High-profile Cases Research Articles

ANYONE BUT YOU, M’LORD: THE TEST FOR RECUSAL OF A JUDICIAL OFFICER

It is trite that judicial officers should perform their adjudicative functions in a trial or hearing without bias or predisposition in favour of any party. Judicial officers must act independently and impartially in discharging their duties (see Van Rooyen v The State 2002 5 SA 246 (CC) par 31). Should this not be the case, a party can move an application for the recusal of the presiding officer. Lately, there have been a number of these applications, including the successful application for the recusal of Ngoepe JP on the first day of therape trial of Jacob Zuma, former Deputy President of South Africa. According to media reports, the reason cited for the recusal was “to protect the credibility of the judiciary” (see “Zuma Judge Steps Aside to Defuse Bias Charges” 2006-02-14 Business Day). Ngoepe JP is alleged to have said:“The legal points for the recusal are not sound and do not hold. However, this is no ordinary matter and is a high-profile case. These considerations invite me to look beyond the personal fears of [Zuma] and take a broader view.”But what are the legal requirements that must be satisfied for a successful application for the recusal of a judicial officer? Before a discussion of the test for recusal, the question of which sources regulate the doctrine of recusal will be briefly discussed.

Evidencing the Need to Broaden the Position of Trust Legislation to Include Sports Coaches

When an individual is in a position of trust over another person, the age of consent is raised from 16 to 18 in the United Kingdom. Currently, the definition of a Position of Trust is restricted to professions such as teachers, care workers and youth justice workers. Recent high-profile cases have contributed to a growing consensus amongst key stakeholders of the need to broaden this legislation to include other roles, such as a sports coach. This study represents the first investigation into the number of concerns recorded by local authorities across England and Wales regarding sexual relationships between a person who is in a potential Position of Trust which is not currently covered by the legislation and someone who was aged 16 or 17 years old. Freedom of Information Requests resulted in full responses from 142 out of the 172 local authorities. A total of 653 cases were recorded over a 4-year period. The most prevalent of the identified roles were related to sport, however, roles related to religion, youth work, transport and uniform services were also cited. Regional differences regarding the number of cases recorded are highlighted and the implications of these findings are discussed.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction of China’s new securities law: policies, problems and proposals

ABSTRACT With the increasing internationalization of its securities market, China has recently introduced Article 2(4) of the 2019 Securities Law, in order to deal with the important issue of extraterritorial jurisdiction over cross-border securities transactions. While it represents an important development, the provision is couched in very broad terms, bringing uncertainties and difficulties to its application in practice. This article proposes a phased reform agenda for improvement: in the short run, the effect test under Article 2(4) should be clarified with more guidance; in the long run, China should go beyond the effect test to consider other relevant tests such as the conduct test and the transactional test. The recent high-profile case of Luckin Coffee is carefully studied to show the factors that China may consider in applying Article 2(4), including the test of national interests, the principle of international comity, and the issue of judicial recourse constraints.

Double Victimization? Using a Human Security Framework to Assess the Effectiveness of the Witness Protection Regime in Kenya

ABSTRACT This paper argues that a witness-protection architecture in which indictees remain in charge of government is ineffective and undermines the Rome Statute’s complementarity principle. In Kenya’s cases before the International Criminal Court (ICC), inadequate protection of witnesses and their extended families discouraged witness participation and affected the availability of evidence. It is argued here that assessing the ICC’s effectiveness should be based on a critical examination of the processes the ICC set in place to defend the security of witnesses. A number of high-profile cases are examined through a human security framework to demonstrate the inadequacy of the witness protection regime in the wake of interference with witnesses and lack of cooperation with the Court.

Masochist or Murderer? A Discourse Analytic Study Exploring Social Constructions of Sexually Violent Male Perpetrators, Female Victims-Survivors and the Rough Sex Defense on Twitter.

“Rough sex” can be considered an act of sexual violence that is consensual or non-consensual, often resulting in bodily harm and in rare cases, fatalities. The rough sex defense is typically advanced by male perpetrators in an effort to portray a sexual encounter as consensual, to avoid criminal sanctions for causing injury or death. Public attitudes toward this defense are often reflected on social media following high profile cases and appear to echo dominant discourses that reinforce widely held sexual violence stereotypes. Therefore, this study aims to deconstruct public attitudes surrounding the rough sex defense. Namely, how female victims/survivors and male perpetrators of sexual violence are constructed online, whilst exploring the wider implications upon society. NVivo12 NCapture software was used to collect a sample of 1000 tweets mentioning the terms “rough sex” or “rough sex defense.” Data were examined using Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), underpinned by a social constructionist perspective, to elicit emergent discourses. Findings indicate that Twitter allowed women to resist harmful victim-blaming discourses and constrained binary identities. Opposingly, men were constructed as sexually entitled predators, yet resisted these subject positions by advocating support for male victims/survivors. Additional analyses examine account holders’ constructions of British Parliamentarians (MP’s) and their campaigns against the rough sex defense. These constructions demonstrated a cultural, heteronormative and victim-blaming understanding of sexual violence, which calls for legislative clarity.

Toxicity in the Decentralized Web and the Potential for Model Sharing

The "Decentralised Web" (DW) is an evolving concept, which encompasses technologies aimed at providing greater transparency and openness on the web. The DW relies on independent servers (aka instances) that mesh together in a peer-to-peer fashion to deliver a range of services (e.g. micro-blogs, image sharing, video streaming). However, toxic content moderation in this decentralised context is challenging. This is because there is no central entity that can define toxicity, nor a large central pool of data that can be used to build universal classifiers. It is therefore unsurprising that there have been several high-profile cases of the DW being misused to coordinate and disseminate harmful material. Using a dataset of 9.9M posts from 117K users on Pleroma (a popular DW microblogging service), we quantify the presence of toxic content. We find that toxic content is prevalent and spreads rapidly between instances. We show that automating per-instance content moderation is challenging due to the lack of sufficient training data available and the effort required in labelling. We therefore propose and evaluate ModPair, a model sharing system that effectively detects toxic content, gaining an average per-instance macro-F1 score 0.89.

How the Conflation Of 'Inappropriate' Grief With Guilt Compromises The Sixth Amendment Right To Fair Trial

On an imperfect American criminal legal landscape, evidence about a defendant’s inability to appropriately perform grief about and/or towards a victim often colors how judges, juries, and the public understand their relationship to criminality. It is on this imperfect American criminal legal landscape that the subject of this paper—grief performance and its relationship to constructions of guilt—is born.I argue that a real ritual dissonance transpires when an individual loses someone close to them to a traumatizing form of death—that is, in an extremely violent or unexpected way. On the one hand, one’s body finds itself expected to conform to social norms regarding grief and mourning. On the other, one’s experience is so anomalous as to potentially make it unfathomable for them to do so. The resulting grief performance is one that is at once produced by the grieving self to process incomprehensible trauma and recognized by a perceiving community as a social oddity, a ritualized failure incapable of being understood by the surrounding community. Because the community cannot comprehend the griever’s performance, suspicion begins to surround the griever. People begin to realize, “she did not cry”; “she was cold”; “she did cartwheels”; “she spoke on television”; “she spent exorbitant amounts of money,” and so they assume she must have had a hand in orchestrating the death of the person close to her. This process can be understood as creating a “grief-guilt” complex, as improper grief performance produces and generates presuppositions of a person’s guilt.As I demonstrate, the construction of a grief-guilt complex does not live in isolation—if it did, the isolated phenomenon would be theoretically interesting but pragmatically insignificant. Instead, the criminal legal system absorbs the assumptions that a person who performs inappropriate or non-normative grief must necessarily be guilty of a crime. To precisely demonstrate the ways in which this unfolds, I focus on three high profile cases: Amanda Knox, Pamela Smart, and Erik and Lyle Menendez. My analysis draws on the language and affective displays that unfolded in the trials to demonstrate how the grief-guilt complex enters into the courtroom. It also highlights the ways in which media coverage preceding and surrounding the trials helped breed heightened suspicion around each of the defendants in ways that hampered their ability to fully access their Sixth Amendment rights to a fair trial unimpeded by prejudicial biases about grief performance and guilt.

Mothers Who Kill Their Children: Literature Review and Reflections for Social Work Practice

The author worked within a Children Services Social Work department at the time of a high profile case involving the homicide of two children by their mother and father. Drawing on this experience, the article seeks to explore why mothers are involved in killing their children through reviewing the literature around how maternal filicides are classified and any complicating factors before finally considering reflections for Social Work practice. This article concludes that the reasons why a mother kills their child are a complex result of social and psychological factors. Social Workers and other professionals working with children can learn from the specific types of maternal filicides that can occur and also what factors may influence such events taking place.

Anti-Asian American Hate Crimes Spike During the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The recent high-profile cases of hate crimes in the U.S., especially those targeting Asian Americans, have raised concerns about their risk of victimization. Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, intimations—and even accusations—that the novel coronavirus is an “Asian” or “Chinese” virus have been linked to anti-Asian American hate crime, potentially leaving members of this group not only fearful of being victimized but also at risk for victimization. According to the Stop AAPI Hate Center, nearly 1900 hate crimes against Asian Americans were reported by victims, and around 69% of cases were related to verbal harassment, including being called the “Chinese Coronavirus.” Yet, most of the evidence martialed on spikes in anti-Asian American hate crime during the COVID-19 pandemic has been descriptive. Using data from four U.S. cities that have large Asian American populations (New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C.), this study finds that hate crime against Asian Americans increased considerably in 2020 compared with that of 2019. Specifically, hate crime against Asian Americans temporarily surged after March 16, 2020, when the blaming labels including “Kung flu” or “Chinese Virus” were used publicly. However, the significant spike after March 16, 2020, in anti-Asian American hate crime was not sustained over the follow-up time period available for analysis.

The Breakdown of the Distinction Between the Public, Secular Private, and Religious Spheres in Education Law and Policy

Background: Over the past decade, courts increasingly have considered cases that involve clashes between public, secular private, and religious institutions in education. Such clashes appear to have intensified as recently as the 2019–2020 Supreme Court term, and the confirmation of Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Court in 2020 suggests that issues centered on these institutions will continue to receive significant judicial attention. While these recent cases have focused on a range of education law and policy issues, some have focused on arguably the most fundamental legal issues applicable to such schools—the instances in which the legal distinctions between public, secular private, and religious schools are strong or weak. Purpose: This study examines three recent, major federal cases as both historical and legal cases to highlight the restructuring of the distinctions among public, secular private, and religions schools in the institutional setting of the courts. I examine how the courts have historically structured these distinctions; how these three recent cases have restructured these distinctions; and the education law and policy implications moving forward. Research Design: This article is a legal analysis and historical case study. Findings: Three recent and high-profile education cases reflect a spectrum of how the highest courts have restructured distinctions between public, secular private, and religious schools in a short period. In some instances, courts have blurred the legal distinctions between these types of schools by allowing religious schools to receive governmental support even in situations in which states have directly attempted to exclude institutions like them from receiving such support. In other instances, courts have strengthened these distinctions by differentiating how public, secular private, and religious schools are treated with respect to their abilities to discriminate. Conclusion: Taken together, the three cases underscore the intensifying attention of the courts to restructuring the distinctions between the public, secular private, and religious spheres in education. These distinctions reflect judicial engagement with major educational and political goals, such as pluralism, communality, and discrimination, and are grounded in a long history of courts’ involvement in this field. Especially in a field characterized by highly politicized debates, attention to the distinction between the public, secular private, and religious spheres in education is critical for understanding how and why fundamental educational policy decisions have been and continue to be made.

Addressing Serious Harm, Reconsidering Policy and Building Towards Repair

This commentary draws on personal experiences, my time spent discussing acts of harm in the academy with activists, and a review of various incidences on issues of academic harm and responsibility. Over the last few years, I have observed numerous high-profile cases in anthropology – in various countries and various contexts – that have elicited a significant public response. Some frame this kind of harm as the proverbial ‘few bad apples’, an approach I reject as it ignores what enables harm. Alternatively, some attempt to use the idea of ‘academic freedom’ as a way to sidestep questions of interpersonal obligations. Recently, I have encountered this line of argument in defences made by some against allegations about John Comaroff, such as media pieces that I note have been later cross-posted to his own website (Comaroff 2022; Walsh 2022). Instead of settling into a debate about what is or is not ‘academic freedom’, I here highlight a different reorientation, a shift in framing: what I have called, in conversations with friends and collaborators, ‘academic responsibility’. This reminds us that whereas academic freedom is frequently framed as a freedom to or a freedom from, academic responsibility emphasises our responsibilities as scholars and the obligations which follow to others. This includes a refusal of what Zoe Todd (2019) calls a ‘failure of imagination’ – we can and must envision different ways of building scholarly spaces beyond what we ourselves have seen or experienced in the academy.

Toxicity in the Decentralized Web and the Potential for Model Sharing

The "Decentralised Web" (DW) is an evolving concept, which encompasses technologies aimed at providing greater transparency and openness on the web. The DW relies on independent servers (aka instances) that mesh together in a peer-to-peer fashion to deliver a range of services (e.g. micro-blogs, image sharing, video streaming). However, toxic content moderation in this decentralised context is challenging. This is because there is no central entity that can define toxicity, nor a large central pool of data that can be used to build universal classifiers. It is therefore unsurprising that there have been several high-profile cases of the DW being misused to coordinate and disseminate harmful material. Using a dataset of 9.9M posts from 117K users on Pleroma (a popular DW microblogging service), we quantify the presence of toxic content. We find that toxic content is prevalent and spreads rapidly between instances. We show that automating per-instance content moderation is challenging due to the lack of sufficient training data available and the effort required in labelling. We therefore propose and evaluate ModPair, a model sharing system that effectively detects toxic content, gaining an average per-instance macro-F1 score 0.89.

Gender Neutralisation for Unbiased Speech Synthesising

Machine learning can encode and amplify negative biases or stereotypes already present in humans, resulting in high-profile cases. There can be multiple sources encoding the negative bias in these algorithms, like errors from human labelling, inaccurate representation of different population groups in training datasets, and chosen model structures and optimization methods. Our paper proposes a novel approach to speech processing that can resolve the gender bias problem by eliminating the gender parameter. Therefore, we devised a system that transforms the input sound (speech of a person) into a neutralized voice to the point where the gender of the speaker becomes indistinguishable by both humans and AI. Wav2Vec based network has been utilised to conduct speech gender recognition to validate the main claim of this research work, which is the neutralisation of gender from the speech. Such a system can be used as a batch pre-processing layer for training models, thus making associated gender bias irrelevant. Further, such a system can also find its application where speaker gender bias by humans is also prominent, as the listener will not be able to judge the gender from speech.

La Oficina de Integridad Científica en España. Una tarea pendiente

In recent years, many cases of scientific misconduct have come to light, some with considerable consequences, highlighting the existing breaches in the scientific integrity globally. In Spain, there have also been high-profile cases of scientific misconduct. However, so far, no organism or agency has been created to monitor the execution, analysis and publication phases of biomedical research from an ethical point of view. Therefore, in this context, we consider that there is a need for the creation of an office which supervises research integrity in Spain which would act in cases of suspected scientific misconduct, carrying out an independent investigation and proposing public sanctions. The existence of such an organism would be of particular importance in the case of publicly funded research, since in that case research fraud would involve the misappropriation of public funds. The creation of an office that would act on detected cases could have a deterrent effect on potential misconduct by some researchers, thus preventing cases of scientific misconduct.

50 Years On: Are Derivatives a “Product from Hell”? Historical Perspectives on 30 Cases of Derivatives Losses

Financial derivatives have been consistently stigmatized. Undoubtedly, most if not all of the negative press arises from high-profile cases of companies that lost significant amounts of money with these products—the so-called derivatives debacles. These products are unique in the sense that, unlike any other financial instrument, some critics have consistently argued for their demise. This article aims to answer the question of whether this criticism is justified from a historical perspective by analyzing the 30 largest losses caused by financial derivatives among non-financial end users from 1987 to 2017. The results of this analysis do not support most of these accusations. The data show four main patterns: (1) All the derivatives products in the sample performed as expected, and all the losses resulted from wrongly timed market strategies. No losses were attributable to operational or legal reasons. (2) In the overwhelming majority of cases, these derivatives strategies were deliberately not designed as bona fide hedges but instead were used to attain off-market rates or extraordinary returns at no upfront cost for the users (“speculative hedging”). (3) Given their academic background, most end users likely did not fully grasp the math behind the most complex strategies, but they seemed to understand the risk-return tradeoffs of their strategies because they agreed to assume additional market risks to achieve off-market rates with no upfront costs. Moreover, having a deep understanding of derivatives was not a guarantee of success. Some of the executives responsible for the largest losses in our sample have mathematical or advanced finance backgrounds. (4) Most financial managers flagrantly underestimated the likelihood of extreme market events. In general, these losses happened after a period of persistent market trends. Financial managers therefore believed that recent market trends would continue for the foreseeable future and overlooked the risk of extreme and unexpected market moves.

Native Blogosphere Advertising and New Expert Tasks

The article touches upon the problem of using special knowledge in the analysis of native texts, which is topical for modern expert practice. Sings of native advertising, the expert approaches to solving individual problems and identifies gaps in the legal regulation of the blogosphere are presented, and which results in a growing number of high-profile cases related to inaccurate and unfair advertising on blogs.

Petitions to the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes: A New Methodological Approach to the History of Divorce, 1857–1923

ABSTRACT Although the subject of divorce and the development of divorce legislation in nineteenth-century England and Wales have received some academic attention, much work remains to be done. Existing studies have examined either a small number of cases from a limited period of the newly formed Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes’ history; answered a specific question over a longer period; or conducted detailed micro-studies of individual and high-profile cases. None have examined the surviving petitions made to the court (held at The National Archives under J 77) holistically over an extended period. This article seeks to revive the field by suggesting a new interdisciplinary methodological approach that will combine historical and legal studies with digital humanities to offer the first panoptic view of J 77 petitions. Far from being dry legal documents, this article argues that they hold a wealth of rich detail about petitioners, respondents, co-respondents, witnesses, children, solicitors, barristers, clerks, and judges, and stand at an exciting intersection of several fields of enquiry. Adopting such an approach will generate important new insights about gender, class, property ownership, intimacy, religion, childhood, and sexuality in nineteenth and early twentieth century England and Wales.

Fight Against Narcotics Trafficking in Mali

In the medical treatment of children disputes can arise where parents cannot agree with one another, or where the medical treating team and parents cannot agree, this will generally be those situations where the medical team and parents are at loggerheads over what is to be done. This paper focuses on the latter kind of dispute. The paper considers solely on the threshold question: at what stage should the court be permitted to make decisions on behalf of very ill children when parents and the medical treating team cannot agree? It focuses specifically on minors who are not competent to give consent (non- Gillick -competent children), therefore, it does not concern itself with the issues around children who are competent to consent to treatment. It first gives a brief account of the ethical position in peadiatrics treatment. It then reviews the role of the courts, using a number of high-profile cases as examples. There are arguments and concerns about the erosion of what some regarded as the territory of parental authority. That parents have both the primary responsibility and the primary right to make decisions in respect of their sick children. The paper centres on those situations where a court is called upon to intervene in decisions about a child’s medical care and how such disputes are resolved. It reveals that disputes come to the courts when there is a serious risk that the parent’s decision will result in significant harm to the child. It concludes that the courts have made it clear that courts have the authority to make medical decisions on behalf of children and that the threshold for judicial intervention is the welfare of the child, often referred to as the ‘best interests’ approach. Keywords: consent, parental responsibility, medical decision-making, court’s involvement, ethics, best interest, children, parental refusals DOI: 10.7176/JLPG/121-05 Publication date: June 30 th 2022

Children, futility and parental disagreement: The importance of ethical reasoning for clinicians in the paediatric intensive care setting

The provision of intensive care enables the lives of neonates, infants and children to be sustained or extended in circumstances previously regarded as impossible. However, as well as benefits, such care may confer burdens that resultingly frame continuation of certain interventions as futile, conferring more harm than or any, benefit. Subsequently, clinicians and families in the paediatric intensive care unit are often faced with decisions to withdraw, withhold or limit intensive care in order to act in the best interests of the child. An integral consideration in respect of these decisions is that futility is a concept that has to be contextualised for all those involved. Recent high-profile legal cases highlight the professional, clinical, legal and social conflicts that can arise when parents and clinicians have different interpretations of futility. In acknowledging the complexity of these conflicts for clinicians, this paper aims to support a better understanding of futility as an integral concept in such difficult and emotive decisions within professional practice. We utilise the concept of futility to frame how these decisions to withdraw or withhold certain invasive life-prolonging interventions are ethically and legally justifiable, even when they disagree or conflict with parental views. To support clinicians in understanding these decisions, we in part use the familiar bioethical framework of Principlism developed by Beauchamp and Childress. We suggest that understanding legal and ethical analysis of futility ultimately will help clinicians in approaching and reflecting on such decision-making.

Interpersonal violence against athletes

Abstract. The mediatization of several high-profile cases of sexual abuse in sports has sensitized a larger public for the problem of interpersonal violence against athletes. This article provides an overview of what is already known on the prevalence of different forms of interpersonal violence in sports, associated personal, organizational and cultural risk factors, and the psychopathological consequences of interpersonal violence. Throughout the article, areas where more research is needed are highlighted. It is concluded that evidence-based psychiatric and psychotherapeutic prevention, intervention and care programs that are tailored to the specific needs of athletes are needed to safeguard mental health in sports.