Public Outrage Research Articles

Legislatively Revising Kelo V. City of New London: Eminent Domain, Federalism, and Congressional Powers

Legislatively Revising Kelo V. City of New London: Eminent Domain, Federalism, and Congressional Powers

Marketing Government Reforms

SUMMARY This article examines government communication on two large-scale Belgian governmental reforms: the Federal Administration and the police forces. Using Lees-Marshment's typology of marketing processes, we identify the marketing of the changes by the Federal Administration as sales oriented: a finished product or an expert-developed administrative reform project to be sold to the public. Declining enthusiasm for communication and growing product disagreement gradually forced this reform to disappear from the market. The Police reform followed a market-oriented marketing process. It responded to public outrage. The Government merely reacted to external information. This explains why it failed to deal with a changed market situation. A content analysis of articles in both popular and quality newspapers examines the representation of both reforms in the media and seems to confirm our observations. This article shows that marketing reforms are extremely difficult when there is no shared understanding of the product to be marketed.

Dangerous People With Severe Personality Disorders

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article LettersFull AccessDangerous People With Severe Personality DisordersMaju Mathews, M.D., M.R.C.Psych., Manu Mathews, M.D., and Kumar Budur, M.D., D.C.P.Maju MathewsSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.R.C.Psych., Manu MathewsSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., and Kumar BudurSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., D.C.P.Published Online:1 Jul 2005https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.56.7.873AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail To the Editor: We read Dr. Appelbaum's April column (1) and wondered how most psychiatrists in the United States would propose to handle "dangerous people with severe personality disorders" (DSPD). The term was coined by government officials after a public outrage over the case of Michael Stone, who in 1996, after he was refused treatment because of a diagnosis of personality disorder, carried out his threat and bludgeoned to death Lin Russel and her six-year-old daughter Megan in Kent (2). Our guess is that most psychiatrists in the United States would not have ignored this psychopath on the basis of his nontreatability. The U.K. government was responding to a loophole that led to these murders by proposing the DSPD category and the broadened criteria for commitment of persons in this category. This controversial concept is analogous to the concept in the United States of sexually violent predators, a form of antisocial personality disorder. At least 17 states provide for commitment of these individuals after their imprisonment (3), a decision that has been repeatedly backed by the U.S. Supreme Court.Dr. Appelbaum and others have questioned the rationale behind such a diagnostic category. We would like to reiterate that psychiatric diagnoses have evolved on the basis of emerging science and societal metamorphosis. Also, grading of diagnoses on the basis of severity is not unique to personality disorder. Mood disorders and mental retardation readily come to mind. Consequently, we do not believe that the U.K. government overreacted by proposing DSPD as an extreme form of antisocial personality disorder.Another point raised by Dr. Appelbaum is the issue of treatability. Before the U.K. proposal, psychiatrists could reject requests to treat people with personality disorder—no matter how dangerous they may be to others—on the basis of the treatability criterion. This is indeed puzzling, because we do not use treatability to determine whether to provide services for people with other psychiatric diagnoses. In the United States we do not discharge to the community patients with borderline personality disorder who are in crisis, because the disorder is not readily treatable. Mental retardation is a DSM-IV-TR diagnostic entity for which we strive to do our best in terms of providing services, even though the disorder itself is untreatable. When psychopathy coexists with another mental disorder, how does one determine treatability, and when does one decide to stop treatment?Unlike Dr. Appelbaum, we agree with the "holistic" framework of treatment that includes nursing care and habilitation. Some habilitative programs proposed for dangerous people with severe personality disorders have been used for people with mental retardation and borderline personality disorder. Such programs may help patients respond to daily stressful situations adaptively rather than in maladaptive overemotional and aggressive ways.Dr. Maju Mathews is an attending psychiatrist and assistant professor at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. Dr. Manu Mathews is a psychiatry resident at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, where Dr. Budur is a fellow.

At the Heart of Controversy: Genentech Markets a Genetically Engineered Drug

This case, developed from a wide variety of publicly available information, presents ethical and economic issues arising from the development, marketing, and pricing of a biotech drug. Genentech developed TPA, the first genetically engineered drug that could be used in clot-dissolving therapy for heart attack, and marketed it as Activase. Public outrage focused on the disparity between the drug's $10 direct manufacturing cost and what Genentech charged for its drug. Activase/TPA was priced at $2200 a dose, raising immediate concerns about its affordability and therefore availability to those who needed it. Additional issues arise from other events, including concern over related-party relationships between the company and organizations which researched and recommended TPA, as well as aggressive marketing of TPA to physicians and the company's refusal to participate in an international drug study to compare TPA with competitor drugs.

Juvenile Parricide: A Predictable Offense?

ABSTRACT The act of juvenile parricide is a rare crime, but one that is highly publicized and generates much public outrage. Due to it being an offense that has a very low base rate, predicting its occurrence is extremely difficult, if not impossible. The purpose of this study was to assess the predictive utility of both the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY) and Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) on a youth that had been adjudicated on this offense. As expected, given the dynamics surrounding juvenile parricide cases, as well as the general psychological characteristics of the perpetrators, neither the SAVRY nor the PCL: YV would have provided a score that would assist in either the prediction or postdiction of the offense committed by the youth in this Study.

Sovereign Decisions: A Plan for Defeating Federal Review of Tribal Law Applications

Sovereign Decisions:A Plan for Defeating Federal Review of Tribal Law Applications Judge Steve Russell (bio) Congress, Indian lawyers quickly learn, can do pretty much as it pleases with or to Indian nations, starting with unilateral treaty abrogation1 and continuing to the classification of Indians for legal purposes in a manner that would not pass equal protection scrutiny if applied to other minorities.2 Indians' unique status for equal protection purposes can be used to help Indians3 or to hurt them,4 and it flows from their status as the original political entities owning the dirt on which the United States rests. Without the sovereign status of Indian nations, and their ability to make land cession treaties, every land title on the continent would rest on nothing more than the willingness of colonists to remove the aboriginal inhabitants with fire and steel and the willingness of the current occupiers to claim the benefit of that savagery.5 So far, at least, the courts cling to the legal fig leaves woven by Chief Justice John Marshall6 that necessitate some recognition of Indian sovereignty. The average American citizen is ignorant of Indian history and the legal house of cards that Indian sovereignty supports. Sovereignty itself is an obscure concept in American education that most often draws notice in the form of sovereign immunity, an ancient legal doctrine that flows from the maxim "the king can do no wrong." The doctrine has survived kings in the rule that keeps citizens from suing the government without its permission. In the United States, three entities have sovereign immunity: the federal government, state governments, and federally recognized tribal governments. [End Page 65] Everybody hates sovereign immunity when it is brought to his or her attention, and therefore most nontribal governments routinely allow lawsuits over contracts they have entered and garden-variety tort claims such as auto accidents. If they did not, public outrage would probably have killed off the doctrine by now. The Magna Carta, after all, recognized that the king can in fact do wrong, and the American Revolution brought kings into further disrepute in the United States, where legitimate government is firmly believed in this day to derive from the consent of the governed rather than from God. Sovereign immunity on the federal and state levels is a legal anachronism that has survived by making itself invisible in daily life. Everybody hates sovereign immunity of tribal governments even more, because it is misunderstood as racially based and because tribes have handled it less well than states. C & L Enterprises, Inc. v. Citizen Band Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Oklahoma7 is a case from the 2000–2001 term of the Supreme Court that exemplifies tribal mishandling of sovereign immunity. The Potawatomi entered into a contract. After signing the contract but before work got started, the tribe came across additional information that made the contract appear to be unwise. A nongovernmental entity in that position would have to either go through with the unwise deal or "buy it out"—negotiate a settlement with the other party to get released. Since being a sovereign government means never having to say you are sorry, the Potawatomi simply broke the contract and told C & L Enterprises they were out of luck. When the vendor sued, the tribe claimed sovereign immunity. C & L Enterprises took the position that the arbitration clause in the contract bound the tribe to arbitrate the claim and bound the Oklahoma courts to enter a judgment based upon the arbitration award, because the agreement to arbitration was an implied waiver of sovereign immunity. This position put the Potawatomi in the crosshairs of two lines of recent Supreme Court law, one tending to uphold arbitration agreements and one tending to uphold state authority when it comes into contact with tribal (and often even federal) authority—the modern iteration of "states' rights." The Potawatomi originally could have gotten the product they wanted (rather than the one for which they contracted) from C & L Enterprises for $79,000. The tribe chose to break the contract and go with another contractor for $56,784. To save $22,216, the tribe decided to litigate. The original arbitration award...

Tuna, Dolphins, and Purse Seine Fishing in the Eastern Tropical Pacific: The Controversy Continues

Like peace, the real work of saving the ocean is not only carried out in diplomatic chambers and government offices. It is carried out in the hearts and hands of the people. (2) INTRODUCTION: DOLPHIN DEATHS AND THE MARINE MAMMAL PROTECTION ACT During the early 1970's, a historic peak in the environmental movement, fueled by public outrage and activism, resulted in the passage of several new U.S. laws designed to protect the environment. Congress enacted the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) (3) in 1972 to address, among many problems concerning marine mammals, the large number of dolphins killed by the purse seine method of fishing for yellowfin tuna in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean (ETP), (4) a 5 to 7 million square-mile area of ocean that extends roughly from Southern California to the Chilean coastline, and west to Hawaii. (5) The MMPA established a moratorium on the taking (or killing) and importation of marine mammals, including dolphins, except those taken incidentally during commercial fishing operations. (6) Recent MMPA amendments reiterated the fundamental views of Americans and the original intent of Congress that marine mammals have proven themselves to be resources of great international significance, esthetic and recreational as well as economic, and it is the sense of the Congress that they should be protected ... (7) It was the voice of an entire nation that pressured Congress to enact the MMPA, but it was the acts of one man that brought public attention to the decimation of dolphin populations in the ETP as a result of the yellowfin tuna industry's fishing practices. In 1988, American marine biologist Sam LaBudde undertook a daring and dangerous mission: he enlisted as a cook on a Panamanian tuna vessel and secretly filmed purse seine fishing activities. (8) LaBudde was the first person to successfully capture this slaughter on film. (9) LaBudde's widely publicized images depict the brutal annihilation of dolphins then commonplace in purse seine fishing. (10) LaBudde's pictures were the catalyst for a shifting debate regarding dolphins and the ETP purse seine tuna fishing industry. (11) In the beginning, it was purely a domestic dispute concerned with the large number of dolphin deaths. After the MMPA and its amendments successfully lowered dolphin mortality rates, the debate's focus shifted. The issues of recovery of dolphin populations, protection of marine biodiversity, international relations, and consumer fraud now largely replaced dolphin mortality as the debate's central issues. (12) The debate also broadened from a domestic outlook to an international one with the passage of treaties such as the La Jolla Agreement and the Panama Declaration. Along with this shift in focus, a schism has occurred in the previously united environmental community. Several environmental groups backed what they believe to be a workable balance between the economics of fishing and dolphin mortality. Other organizations taken a hard line approach against any dolphin mortality and brought lawsuits against the U.S. government challenging legislation ratifying recent international agreements. This paper will provide a history of the tuna-dolphin debate, beginning with an analysis of the tuna-dolphin relationship. A chronological overview of both domestic and international legislative developments regarding ETP purse seine fishing follows. Finally, two recent court cases, Brower v. Evans (13) and Defenders of Wildlife v. Hogarth, (14) are discussed and analyzed for their potential impact on the continuing debate. TUNA, DOLPHINS, AND PURSE SEINE NETS IN THE ETP Yellowfin tuna is the most economically significant tuna species caught in the ETP. (15) Yellowfin can grow to be 6 feet long (180 cm), and generally weigh anywhere from 11 to 44 pounds (5 to 20 kg). (16) Their size makes yellowfin well fit for solid packing in cans and causes the market demand to be greater for yellowfin than it is for other fish species. …

The Inevitable Instability of American Corporate Governance

American corporate governance faces two core instabilities. The first is the separation of ownership from control - distant and diffuse stockholders own, while concentrated management controls - a separation that creates not only great efficiencies but also big recurring breakdowns. In every decade since World War II, we've faced a fundamental large firm problem. Each emanated from this fundamental instability. We will not stabilize, once-and-for-all, this instability because some form of separation is necessary for large firms, because it provides large efficiencies, and because once we resolve one derivative problem, another will in time arise. The Enron-type scandals are just the latest manifestation of the core fissure in the large American public firm.The second instability arises from our decentralized and porous regulatory system. Decentralization has key advantages - such as flexibility, specialization, and multiple informational channels - but with the advantages come costs in porosity. Our decentralized regulatory system leaves each regulator with weaknesses. Most importantly, they are not fully independent from the regulated. The regulated entities often deter the incompletely independent regulated from acting. The regulated can induce political authorities to deny the regulator enough power to act, they can get Congress to cut the regulator's funding, they can fight the potential regulations in courts and Congress, and they can weaken the quality of the regulation that they face. The Enron-class scandals illustrate this regulatory instability of American corporate governance well. Thus one structural response to the first fissure - separation and managers without immediate bosses - would be to facilitate gatekeeping, via strong boards that check managers, via strong shareholders with the motivation to channel managers toward profitability, via powerfully independent, professionally-driven accountants who verify managers' report card, and so on. Some of these gatekeeping functions arise from contract, best practice, and the natural path of the market. Many are facilitated by regulation, but here the regulated - often managers themselves - can affect the regulatory outcomes, often weakening it. Some regulation that does occur arises when public outrage is sufficiently high that the regulation is more brittle and less supple than would be ideal.Neither of these instabilities can be solved once-and-for-all, so that we can put it behind us. Instead, we resolve the local and immediate problem, move on, and in time face a new problem emanating from one or both of these core instabilities. We muddle through; we don't solve, because we can't.

Pascal's legacy.

The musings of a Belgian monk 300 years ago on the consequences of believing in God, or not, have influenced our Western life probably more than any other scientific or technological invention

News @ a glance

NB cuts: New Brunswick's Conservative government is feeling the sting of public outrage as it cuts hospitals and beds in an attempt to save health care dollars. Premier Bernard Lord is pleading with New Brunswickers, considered one of the unhealthiest populations in Canada, to take more personal

From the courts to the state legislatures: social justice feminism, labor legislation, and the 1920s

The Progressive Era, a period of important social and political activism which stretched from 1890 through the end of World War I, now offers a rich, diverse historiography.1 In contrast, the 1920s...

Scandals, Media, and Citizenship in Contemporary Argentina

This article examines several scandals in 1990s Argentina to discuss the linkages between scandals, media, and citizenship. Suggesting that media publicity is central for scandals to unfold, the article examines a particular arms scandal. An institutional approach that considers the role of different political actors in different scandals shows how and why the media and other institutions contributed to the making and unmaking of scandals. Although scandals offer opportunities for “doing politics by other means,” not all actors are similarly involved. Scandals that dealt with official corruption mainly featured political elites, whereas scandals that followed revelations about human rights violations showed a different pattern: public outrage and citizens’mobilization. In a political context of “scandal fatigue,” scandals do not necessarily trigger public action or moral crusades. Only those scandals that directly affected groups of citizens and were not simply causes d’état were followed by public demonstrations and intense audience attention.

Prosecutorial Power in an Adversarial System: Lessons from Current White Collar Cases and the Inquisitorial Model

Justice Robert Jackson famously characterized the federal prosecutor as having “more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America.” Sixty years later, Judge Gerard Lynch raised the prosecutor’s standing when he remarked that federal prosecutors perform “the role of god.” Current white collar criminal prosecutions suggest that characterizing federal prosecutors as gods is the better description. Riding a tide of public outrage following the discovery of massive fraud at Enron and other firms, prosecutors have attained something akin to heroic status. The failure of the civil

Animals, Women, and Weapons: Blurred Sexual Boundaries in the Discourse of Sport Hunting

AbstractThe furor and public outrage surrounding the release of a fictionalized video in which naked women are hunted down and shot with paintball guns ("Hunting for Bambi") inspired this paper. Arguing that distressing representations of hunting as a sexually charged activity are resilient popular culture images, this paper examines the theoretical framework that links hunting with sex and women with animals and the empirical evidence of such linkages in the hunting discourse of a popular newsstand periodical. Contemporary feminist theory often connects hunting with sex and women with animals. This paper details clear evidence of the juxtaposition of hunting, sex, women, and animals in the photographs, narratives, and advertisements of a random sampling of Traditional Bowhunter magazines (1992-2003). Particularly prominent in the magazines' hunting discourse is the sexualization of animals, women, and weapons, as if the three are interchangeable sexual bodies in narratives of traditional masculinity. This paper concludes that moral outrage at the degradation of women might be targeted best at widely read newsstand periodicals that serve as popular culture precursors to videos that celebrate hunting naked women.

The AMT: Projections and Problems

The individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) operates parallel to the regular income tax, imposing a different income definition, allowable deductions, and rate structure. The AMT grew out of a minimum tax that first took effect in 1970, due to legislation enacted in response to public outrage in the wake of testimony by Treasury Secretary Joseph W. Barr (1969) that 155 high-income households had paid no income tax in 1966. Although it has historically applied to only a very small share of taxpayers, the tax is projected to grow rapidly over the next decade, transforming it from a class tax to a mass tax. The growth of the AMT will create problems of equity, efficiency, complexity, and transparency in the tax system. It will also inevitably force policy makers to focus more attention on the issue, in part because many reform options will prove expensive. This column provides new projections of AMT taxpayers and revenues, and uses the projections to examine some broader implications for tax policy and the AMT.

Technological revolution meets policy and the market: Explaining cross‐national differences in agricultural biotechnology regulation

Abstract. The development and marketing of agricultural biotechnology applications has led to controversies over whether and how to regulate this new technology. The European Union (EU) has imposed severe restrictions on agricultural biotechnology, particularly in terms of approval and labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food. The United States has adopted a far more permissive approval policy and has not required labeling. This article explains these differences in terms of the collective action capacity of consumer and producer interests, and the institutional environment in which regulation has taken place. We find that the regulatory outcome in the EU can be traced back to nongovernmental organizations’ (NGOs) increased collective action capacity due to public outrage, an institutional environment favorable to anti‐biotechnology NGO interests (multilevel regulatory policy making) and a disintegration of the producer coalition due to NGO campaigns and differences in industrial structure. Biotechnology politics in the United States has been dominated by a strong and cohesive coalition of pro‐biotechnology upstream and downstream producers and farmers. Because of lower public outrage and a less favorable institutional environment (centralized regulatory policy making), anti‐biotechnology NGOs in the United States have been largely excluded from agricultural biotechnology policy making.

Shell’s bid to rebuild its reputation

Little more than a decade ago, Shell was a by‐word for corporate mistrust. Not only had it caused public outrage with its plans to sink the Brent Spar oilrig in the Atlantic, but the energy giant was also facing intense opposition to its activities in Nigeria (where it was perceived to be plundering this developing nation). Consequently shareholders were boycotting the company and international suspicion was running high. Yet, according to many critics, these outcomes were the fault of no one but Shell itself, which has learned the hard way the value of social awareness, ethics and trust in a world that appears to be finding less and less time for greed or corruption.

QUALITY IN CHAINS: CONSUMERS AND RISK

QUALITY IN CHAINS: CONSUMERS AND RISK

Human subjects protections, institutional review boards, and cultural anthropological research.

The protection of human participants involved in scientific research is a fundamental obligation of any investigator. Societal concerns with ethical issues surrounding human experimentation were heightened following World War II during the Nuremberg Trials. These proceedings judged medical experiments conducted by Nazis on concentration camp prisoners and resulted in the Nuremberg Code for ethical conduct in scientific research. The Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association 2001 [1964]) reiterated concerns for voluntary and informed consent to research, as have subsequent national and international guidelines for ethical conduct in social, behavioral, and biomedical research.1'2 In the United States, during the 1960's and 1970's, a number of scandals involving the abuse of human subjects in social and medical research were brought to the attention of the public (Beecher 1966; Katz 1972; Faden and Beauchamp 1986; Levine 1986). The Tuskegee experiment, for example, generated public outrage when it was learned that low-income African-American men in Alabama were subjects in a study of the natural course of syphilis and remain untreated even after effective therapy became available (Jones 1981). Concerns over the Tuskegee experiment prompted the appointment of a panel by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to review the study and, in 1974, the National Research Act was passed. This act established the National Commission for the Protection of Human of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The widely cited Belmont Report, published in 1978 by the National Commission, described three basic ethical principles regarding research with human subjects: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Institutional Review Boards Currently, throughout the world, institutional ethics committees have been established to provide oversight and approval for proposals to conduct studies involving human subjects (Brody 1998; Vanderpool 1996). In the U.S., in 1966, the Public Health Service required the establishment of ethics committees at research institutions. Final regulations concerning policies governing research on human subjects were issued in 1981 by the Department of Health and Human Service and reissued a decade later (USDHHS 1991). The Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects is known as the Common Rule and has been adopted by most federal agencies that conduct or fund research on human populations. The federal mandates were clear: any research involving human subjects funded by a Department agency, with certain exemptions, must be evaluated by an Institutional Review Board (IRB). Eight criteria for IRB approval are listed, including minimization of risk, documentation of informed consent, and the protection of privacy and confidentiality. The Office for Human Research Protection (OHRP) plays an important role in the federal regulation of human research subjects' protections, including oversight of Institutional Review Boards. OHRP was established in 2001 when responsibilities were transferred from the National Institute of Health's Office for the Protection of Research Risks (OPRR). IRBs have had a profound impact on the regulation of all research with human participants. In recent years, the Office for Human Research Protections has shut down research at several US-based institutions because of violations of human subjects' protections (Greenberg 1999, 2001; Holden 1999). In this climate, IRBs may be overly zealous in their interpretation and application of federal guidelines, exacerbating the challenges faced by anthropologists and other professionals in seeking approval for studies. Moreover, in recent years, there has been increased debate in both public and professional arenas about a range of ethical issues involving research with human participants (see e.g., Kass et al. 1996; Kahn, Mastroianni and Sugarman 1998; King, Henderson and Stein 1999; Emmanuel, Wendler and Cray 2000; Killen et al. …

A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future. By David Hancocks. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xxii + 280 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $35.00

Federal land management agencies in the United States, particularly those responsible for overseeing public forestlands, are under constant vigil by those demanding environmentally responsible land use. Since the early 199os, many agencies have responded to these political demands by brandishing Ecosystem Management -a framework for environmentally friendly forestry. In 1993, for instance, the United States Forest Service, the National Park Service (NPS), and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), pledged to work with each other to protect and restore biological diversity and preserve wildlife species in the Pacific Northwest. These agencies collaborated on land management plans that would cover over 2omillion acres of federally administered forests from Northern California, Oregon, and Washington to Idaho and western Montana.! These federal agencies embraced Ecosystem Management to varying degrees The NPS, which encountered little criticism, has been content to cooperate with the other two agencies in managing endangered and threatened wildlife species, particularly in the western states. The BLM and the Forest Service, on the other hand, faced both public outrage for their logging policies and court rulings that halted timber operations across the Pacific Northwest-their most profitable forests - and they went further in their engagement with Ecosystem Management. Of these two agencies, the Forest Service's Ecosystem Management has been more involved and has drawn far more media attention, though BLM Director Jim Baca pledged to work "diligently to develop an approach to Ecosystem Management on the 270 million acres of public lands ... for which it has stewardship responsibilities."3 The BLM is and has been significantly smaller agency (in terms of budget and workforce), and it has been significantly less influential in national politics than the Forest Service. Its efforts toward Ecosystem Management have involved playing a junior partner to the larger agency in efforts to meet federal law.4 The Forest Service made Ecosystem Management its policy mantel piece, following a decade of severe internal and external conflict that culminated in a political