for detection of hidden applications on android

<span>Smartphones, since their emergence has become a significant part of our lives and Android is popular of all. They are successful due to the increasing availability of user applications to answer every possible need, so it is of great importance to ensure security and privacy when handling personal and sensitive information of the user. To secure the data on mobile devices, users use applications available on the Google Play store, which help to hide data on their devices known as Hidden Applications. Hidden applications are categorized as one of the major applications used for data hiding and storing. These applications can be used to hide date from snooping, intrusion and against the data theft. Therefore, the proposed framework in this research helps to find either they store and hide data in efficient manner or not and if they do so either it is encrypted or not. In this paper, main objective is to identify the privacy threats which end users face by using such applications, analyse these application’s behaviour, working, their code to understand how data is hidden and if the information is encrypted, it can be retrieved or not. The work not only focuses on the identification of hidden data/apps; it also provides a mechanism to recover and reconstruct the data from these hidden parts of the memory. In the end, present the results obtained by using the proposed framework in a case file so that it can be used in a criminal court case.</span>

The Connecticut Experience with Sell Legislation.

Since 2004, Connecticut has had two different mechanisms for involuntary medication of defendants hospitalized for restoration of competence to stand trial. In this article, we first describe the development of these two mechanisms and compare their procedural elements. The first procedure required a hearing in criminal court, in a process parallel to the subsequent U.S. Supreme Court holding in Sell v. United States; the later procedure uses a civil mechanism in probate court and was enacted in response to the dicta in Sell regarding the preferential use of alternate mechanisms for involuntary medication orders. To compare the effectiveness and efficiency of the two mechanisms, we examined 1,455 admissions to the state's secure forensic hospital for competency restoration for the calendar years 2005 through 2011. Petitions for involuntary medication of defendants were filed in five cases in criminal court (0.3%) and in 177 cases (12.2%) in probate court. The probate mechanism resulted in a significantly shorter duration of the resolution of the competence matter. Both mechanisms were effective at restoring defendants' competency (i.e., two thirds were restored by the criminal court process, and nearly 74% were restored in the civil process).

Football in Turkey during the Erdoğan regime

ABSTRACT Since Islamist-conservative Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took over power in Turkey, the country has gone through a massive social transformation. Football, the quintessential form of entertainment in Turkey which has always had its ties with politics, has also been affected by this change. Especially after the Gezi Protests, in which the supporters of three major Istanbul clubs participated, to express their discontent over Erdoğan’s autocratic tendencies and interventions on secular lifestyles, the ruling party’s intervention in football accelerated. The new regime employed heavy policing, a controversial e-ticket scheme, and criminal court cases to suppress dissent in the stadiums, and also sponsored two pro-regime teams of its own that reached success but not popularity. The regime’s every move concerning football has been contested by the middle-class, secular football fans of Istanbul’s pro-opposition neighbourhoods. This paper discusses the historical and sociological origins of Erdoğan’s recurring defeats in the football field versus Stambulite fans.

“We Have Been Thrown Under the Bus”: Corporate Versus Individual Defense Mechanisms Against Transnational Corporate Bribery Charges

The telecommunication company Telia’s dealings in Uzbekistan have resulted in bribery accusations both in Sweden and in abroad. The article analyzes the defense mechanisms produced by both the corporation and the prosecuted former executives of the company. Telia’s initially denial eventually changed into a partial acknowledgment in combination with a scapegoating discourse. While Telia hardly defended itself at all in the Swedish court, the company’s former executives employed a defense of legality, denial of knowledge, of deviance, and of responsibility as well as a claim of being scapegoated. We discuss these developments in the light of the transformation of the Telia case from a mediated corporate scandal to a criminal court case and from a focus on organizational to individual responsibility.

Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma: Wrongful Conviction Risks, Mis-information Effects, and Psychological Consultation

ABSTRACTPsychologists as experts may be engaged in criminal or family court cases involving Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma (SBS/AHT). There are unsettled questions within medical specialties regarding the diagnosis of SBS/AHT, as well as the mechanisms and timing of injuries. Psychologists need to be cautious about providing testimony based on findings from disciplines other than psychology. Forensic psychological consultation in SBS/AHT can be informed by the record of exoneration in these cases. Also, psychological research on processes in wrongful conviction such as the “mis-information effect” and forensic “confirmation bias” can inform such consultation and testimony.

ADEQUACY OF PENAL POLICY IN CRIMINAL CASES OF ORGANIZED CRIME

Organized crime is a serious form of crime, whether it is viewed in the criminological sense or as the criminal justice response to this phenomenon. In this regard, the penal policy of the legislator should be proportionate to the gravity of organized crime. However, the penal policy of the courts does not reflect the stated intentions, which is primarily reflected in relatively mild criminal penalties for criminal offenses of organized crime. Although the case law does not contravene the law, i.e. contra legem, because it moves within the boundaries prescribed by the law, it is obvious that the issue is about imbalance of punishment for these criminal offenses, even when it comes to mitigating of the sentence of imprisonment. This paper will provide an analysis of the criminal law framework of organized crime prescribed by the Criminal Code of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CC BiH), as well as an analysis (statistical and descriptive) of the jurisprudence in the criminal cases of organized crime before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Court of BiH) for the period 2015-2018. As it is not justified and desirable for the legislator's criminal policy and court case jurisprudence to have a different approach in relation to these criminal offenses (different valuation and grading of severity of organized crimes), we will also make certain proposals for de lege ferenda. The paper is a continuation of earlier researches of this problem and is based on the analysis of court judgments in organized crime cases.

The Effect of Outside Temperature on Criminal Court Sentencing Decisions

Climate change has stimulated growing interest in the influence of temperature on cognition, mood and decision making. This paper is the first investigation of the impact of temperature on the outcomes of criminal court cases. It is motivated by Heyes and Saberian (2019, AEJ: Applied Economics), who found strong effects of temperature on judges' decisions in immigration cases, drawing on 207,000 cases. We apply similar methods to analyse 2.8 million criminal court cases in the Australian state of New South Wales from 1994 to 2019. Most of the estimates are precise zeros. We conclude that outcomes of criminal court cases (which are far more prevalent globally than immigration cases) are not influenced by fluctuations in temperature, an unsurprising but reassuring result.

Analyzing crime foreseeability: premises security litigation and the case of convenience stores and gas stations

Over the decades, the social and behavioral sciences have become increasingly integral to the assessment of crime foreseeability in criminal and civil court cases. This paper uses case examples from litigation involving convenience stores and gas stations to describe the analytical steps of a forensic criminological investigation to assess crime foreseeability. We describe the investigative tasks of a premise security lawsuit and address the challenges of examining and explaining the etiology of a criminal attack. A major goal is to demonstrate the translation of social science knowledge into actionable legal outcomes. The paper offers insights to enhance the investigative quality of forensic criminological assessments of crime and improve forensic applications of criminological theory and social science methods.

Livonijos kanauninko, Vilkaviškio klebono Vincento Bakuzičiaus biografija. Keletas XVIII amžiaus Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės katalikų dvasininko portreto detalių

BIOGRAPHY OF CANON PRIEST OF LIVONIA, PARISH PRIEST OF VILKAVIŠKIS WINCENTY BAKUZICZ. A FEW STROKES TO THE PORTRAIT OF THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIEST OF THE GRAND DUCHY OF LITHUANIA The key figure of this article is the late eighteenth-century canon priest of Livonia and parish priest of Vilkaviškis and Vaukavysk Wincenty Bakuzicz. Historical information on this person is scarce. His career of a clergyman began with the service in Vilnius Chapter, however during Bar Confederation (1768–1772) he got involved in its activities, travelled with a mission to Teshin and later was imprisoned by Russian imperial army officers, providing information on the movements of the Confederates. After being released from prison, W. Bakuzicz did not make any significant career in Vilnius Chapter, becoming parish priest of Vilkaviškis and Vaukavysk and being involved in several criminal court cases in Vilnius and its district. In 1794, during the uprising of Tadeusz Kosciuszko he was imprisoned by the rebels in Vilnius, although soon released. In that year he arranged his will, where he assigned significant sums to charity. The life of W. Bakuzicz was one of paradox and contradiction, just as was the entire period. Keywords: Vilnius Chapter, parish priests, canon priests, criminal cases, Bar Confederation (1768–1772), trade, wills.