Personal Culpability Research Articles

The Curious Case of International Criminal Liability

Individual criminal responsibility (ICR) in international law is sui generis. Whilst modelled on domestic concepts of liability, ICR deviates substantially from theories of liability in municipal law. The distinctive character of criminal responsibility in international law is characterized by both intrinsic and extrinsic features. Intrinsic features go to the nature of international crimes. Extrinsic features relate to what according to Cassese is typically ‘international’: the composition of international courts and the rudimentary character of the governing law. An analysis of case law through the lens of ICR’s distinctive features reveals international criminal law's instrumental role, which in turn puts pressure on the principle of personal culpability.

Testing times: Exploring staged responses and the impact of blame management strategies in two examination fiasco cases

AbstractThis article examines the responses of ministers facing high levels of blame in the press after serious failures in the public exam system for school‐leavers in Scotland in 2000 and England in 2002. It develops a method for systematic analysis and comparison of the behaviour of officeholders facing blame, tests the hypothesis that ministers will accept personal culpability only after other ways of handling blame have been exhausted and uses time series intervention models to show how one can estimate the impact of strategies on the next day's blame level. The basic sequencing hypothesis is partially upheld by the observed behaviour in these cases, though many other kinds of blame responses do not display a clear sequence. The intervention analysis also raises questions about the claimed effectiveness of presentational strategies for managing blame.

Personal and Collective Culpability Judgment

This research takes a functional perspective and examines the psychological processes underlying personal and collective culpability judgments in European Americans and Chinese in mainland China (Experiment 1), and in European Americans and Asian Americans (Experiment 2). Results indicate that when determining personal culpability for negative events, all three cultural groups consider behavioral causality. However, Chinese and Asian American participants tend to make more extreme collective culpability judgments than do European American participants. Furthermore, activating the goal of delegated deterrence strengthens Chinese and Asian American participants' collective culpability judgments only, whereas activating the goal of group harmony increases the strength of collective culpability in all three cultural groups. These findings suggest that collective culpability serves different functions in different cultural contexts.

The Mission of Healing: Kofi Annan's Failed Apology

Kofi Annan traveled to Rwanda in May of 1998 attempting to repair the image of the United Nations (U.N.) and to heal the fractured political relationship between the two entities. However, the U.N. secretary general largely failed to fulfill his mission. This article analyzes the reasons why Annan's mea culpa failed. It argues that in Annan's address before the Rwandan parliament, his rhetorical choices constrained his ability to repair the U.N.'s image and U.N.–Rwandan relations. Specifically, this article demonstrates that the U.N. leader's nondiscussion of his personal culpability for U.N. action, his democratization of blame for the genocide, and the appearance of personal arrogance created by his language choices hindered his ability to fulfill his mission. The article concludes with implications for image repair theory, lessons from Annan's failure for rhetors who apologize for historical wrongdoing, and directions for further research into the phenomena of public apology.

Treatment: "Just What the Preacher Ordered"

Back to table of contents Next article Taking IssueFull AccessTreatment: "Just What the Preacher Ordered"Rhonda Mattox M.D.,Greer Sullivan M.D., M.S.P.H.,Rhonda Mattox M.D.Search for more papers by this author,Greer Sullivan M.D., M.S.P.H.Search for more papers by this author,Published Online:1 Apr 2008AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Many mental health providers have not comprehended the impact that the clergy has on shaping social norms that influence willingness to seek treatment. Clergy members have myriad opportunities to influence social norms about mental health issues when they deliver sermons and conduct informal counseling. These may range from language that influences explanatory models of symptoms commonly associated with psychiatric disorders by describing them as "spiritual performance measures" that reflect "contaminated faith," proximity to God or the devil, or personal culpability to recommendations that encourage use of spiritual coping strategies in lieu of treatment.The clergy's sphere of influence has expanded exponentially through multimedia. For instance, Daystar Television, the second-largest Christian broadcasting network, reports having a potential audience of more than 128 million viewers in the United States alone, including 60 million cable and satellite households. This is further underscored by an April 2003 survey disclosing an aggregate adult U.S. audience for Christian programming of 90 million people.Clergy members have been an untapped resource in the effort to reduce mental health disparities. In part, they have not been enlisted in the effort because of their differing, sometimes conflicting, explanatory models of symptoms. However, individuals with mental illness frequently identify clergy members as their initial contacts when they decide to seek help. In this issue of Psychiatric Services, Farrell and Goebert report on a survey of clergy in Hawaii that found that few clergy members made referrals to psychiatrists partly because of their limited ability to identify serious psychiatric conditions. Finding a way to bridge the gap and work synergistically with these credible, "divinely endorsed" gatekeepers who have a global sphere of influence may be "just what the doctor ordered" to change social norms and reduce stigma. Yet the consumer may be more concerned with a different question: "Is this treatment 'just what the preacher ordered?' " To reduce disparities, public health educators seek to develop community interventions that will reach the general public. A critical factor may be with whom they are willing to collaborate. Given the clergy's role in shaping social norms and influencing large audiences, nurturance of relationships with these gatekeepers by the public health community may be imperative in improving help-seeking behaviors and in facilitating earlier detection and treatment. Modest investments of resources in partnership ventures with clergy may encourage more people to obtain professional help by providing options for treatment their way—spiritually infused and clergy approved.Department of Psychiatry, University of Arkansas for Medical SciencesSouth Central Veterans Affairs Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByFaith Leaders’ Views on Collaboration with Mental Health Professionals21 October 2022 | Community Mental Health Journal, Vol. 53Between the “ whispersofthe Devil ” and “ the revelationofthe Word ”: Christian clergy’s mental health literacy and pastoral support for BME congregants30 October 2018 | Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, Vol. 22, No. 2Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 57, No. 4 Volume 59Issue 4 April, 2008Pages 349-349PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES April 2008 Volume 59 Number 4 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 April 2008 Published in print 1 April 2008

Jared Cohen. One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007. xxviii + 230 pp. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. $50.00. Cloth. $18.95. Paper.

Jared Cohen. One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007. xxviii + 230 pp. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. $50.00. Cloth. $18.95. Paper. Those who have followed the debate on the international community's failure in Rwanda might be forgiven for not wanting to read One Hundred Days of Silence: it appears to be yet another finger-pointer that chooses to excoriate the U.S. for its failure to prevent and end Rwanda's genocide. However, while the general argument is not new - that the U.S. could have done more and in certain ways acted to make the situation worse - the author presents us with fresh, nuanced evidence and convincing narrative to reinforce this claim. The book's chief strength is Cohen's understanding of the inner workings of the U.S. government machinery; we learn as much about the decision-making process and culture of the individual bureaucracies as we do about the genocide. From his time as an intern at the State Department and Pentagon, Cohen is able to distinguish between the bureaucratic process and the personal culpability of individual policymakers. He takes us inside the monolith, identifying the individuals whose positions would have allowed them to do more than they did and exposing the claim that inaction was just the product of systemic failure; he shows us instead that it was the result of a policy of calculated non-interventionism (95). Cohen goes further and argues that the U.S. was not just guilty of choosing inaction. It worsened the situation in at least two ways. First, pushing for the draw-down of UNAMIR (the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the country) emboldened the extremists and removed the protection on which several thousand Rwandans were directly dependent. Second, and perhaps more debatably, by pressing for the inclusion of the extremist Coalition pour la Defense de la Republique et de la Democratie (CDR) party in the Arusha peace process, the U.S. contributed to the breakdown of the talks with the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) movement. Cohen also uses his insider knowledge to show that there was much the U.S. easily could have done that would not have involved putting boots on the ground. For example, in his most cogently argued chapter he claims that the U.S. could have severed diplomatic ties with Rwanda during the genocide or that the president personally could have called the principal organizers of the genocide to hold them responsible. As it was, there were no senior-level meetings or discussions of Rwanda inside the government, and he argues the U. …

The Importance of Trying Charles Taylor

The Special Court for Sierra Leone has indicted Liberia's former President Charles Taylor on eleven counts of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and serious violations of international humanitarian law. In April 2006, Charles Taylor was arrested and brought into the court's custody, and his trial will begin in 2007. This article discusses three evolving issues in international law expected to be highlighted in Taylor's trial. First, Taylor's prosecution contributes to the ongoing challenge to the norm of head-of-state immunity from prosecution for alleged human rights crimes. Second, the prosecution will employ a relatively new tool in international prosecution—personal culpability based on participation in a joint criminal enterprise. Finally, this case will continue the path-breaking work of the Special Court for Sierra Leone in prosecuting individuals for the crime of enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into armed forces and using them in hostilities. In each of these three areas, the trial of Charles Taylor will make important contributions to international human rights law.

Cashing-in on Risk Claims: On the For-profit Inversion of Signifiers for “Global Warming”1

International environmental groups and a few Western governments have invested considerable resources in the social marketing of risk claims about global warming and climate change. These claims appear in novel forms of public service adverts that combine images and text in dramatic narratives of warning, natural disaster and moral responsibility. Although a few narratives mention government's regulatory role in mitigation, most speak to individuals’ personal culpability and assign responsibility for remedial actions (such as energy conservation) to them, rather than to industrial sources. These campaigns appear to be working. Opinion polls show public awareness increasing and some willingness to adopt recommended measures. The more compelling consequence, however, has been the commercial appropriation of this discourse, and its ironic reprise to promote greater consumption, the opposite of its sponsors’ original intent. The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to analyze selected exemplars of the social marketing campaigns that have given global warming and climate change their cultural content, reframing them as public problems; second, to investigate how this content, once formed, is appropriated by private advertising for commercial ends; and third, to examine how the deployment of parody then inverts the original message to reinforce the values that the message had challenged. A sample of both visual and print media will be analyzed for evidence of these effects and to suggest a syntagmatic pattern that tracks the conversion of scientific messages of public concern into for-profit parody. Implications for the fate of risk messages in advanced commercial cultures will be considered.

Victims and Perpetrators: An Argument for Comparative Liability in Criminal Law

This article challenges the legal rule according to which the victim’s conduct is irrelevant to the determination of the perpetrator’s criminal liability. The author attacks this rule from both positive and normative perspectives, and argues that criminal law should incorporate an affirmative defense of comparative liability. This defense would fully or partially exculpate the defendant if the victim by his own acts has lost or reduced his right not to be harmed. Part I tests the descriptive accuracy of the proposition that the perpetrator’s liability does not depend on the conduct of the victim. Criminological and victimological studies strongly suggest that criminal liability may be properly evaluated only in the context of the victim-perpetrator interaction. Moreover, criminal law itself has a number of doctrines, such as consent, self-defense and (to some degree) provocation, which include victims’ actions in the determination of perpetrators’ liability. Part II makes a normative claim that victims’ actions should reduce or eliminate the perpetrator’s liability in all appropriate cases and not merely in the context of a few distinct defenses. This claim draws on: (a) the just desert principle which requires that individuals be punished only for the amount of harm caused by them and not by the victim himself; (b)the efficiency principle, which requires that, in order to preserve the moral authority of criminal law, penal sanctions should not be overused and the law should develop in a dialogue with community perceptions of right and wrong; (c)the consistency principle, which mandates that punishment-justifying considerations be applied systematically; (d)the analysis of mitigating factors recognized at the penalty stage of a criminal trial; and (e)considerations of fairness underlying the comparative liability reform in torts. Part III proposes a basis for a theory of comparative liability in criminal law and suggests a method that makes it possible to distinguish between cases, in which the victim’s conduct should provide the perpetrator with a complete or partial defense, and cases, in which the victim’s conduct should be legally irrelevant. The author offers a unitary explanation to the defenses of consent, self-defense and provocation. That explanation lies in the principle of conditionality of rights. Pursuant to this principle, the perpetrator’s liability should be reduced to the extent the victim, by his own acts, has changed the balance of rights between him and the perpetrator. The victim can do that either voluntarily, by waiving a right not to be harmed, or involuntarily, by forfeiting this right as a result of his unjustified attack on some legally recognized rights of the perpetrator. The article concludes with comparative analysis of factors that may affect the determination of the scope of the perpetrator’s liability. These factors include the magnitude of the affected rights of the perpetrator and the victim, the causative impact of their respective conduct, and their personal culpability. Victims and Perpetrators: An Argument for Comparative Liability in Criminal Law

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002: A German Perspective

1. Within Europe, the traditional concept of crime being flawed, individual conduct dominated. The concept of deterrence, achieved through the threat of punishment, and the related concept of personal culpability, made the representatives of a corporate entity in which a crime had been committed criminally liable insofar as they either participated in the causal act through their own doing or did not prevent it even though their position within the entity meant that they had a duty to act. Hence, in many cases in which an act of the representative could not be proved, the crime of omission became the most important instrument of criminal justice. In particular the principals

The Fault of Not Knowing: A Comment

In a recent paper, George Fletcher points out a surface anomaly in tort system's adherence to a standard (under banner of negligence), and its correlative refusal to excuse, under ordinary circumstances, individual who in good faith attempts to exercise reasonable care but simply falls short of mark. If an actor injures another through inadvertence, Fletcher observes, situation appears on its face to be one in which tort, in guise of negligence and contrary to its grounding in fault, is assigning liability in absence of personal culpability. The objective standard universally recognized in obeisance to the reasonable person seems to weave a strand of strict liability into tapestry of negligence. The central theme in Fletcher's paper is to show how negligence, in sense of the of not remains centered on a foundation of personal blameworthiness, despite its surface appearance of adhering to an external standard of conduct that risk-imposing individual may be incapable of satisfying. In this comment, I begin by indicating where I find common ground with Fletcher. In fact, I will suggest that his fault of not knowing rests on a well-established notion of role of custom in tort law. But I then indicate through discussion of leading tort scholarship and cases that his broader thesis - that once acknowledging of not knowing, negligence can be squared with personal blameworthiness - cannot withstand sustained analysis. In a final section, I open inquiry still further by briefly commenting on constraining effect of addressing problem of remedies for accidental harm exclusively in terms of and strict liability.

Bias Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: Culpability in Context

Nine years after Wisconsin v. Mitchell, bias crime statutes have become a settled feature of the American legal landscape. In philosophical terms, however, these statutes remain only partially understood. The most widely accepted justification for the penalty enhancement associated with bias crime statutes derives from evidence that these crimes potentially engender more harm than do ordinary crimes. Scholars have less successfully articulated, however, the special blameworthiness of the bias crime perpetrator that justifies his enhanced punishment on the grounds of his personal culpability. The dominant account of the culpability associated with bias crimes derives from a conviction that the perpetrator's motives are particularly culpable. In this article, by contrast, I argue that the perpetrator's decision to select a particular victim - and not necessarily his motive - is the morally relevant event, and the basis upon which we may justly inflict increased punishment. Traditional explanations of the culpability associated with bias crimes suffer from a failure to consider fully the group aspects of these crimes. Crimes against humanity under international law provide a useful prism through which we can examine bias crimes. Through a comparison with crimes against humanity, I argue that the bias crime perpetrator's culpability can only be understood by reviewing the social context in which the perpetrator acts and his understanding of that context. In particular, it is important to consider the perpetrator's understanding of discrimination against the group of which his victim is a member. I maintain that a perpetrator should be found culpable for contributing to this discrimination - and hence guilty of a bias crime - if he intentionally selects a victim who is a member of a group subject to discrimination in the community, and if he is at least reckless as to that discrimination. Under these conditions, the bias crime perpetrator's actions reinforce and perpetuate social meanings that facilitate and solidify existing discrimination. His conscious decision to select a member of a vulnerable group as his victim makes the perpetrator more blameworthy: he knowingly or recklessly joins other wrongdoers in a demonstration of bias and discrimination that ultimately harms our society.

The Fault of Not Knowing: A Comment

In a recent paper, George Fletcher points out a surface anomaly in tort system's adherence to a standard (under banner of negligence), and its correlative refusal to excuse, under ordinary circumstances, individual who in good faith attempts to exercise reasonable care but simply falls short of mark. If an actor injures another through inadvertence, Fletcher observes, situation appears on its face to be one in which tort, in guise of negligence and contrary to its grounding in fault, is assigning liability in absence of personal culpability. The objective standard universally recognized in obeisance to the reasonable person seems to weave a strand of strict liability into tapestry of negligence. The central theme in Fletcher's paper is to show how negligence, in sense of the of not remains centered on a foundation of personal blameworthiness, despite its surface appearance of adhering to an external standard of conduct that risk-imposing individual may be incapable of satisfying. In this comment, I begin by indicating where I find common ground with Fletcher. In fact, I will suggest that his fault of not knowing rests on a well-established notion of role of custom in tort law. But I then indicate through discussion of leading tort scholarship and cases that his broader thesis - that once acknowledging of not knowing, negligence can be squared with personal blameworthiness - cannot withstand sustained analysis. In a final section, I open inquiry still further by briefly commenting on constraining effect of addressing problem of remedies for accidental harm exclusively in terms of and strict liability.

The socio-spatial stigmatization of homelessness and HIV/AIDS: Toward an explanation of the NIMBY syndrome

A central element of community response to controversial human service facilities is the socio-spatial construction of stigma. This paper develops a conceptual framework for understanding the constitution and role of stigma in community rejection of human services, particularly those associated with homelessness and HIV/AIDS. Three facets of stigma concerning homelessness and HIV/AIDS (non-productivity, dangerousness, and personal culpability) are offered as a way of understanding the rising tide of community rejection toward human service facilities.

Problems in Blaming and Punishing Individuals for Human Rights Violations: the Example of the Berlin Wall Shootings

This chapter focuses on the problems of criminal prosecution as exemplified by the Berlin Wall cases. It outlines the relevant post-unification criminal law issues. The chapter leads to a discussion of the international and constitutional law issues the courts had to face in establishing the border soldiers' criminal responsibility. It looks at problem of individual attribution and personal culpability. The chapter summarizes the special problems in trying Honecker and other top-level officials. The author questions the reasonableness of the sentencing in the Mauerschutzen cases and raise the issue of appropriate sanctions in human rights cases. The chapter provides some perspectives on the legitimacy of ex post facto criminal justice and on the problems of state prosecution of human rights cases in general. The Mauerschutzen cases in unified Germany illustrate that blaming and punishing individuals for human rights violations within the framework of the criminal justice system is fraught with difficulties. Keywords:Berlin wall shooting; blaming; ex post facto ; human rights violations; Mauerschutzen ; personal culpability; post-unification criminal law; punishing