New Form Of Evidence Research Articles

‘And Along Came DNA’: The Introduction of DNA Evidence in Australian Courts in the Applebee case

ABSTRACT In 1989, serial offender Desmond Applebee was tried in the Australian Capital Territory for the rape of a young woman. A first for Australian courts, the prosecution tendered DNA evidence to counter Applebee’s alibi that he had been unconscious in his car at the time. However, despite the handling of novel scientific evidence being hotly debated at the time, the trial failed to engage with the legal issues this new evidence raised. The defence was unprepared and under-resourced to put into issue evidentiary principles; there was no systemic means for addressing the issues raised by novel scientific evidence if the defence did not do so. This paper argues that the Applebee case is a dissatisfying case of first impression, graphically illustrating the struggles legal systems can have interrogating novel scientific evidence. The case helped smooth adoption of this new form of evidence. How courts receive and respond to scientific evidence is today again in mind owing to the recent quashing of Kathleen Folbigg’s murder conviction following genetic discoveries; Applebee shows why relying on a particular defendant and particular defence counsel to carry out a gate-keeping function for admissibility of novel evidence collides with practical realities of the court system.

Improving Vietnam’s Electronic Evidence Law in the Industry 4.0 Era

This paper reviews the current legal framework for electronic evidence in civil litigation in Vietnam and assesses whether such changes are sufficient to meet the demand of the Industry 4.0 era. The paper finds that despite major changes in Vietnam’s civil litigation and the increased adoption of electronic evidence, the current legal framework has not been able to keep up with the new context, even with the new Law on Electronic Transactions 2023. As a result, Vietnamese courts and litigants encounter numerous challenges in dealing with this new form of evidence. This paper identifies these challenges through analysis of the legislation and court decisions and makes recommendations for Vietnam based on China’s experience.

Further compelling evidence for safety-in-numbers: It is more than meets the eye

In the extant road safety literature, estimating safety-in-numbers is dominated by conventional cross-sectional methods in which active mode (pedestrian or cyclist) volume together with motorised traffic volume are present in regression models explaining active mode safety directly. There is “direct” evidence for safety-in-numbers when the coefficient associated with active mode volume is negative (safety improves as volume increases) or when it is smaller than one (safety decreases at a lower rate compared to the rate of increase in active mode volume). In this article we extend the concept of safety-in-numbers in the traffic safety field, introducing “indirect” safety-in-numbers, which constitutes a new form of evidence for this phenomenon. We provide empirical evidence to support this, discussing that using an approach based on heterogeneity in mean modelling–a form of random parameters (slopes) models–it is possible to reveal “indirect” safety-in-numbers effects. Therefore, such models can reveal further compelling evidence for safety-in-numbers. Accurate knowledge of safety-in-numbers effects (both direct and indirect) and their underlying mechanisms can help provide robust motives for promoting active travel and will have valuable implications for the design of road safety interventions.

Eliciting public values on health inequalities: missing evidence for policy windows?

There is a widening health divide in the UK despite health inequalities being a long-standing subject of policy and research. New types of evidence are needed. Knowledge of public values for non-health policies and their associated (non-)health outcomes is currently missing from decision-making processes. Eliciting public values using stated preference techniques can provide insights on what the general public would be willing to give-up for different distributions of (non-)health outcomes and the policies that can achieve them. To understand the role this evidence could have in decision-making processes, Kingdon's multiple streams analysis (MSA) is used as a policy lens to explore how evidence of public values could affect policy processes for ways to tackle health inequalities. This paper outlines how evidence of public values could be elicited through the use of stated preference techniques and suggests this could facilitate the creation of policy windows for tackling health inequalities. Additionally, Kingdon's MSA helps make explicit six cross-cutting issues when generating this new form of evidence. This suggests the need to explore reasons for public values and how decision-makers would use such evidence. With an awareness of these issues, evidence on public values has the potential to support upstream policies to tackle health inequalities.

EAR PRINT EVIDENCE R v Kempster (No 2) [2008] 2 Cr. App. R. 19 (CA)

The battle between criminal methods and criminalistic science is ongoing. As criminals become more knowledgeable about forensic techniques (with the aid of dissemination of such techniques in the media), it is becoming more difficult to find fingerprints at crime scenes. In this context the use of ear print evidence, typically as a result of an intruder pressing his ear against a window, in order to hear tell-tale sounds of someone’s presence within the dwelling, has come to the fore. It has been estimated that ear prints are reported to be found at up to 15% of crime scenes. Although the idea of using ear prints as a means of identification is not novel, ear print identification has not featured previously in the courts of a number of jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom and South Africa. Acceptance of the validity of a new form of evidence is, however, invariably a controversial matter. Ear print evidence has proved to be a particularly thorny issue, as it has been accepted in jurisdictions such as Holland (where by 2006 there had been more than 200 instances of forensic ear print identification), Spain (where the first conviction based on occurred in 2001, and where, by 2006, 20 identifications had been made) and Switzerland (where the first ear print identification of a criminal was made in 1965), but rejected in the United States. In the case under discussion the question of the probative value of ear print evidence arose for consideration. The context for this case in the English law was provided by the case of R v Dallagher [2003] 1 Cr. App. R. 12 (CA), where a murder conviction founded upon an identification obtained by means of ear print evidence was overturned on appeal. The court of Appeal held, in the light of evidence from expert witnesses expressing doubt as to the reliability of ear print identification obtained subsequent to the trial, that the trial jury may have decided otherwise had this evidence been before it. The court therefore concluded that the conviction was unsafe, and ordered a retrial. In the course of the new investigation, however, it was discovered that the DNA profile obtained from an ear print found on a window at the crime scene, which had been unequivocally linked to the accused, did not in fact match that of the accused. After setting out the relevant facts pertaining to the case at hand, this note will proceed to discuss the nature of ear print evidence. The latter part of the discussion will briefly examine the nature of the rules relating to expert evidence in certain jurisdictions, in order to place the admissibility of this particular form of evidence in context.

A Systematic Analysis on the Admissibility of Digital Documents as Evidence in Malaysian Syariah Courts

Digital document is a relatively new form of evidence, particularly for use in the Malaysian Syariah courts. This scenario contrasts with civil courts, which started using digital documents in court proceedings as early as the 1950s. The use of the digital document as evidence is intended to strengthen other methods of proof further. However, the Syariah courts are still less exposed to a new proofing method because there are no specific provisions according to Islamic law to allow it. Not only that, but Syariah law practitioners are also rarely exposed to cases related to the use of digital documents. Therefore, this qualitative study will analyse the admissibility of the digital document as evidence under Islamic law through a systematic analysis. This study uses the PRISMA methodology with the range of data stored on the web at www.scopus.com and http://myjurnal.my, which brings together thousands of scientific writings worldwide. The final screening results found a total of 21 articles that discussed the practice of digital documents as evidence under Islamic law. Furthermore, from the final filter, the researchers found several works of literature that previously discussed the usage of digital documents as evidence in a trial proceeding, which indirectly shows that the Syariah court has begun to accept this type of evidence. It is expected that the results of this study will assist legal practitioners in the Syariah court and become a reference point for researchers, academics and the public in Malaysia.

CONTINUING PHANTOM INFLUX OF ENGLISH LEXIS VIA LOCALIZATION: AN ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH COMPUTER TERMINOLOGY LOCALIZED IN SERBIAN

The paper analyzes the English computer terminology localized into Serbian between 2010 to 2020 both from the purely lexical stand-point (type and status of borrowings, as per Prćić (2005)), and from the viewpoint of pragmatic borrowings (Andersen 2014), but in a narrower set of pragmatic borrowings limited to written modes of communication: direct and indirect borrowing of interjections, discourse markers, expletives, vocatives, and paralinguistic phenomena. The chosen period saw a rapid expansion of instant communication applications with rich sets of emoticons, proliferation of cloud services and replace- ment of traditional software with software as a service. The research aims to shed light on how much the new lexis from computer-mediated forms of communication, as well as pragmatic notions stemming from the emerging trend of IT companies crafting their content to adhere to strict stylistic and audience accommodation guidelines, have been taken over into Serbian. Preliminary findings indicate that there is a huge number of both lexical and pragmatic borrowings, including interjections and paralinguistic phenomena such as names of emoticons and short codes used to insert emoticons. This influx of new, raw and, due to style guides, conditionally justified English borrowings provides a new form of evidence of English having become a nativized foreign language (Prćić 2014) of online communication, which, as a knock-on effect, leads translators and localization teams to consider raw and normally unjustified borrowings as acceptable and appropriate for the target audience that consists of more and more digital natives. The research applies a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods by means of annotating the 2020 version of Microsoft English-Serbian Bilingual Terminology Database.

Teaching Real-World Evidence: Protocol for a Systematic Review.

BackgroundReal-world evidence (RWE) refers to observational health care data beyond clinical trial data. It holds the promise of transforming health care as a new form of evidence to support decision makers in making decisions when developing and regulating medicines. As the importance of RWE is recognized by industry and regulatory bodies, teaching RWE becomes an important matter to evaluate and refine in order to develop future researchers and stakeholders who can better integrate RWE into the routine development of medicine.ObjectiveThe aim of this review is to understand how RWE is currently being taught. From this landscape study, the insufficiencies of the current education of RWE can be identified and subsequently inform future education policies around RWE and its subfacets.MethodsWe will search MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Healthcare Management Information Consortium, Cochrane, and Web of Science for published studies using a combination of keywords and subject headings related to RWE and education. In addition, a Google search to identify grey literature will be conducted. Two authors will independently screen the titles and abstracts identified from the search and accept or reject the studies according to the study inclusion criteria; any discrepancies will be discussed and resolved. The quality of the included literature will be assessed using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme systematic review checklist.ResultsData from eligible publications will be abstracted into a predesigned form in order to better understand the current state of education of RWE and inform future RWE education directions and policies.ConclusionsThe subsequent systematic review will be published in a peer-reviewed journal.International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)PRR1-10.2196/16941

Network meta-analysis: users\u2019 guide for pediatricians

BackgroundNetwork meta-analysis (NMA) is a powerful analytic tool that allows simultaneous comparison between several management/treatment alternatives even when direct comparisons of the alternatives (such as the case in which treatments are compared against placebo and have not been compared against each other) are unavailable. Though there are still a limited number of pediatric NMAs published, the rapid increase in NMAs in other areas suggests pediatricians will soon be frequently facing this new form of evidence summary.DiscussionEvaluating the NMA evidence requires serial judgments on the creditability of the process of NMA conduct, and evidence quality assessment. First clinicians need to evaluate the basic standards applicable to any meta-analysis (e.g. comprehensive search, duplicate assessment of eligibility, risk of bias, and data abstraction). Then evaluate specific issues related to NMA including precision, transitivity, coherence, and rankings.ConclusionsIn this article we discuss how clinicians can evaluate the credibility of NMA methods, and how they can make judgments regarding the quality (certainty) of the evidence. We illustrate the concepts using recent pediatric NMA publications.

A Framework to Analyze the Relevancy of Electronic Evidence

For electronic evidence, its legal status has been admitted and the electronic evidence as a new form of evidence in law has been specified clearly. Currently relatively little electronic evidence has been adopted in the court because of multiplicity, concealment and frangibility of electronic evidence, which is considered by the courts to be of a complexity that is beyond the understanding of general judge and it is usually questionable in the courts because of their relevancy. In this paper, we put forward a framework to analyze the relevancy of electronic evidence, and discussed their analytical methods to guild the judicial practice.

The Link between Corporate Environmental and Corporate Financial Performance—Viewpoints from Practice and Research

For more than 40 years, a tremendous number of studies have empirically explored the relationship between Corporate Environmental Performance (CEP) and Corporate Financial Performance (CFP). This study considers the relationship from a new perspective—via a qualitative research approach based on expert interviews. First, practitioners are queried for their view on the link between CEP and CFP and how to measure it. Since the vast majority see a positive relationship, this study contributes with a new form of evidence that it pays to be green. The chosen qualitative approach also allows a more detailed analysis of underlying cause-and-effect mechanisms. For instance, interviewed practitioners emphasize a direct and indirect impact from CEP on CFP. Second, the study conducts interviews with experts from research and associations (non-practitioners) and compares the viewpoints of the two interview groups. One prevalent difference refers to the fact that non-practitioners do not focus on the two impact levels. Moreover, business experts perceive the link between CEP and CFP as much less complex and reveal more pragmatically oriented considerations. The study then discusses how the interview results and identified differences can be used to direct future research and to support corporations in their move towards sustainability.

Antidepressants and age: A new form of evidence for U-shaped well-being through life

A growing literature argues that mental well-being follows an approximate U-shape through life. Yet in the eyes of some scholars this evidence remains controversial. The reason is that it relies on people’s answers to ‘happiness’ surveys. The present paper explores a different approach. It examines modern data on the use of antidepressant pills (as an implicit signal of mental distress) in 27 European nations. The regression-adjusted probability of using antidepressants reaches a peak in people’s late 40s. This pattern – one that does not rely on well-being survey answers – is thus consistent with the claim that human beings experience a midlife low.

Creating and using real-world evidence to answer questions about clinical effectiveness

New forms of evidence are needed to complement evidence generated from randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Real-World Evidence (RWE) is a potential new form of evidence, but remains undefined.This paper sets...

포렌식에서 디지털 증거의 우선순위 스케쥴링

범죄 증거의 새로운 형태인 디지털 증거는 기존의 증거와 기능 및 역할에 있어서 거의 차이점이 없으며, 증거로서의 법적 인정 및 역할이 점차 증가할 것으로 예상된다. 포렌식 수사관은 다수의 증거 보유 장치(예, 컴퓨터 시스템, 저장 매체 등)에 저장되어 있는 막대한 양의 데이터로부터, 사건과 관련된 실마리를 찾기 위하여 많은 시간을 소모해야 한다. 따라서 조사 시간을 단축하기 위해서는 잠재적인 관련 증거의 중요성에 근거하여 순서화 및 순위화가 필요하다. 본 연구에서는 포렌식 조사 시에, 정확한 증거를 선정하게 함으로서 증거 분석 우선순위를 결정하는 방법을 제안한다. 제안된 방식은 증거 조사 소요시간, 증거의 가치, 증거간의 연관성 그리고 사건과 시간과의 연관성과 같은 다수의 부정확한 요소가 퍼지 집합 함수를 사용한 의사 결정에 사용되는 다기준 의사 결정에 근거한다. Digital evidence which is the new form of evidence to crime makes little difference in value and function with existing evidences. As time goes on, digital evidence will be the important part of the collection and the admissibility of evidence. Usually a digital forensic investigator has to spend a lot of time in order to find clues related to the investigation among the huge amount of data extracted from one or more potential containers of evidence such as computer systems, storage media and devices. Therefore, these evidences need to be ranked and prioritized based on the importance of potential relevant evidence to decrease the investigate time. In this paper we propose a methodology which prioritizes order in which evidences are to be examined in order to help in selecting the right evidence for investigation. The proposed scheme is based on Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making, in which uncertain parameters such as evidence investigation duration, value of evidence and relation between evidence, and relation between the case and time are used in the decision process using the aggregation function in fuzzy set theory.

A New Form of Evidence to Date the Madaba Map Mosaic

One lingering problem facing researchers of the Madaba Map mosaic is its precise date of manufacture. The historical geography evident in the mosaic and stylistic considerations are generally viewed as the essential dating indicators. Michele Piccirillo suggested that the Map and mosaics from the nearby church of Sts. Lot and Procopius were paved by the same workshop, primarily on the strength of style. An analysis of the technique employed by the artisans to illustrate certain detailing elements common to these mosaics leads to the compelling belief that they were indeed manufactured by the same workshop. The pavement from Sts. Lot and Procopius can be reliably dated by its dedicatory inscription to a specific year that also accords with the period ascertained by the Map’s historical evidence. Consequently, this should stand as the probable date for the creation of the Map mosaic.

Programmed cell death and new discoveries in the genetics of parkinsonism

The concept that activation of cellular pathways of programmed cell death (PCD) may lead to the death of neurons has been an important hypothesis for adult neurodegenerative diseases. For Parkinson's disease (PD), up until now, the evidence for this hypothesis has largely been of two types: clear evidence of a role for PCD in neurotoxin models of the disease, and somewhat controversial evidence from human postmortem studies. With the rapid pace of discoveries in recent years of the genetic basis of PD, a new form of evidence has emerged. The prevailing concept of the role for PCD in PD has been that its mediators are 'downstream' effectors of more proximate and specific causes related to genetic or environmental factors. However, recent studies of three genes which cause autosomal recessive forms of parkinsonism, parkin, PTEN-induced kinase, and DJ-1, suggest that they may have more intimate relationships with the mediators of PCD and that loss-of-function mutations may result in an increased propensity for neurons to die. Intriguingly, independent studies of the function of these genes have suggested that they may share roles in regulating survival signaling pathways, such as those mediated by the survival signaling kinase Akt. Further elucidation of these relationships will have implications for the pathogenesis and neuroprotective treatment of PD.

Neurological imaging as evidence in political science: a review, critique, and guiding assessment

EnglishPolitical scientists have access to a number of competing methodologies that marshal different forms of evidence for their arguments about political phenomena. Recently a new form of evidence has appeared in political science research and, more frequently, economics: spatially explicit and time-varying neurological activity of human subjects engaged in political or economic decision-making. As with any of the more standard methodologies, this approach carries with it a set of orienting theories linking hypotheses with the types of data induced to support or falsify these theories. While this new form of evidence is exciting, especially for the empirically minded social scientist, it deserves the utmost scrutiny. I provide a review of how neurological imaging is being used in the social sciences and consider several problems and prospects of using neuroimaging data in political science.FrenchLes sciences politiques ont recours à des méthodes de recherche et à des évidences empiriques diverses pour étudier les phénomènes politiques. Récemment, les chercheurs en sciences politiques et plus souvent encore en économie se sont tout particulièrement intéressés à l'activité cérébrale, objectivable dans l'espace et variant dans le temps, de sujets humains en situation de prise de décision politique ou économique. Comme toute autre méthode de recherche, cette approche s'appuie sur des orientations théoriques, qui font le lien entre les hypothèses de recherche et les données destinées à étayer ou invalider ces théories. Si cette approche nouvelle semble prometteuse, tout particulièrement pour les chercheurs à l'esprit empirique, elle mérite d'être examinée en profondeur. L'article fait le point sur l'utilisation des résultats de l'imagerie cérébrale fonctionnelle en sciences sociales et considère les différents problèmes qu'elle pose ainsi que les perspectives nouvelles qu'elle peut offrir en sciences politiques.

Do Job Opportunities Decline with Age?

This paper presents a new form of evidence supporting the hypothesis that job opportunities decline with age. Segregation curves computed from the January 1983 Current Population Survey reveal that newly hired old workers tend to be clustered in a smaller set of industries and occupations than both newly hired young workers and all old workers.