Reliability Of Testimony Research Articles

Evaluating Children's Competency to Testify: Developing a Rational Method to Assess a Young Child's Capacity to Offer Reliable Testimony in Cases Alleging Child Sex Abuse

There are few crimes which elicit a response as emotionally charged as those involving an allegation of child sexual abuse. Given the paucity of physical and scientific evidence in many cases and the resulting need to rely almost exclusively on the testimony of a very young child, the cases present unique challenges for judges, prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys. While many scholars have addressed the dangers inherent in questioning children, such as creating false memories and improperly influencing testimony, there has been little exploration of the means employed by courts to evaluate a child’s ability to offer reliable testimony. Many courts make a threshold finding of competence to testify after only a cursory examination that does not adequately test the child’s true capacity to provide credible and factually accurate testimony. This article explores the nature of children’s testimony and the inadequacy of the traditional competency hearing in either testing the child’s ability to distinguish fantasy from reality or in judging his or her understanding of the consequences of testifying truthfully. The article provides suggestions for restructuring the competency hearing to make it a meaningful process by which the judge and jury can determine the young child's capacity to offer reliable testimony.

Notes on a Forgotten Manuscript of Hesiod's Theogony

AbstractIn this article the author studies a new witness (Vaticanus gr. 1825) of Hesiod's Theogony that has been overlooked by recent editors of Hesiod's poems. It is a reliable testimony that should be preferred over one of its apographa, Laurentianus Conv. Soppr. 15, frequently quoted in West's edition.

‘Robust and Raring to Go?’– Judges' Perceptions of Child Witnesses

This article explores judicial perceptions of child witnesses. It considers the impact of recent legislation in England and Wales as well as in Scotland which classified all child witnesses as vulnerable and introduced a series of special measures to facilitate children's evidence. The article reports the findings of an empirical research study conducted with the judiciary in Scotland which suggests that judicial perceptions of child witnesses extend across a complex spectrum where a child may be viewed as vulnerable but is also likely to be seen as suggestible, reliable or resilient. The article advances two propositions. First, that the statutory conceptualization of children as invariably vulnerable has not displaced established beliefs concerning children's suggestibility and therefore has made little difference to perceptions of their ability to produce reliable testimony. Second, that focusing on children's potential for resilience rather than their vulnerability may prove a more productive conceptualization of children, one which could better support their capability as witnesses.

The Basis of Epistemic Trust: Reliable Testimony or Reliable Sources?

ABSTRACTWhat is the nature of children's trust in testimony? Is it based primarily on evidential correlations between statements and facts, as stated by Hume, or does it derive from an interest in the trustworthiness of particular speakers? In this essay, we explore these questions in an effort to understand the developmental course and cognitive bases of children's extensive reliance on testimony. Recent work shows that, from an early age, children monitor the reliability of particular informants, differentiate between those who make true and false claims and keep that differential accuracy in mind when evaluating new information from these people. We argue that this selective trust is likely to involve the mentalistic appraisal of speakers rather than surface generalizations of their behavior. Finally, we review the significance of children's deference to adult authority on issues of naming and categorization. In addition to challenging a purely inductive account of trust, these and other findings reflect a potentially rich set of tools brought by children to the task of learning from people's testimony.

Conscious awareness in PVS and MCS

Throughout the final month of Theresa Schiavo's life, her parents insisted she was in a minimally conscious state (MCS),1 not in a persistent vegetative state (PVS).2 Based on reliable expert medical testimony, Judge Greer ruled that Schiavo was in a PVS and beyond hope of significant improvement. Her postmortem examination revealed profound and widespread cortical, subcortical, and thalamic damage consistent with a PVS,3 but even these findings did not conclusively settle the dispute. How can neurologists prove that a brain-damaged patient utterly lacks conscious awareness and has no hope of meaningful recovery? There is a biologic limitation to what any person can know about the quantity and quality of another person's awareness. No one can directly experience the conscious life of another person, so our clinical knowledge is inferential. A neurologist can apply auditory, visual, somesthetic, noxious, or olfactory stimuli and on the basis of the quality of the patient's responses make a reasoned judgment as to that person's level of awareness. Although an experienced and skillful neurologist usually will be correct, there exists a possibility that, despite the absence of clinically apparent evidence of conscious awareness, the patient remains aware at a level that cannot be adequately assessed clinically.4 The difference between a severely brain-damaged person who retains awareness and one who does not is the essential difference …

The Basis of Epistemic Trust: Reliable Testimony or Reliable Sources?

What is the nature of children’s trust in testimony? Is it based primarily on evidential correlations between statements and facts, as stated by Hume, or does it derive from an interest in the trustworthiness of particular speakers? In this essay, we explore these questions in an effort to understand the developmental course and cognitive bases of children’s extensive reliance on testimony. Recent work shows that, from an early age, children monitor the reliability of particular informants, differentiate between those who make true and false claims and keep that differential accuracy in mind when evaluating new information from these people. We argue that this selective trust is likely to involve the mentalistic appraisal of speakers rather than surface generalizations of their behavior. Finally, we review the significance of children’s deference to adult authority on issues of naming and categorization. In addition to challenging a purely inductive account of trust, these and other findings reflect a potentially rich set of tools brought by children to the task of learning from people’s testimony.

Access to Justice: An SLP’s Guide to Helping Persons with Complex Communication Needs Voice Their Case

Access to Justice: An SLP’s Guide to Helping Persons with Complex Communication Needs Voice Their Case

John Venn’s opposition to probability as degree of belief

John Venn is known as one of the clearest expounders of the interpretation of probability as the frequency of a particular outcome in a potentially unlimited series of possible events. This view he held to be incompatible with the alternate interpretation of probability as a measure of the degree of belief that would rationally be held about a certain outcome based upon the reliability of testimony and other prior information. This paper explores the reasons why Venn may have been so opposed to the degree-of-belief interpretation and suggests that it may have been a way for him to resolve a conflict in his own mind between his ideas of proper scientific methods of inference and the religious beliefs that he held as a young man.

Ida Fink's Scraps and Traces: Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives

Ida Fink's Scraps and Traces:Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives Ruth Ginsburg "Ja, Das ist der Plaz" ["Yes, this is the place"]—Simon Strebnik, the survivor of the Chelmno extermination camp, identifies, in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah,1 a site of innocent "nothing," covering up and silencing an act of annihilation, an act of eradication. A site of absence like this, where you see nothing because you see "nothing," a place that arrests a time of disappearing, of vanishing into nothing, is what I would tentatively call a "negative" chronotope. And "Yes, of course she recognizes it. Why shouldn't she? That was their last ghetto" (135).2 Yes, this is the place the nameless survivor in Ida Fink's story "Traces" identifies in an old photograph as "their last ghetto," reduced "in the last stage . . . to this one little" snow covered "street" (136). There are traces of footsteps in the snow in the foreground. Reduced, voided, silenced and covered up, the place stores the time of extinction. The woman, and the reader, are made to look into a void, into a "non-transcendent emptiness," an emptiness that is not a spiritually charged, capitalized "Nothingness," nor a nothing that encapsulates the Human Condition. Neither does it indicate an endless speculation of a deadly serious language-game. It is simply empty. This empty place is an ambivalent space that is and is not itself. It is that "nothing" that has not "been able to fill, or even cover over, the gaping pit."3 It marks its radical difference from its own past. It is a trace of itself. Here, again, [End Page 205] is a "negative" chronotope. In this case too, it structures a narrative that attempts to capture the moment of disappearance in a place charged with "not," a place under erasure (cf. Baer 20, 23). One could choose from a vast number of terms for that which was and is no more, to distinguish it from that which has never been. The concepts negating presence, from absence to disappearance, from emptiness to void and nothingness, have a long history of philosophical and theological discourse behind them, from the Fathers of the Church to Sartre and Heidegger.4 Yet the experience of Simon Strebnik and the survivor of "Traces" resists conceptualization. Made to confront and identify the deceptive, self negating empty stage of the theater of death, they can only look, perceive, and assert its placeness. They can only see the spatial materiality of an index with an abyss at its center; a setting delineating an excruciatingly long but fleeting moment of dying. I This collection of essays is about narrative as a way of thinking. Trauma, by expert definition, is anything but a way of thinking. However, for narrators and characters, as well as for readers and writers, narrative is not merely a way of thinking—it may be a way of perceiving, of remembering, and perhaps, above all, of (re)experiencing living and dying. For writers, it may be a way of surviving, even; for some "surviving" writers—a way of speaking the truth of an experience of "not being," of becoming "nothing." For apart from the many psychological needs to narrate, apart from the inner urgency to shape experience for whatever reason or purpose, some writers have expressed their conviction that fictional narrative is the only way through which the truth of an ineffable "negative" reality, which otherwise eludes comprehension, may be apprehended and transmitted. Fiction, for them, becomes reliable testimony. At least, this is what Jorge Semprún felt when writing of his experience in the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald in the form of a fictional autobiography: "Only the [End Page 206] artifice of a masterly narrative will prove capable of conveying the truth of the testimony . . . would help reality to seem real, and truth to be believable" (Suleiman 4). Like Semprún in his autobiographical texts, Ida Fink, the Israeli-Polish writer, aspires in her stories to convince us of the reality of the inconceivable, and to "narrow the fissure between the truth of experience and its literary representation" (Wilczinski 27). Even if fictional, it is all real: "Everything...

The cult of St. Vitus among the Serbs in the middle ages

Vitus, a native of Sicily, who was martyred during the emperor Diocletian's persecutions, is not well known among Orthodox Christians. However, his feast day, which is celebrated on June 15th, occupies an extremely important place in the minds of the Serbian people, as Vidovdan. At the end of the 19th century, Jovan Vuckovic, a learned priest, concluded that, for the Serbs, the significance of the feast of St. Vitus does not lie in any particular reverence for St. Vitus himself, but in the fact that the Battle of Kosovo took place on his feast day. Nevertheless, there are reliable testimonies that the Serbs did revere this martyr from Sicily, in the Middle Ages. The earliest is to be found in the menologion in the Miroslav Gospel, and St. Vitus is also recorded in hagiographic sources that appeared after the establishment of the autocephalous Serbian Church. We find the most frequent mention of him in the manuscript synaxaria of the so-called First recession of the Menologue of Basil II (from 13th and 14th centuries), and several 14th century menaions contain an akolouthia dedicated to St. Vitus.

Forensic psychology in Iceland: a survey of members of the Icelandic Psychological Society.

Forensic psychology is a rapidly growing specialism within psychology. A survey was carried out among the 152 members of the Icelandic Psychological Society (Sálfradingafélagi Islands) about their involvement and role in court work. Out of 101 psychologists who responded to the survey, 39 reported having been involved in court work, of whom 34 had testified in court. The great majority of court work of the psychologists involved assessments relating to child-care and custody proceedings, but there was evidence that Icelandic psychologists are increasingly becoming involved in criminal cases concerning criminal responsibility and the reliability of testimony. They are working much more independently of medical colleagues than before.

Korean p'ansori Narrative

Korean p’ansori Narrative Chan Park (bio) What is oral tradition? Oral tradition is a living community. Distanced from the languages, tales, and populaces of today, oral tradition is habitually dissociated from the narrative behaviors of the present. Oral tradition may seem fixed and encased in the past, but it too evolves with time. From a strawmat birth to a national treasure, p’ansori, a Korean storysinging tradition, has continually crossed regions, styles, schools, languages, genders, genres, social classes, modes of transmission and presentation, and performance contexts. Emerging from regional shaman ritual chant, p’ansori narrative became injected with Confucian ethics and literary calibers in the nineteenth century, designated as an Intangible Cultural Treasure in the twentieth century, and continues to inform the Korean narrative past. The text of oral tradition is the voice that sings. Compared with second-language pedagogy targeting languages existing today, oral tradition focuses on sociolinguistic life long obsolete but essential to interpreting epic’s inner dimensions less visible to a modern eye. In p’ansori, the voice that narrates is more than a message-bearer. It is the very text of the tradition that takes total commitment from the learner. Perpetuating a quaint story-singing tradition against the tide of modernity is challenging to say the least, and p’ansori thrives much less on improvisation or new composition than on the confirmation of its past. Still, its performance is a reconstruction of not merely the past, but the continuing past. In the process of unquestioning emulation emerges an individual voice expressive simultaneously of the tradition and of the performer’s own interpretive aesthetics. In sum, p’ansori as an oral tradition is the entire process of its tradition-making, tradition-bearing, and tradition-reenacting: emergence, proliferation, preservation, valorization, pedagogy, acquisition, adaptation, and performance here and now. [End Page 241] Future directions Today, audiovisual technology helps preserve p’ansori for future reference, while p’ansori discourses themselves habitually deviate from their oral existence as researchers ignore or invalidate indigenous voices in favor of scientifically situated secondary voices. The ultimate challenge is conceptualizing the acoustic depths of orality. Due to the experiential nature of the understanding of performance, the true shape and size of the oral tradition may not be fully fathomed, even if graced with the most reliable testimonies by insiders, unless seen from inside the tradition. In order to understand the nature of oral tradition, one must first enter its performative world as a humble student. Outside the p’ansori designated as “archetypes,” efforts to tune its narrative structure to the stories of the present need to be amplified. From another angle, actual performances of oral traditions have yet to cross cultural and linguistic barriers. Due to its nonverbal modes of communication, dance or instrumental art freely crosses regional and national boundaries, but it is difficult for oral tradition to do so on account of its language-dependency, as well as the necessity for communication between the performer and the audience. Insofar as oral tradition is a narrative event, its study should rightfully include discovery or invention of cross-cultural or cross-linguistic narrativity beyond the customary use of subtitles or adaptation. Chan Park Ohio State University Chan Park Chan E. Park is Associate Professor of Korean language, literature, and performance studies at Ohio State University. She researches p’ansori, Korean story-singing, related oral narrative/lyrical/dramatic traditions, and their place in the shaping of modern Korean drama. Among her publications is Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story-Singing (2003). References Park 1998a. Park 1998a Chan E. Park. “Playful Reconstruction of Gender in P’ansori.” Korean Studies, 22:62–81. Google Scholar Park 1998b. Park 1998b ———. “Why Recitative, Instead of Just Speaking or Singing, in P’ansori Storytelling?” In Perspectives on Korea. Ed. by Sang-Oak Lee and Duk-Soo Park. Sydney: Wild Peony. pp. 499–510. Google Scholar Park 1998c. Park 1998c ———. “P’ansori in Trans-National Context: The Global Transmission of Korean Performance Tradition.” Korean Culture, 19:14–21. [End Page 242] Google Scholar Park 1999. Park 1999 ———. “P’ansori, the Ancient Art of Storytelling.” In Traditional Storytelling Today: An International Sourcebook. Ed. by Margaret Read McDonald...

The Acquaintance Principle

The Acquaintance Principle maintains that aesthetic knowledge must be acquired through first-hand experience of the object of knowledge and cannot be transmitted from person to person. This implies that aesthetic knowledge of an object cannot be acquired either from an accurate description of the non-aesthetic features of the object or from reliable testimony of its aesthetic character. The question I address is whether there is any sound argument in support of the Principle. 1 give scant consideration to the possibility of deriving knowledge from a non-aesthetic description. If this were to be a real possibility, it would certainly disprove the Acquaintance Principle, but its impossibility would not establish it. Furthermore, if the way knowledge were to be derived from a non-aesthetic description were through its enabling a person to imagine the object (as one might imagine music from a score), a defender of the Acquaintance Principle might simply deem imagining to be a form of first-hand experience. I focus on the possibility of acquiring aesthetic knowledge through reliable testimony because here there is a style of argument that, if correct, would rule out the possibility of knowledge of an item's aesthetic properties being transmitted to someone who lacks the requisite first-hand experience, and the manoeuvre of including imagining under the head of first-hand experience is not available. An argument of this kind is, I believe, the only possible way of establishing the Acquaintance Principle. I try to show that this style of argument fails and that the Acquaintance Principle should be rejected.

Improving the Reliability of Expert Testimony in Suicide Litigation

The topic of suicide assessment is of interest to mental health practitioners because it is one where they often feel very susceptible to criticism in the event of a completed suicide. In the absence of defined academic or professional standards, practitioners rightfully feel vulnerable to the potential consequences of a legally challenged assessment. The lack of recognized standards is also problematic for trial courts because it forces them to rely heavily on the testimony of expert witnesses. In recent years the standard for admissibility of proposed expert testimony in federal court has changed significantly, shifting from emphasizing experts' credentials as the primary bases for their testimony to a more scientific analysis of the methods and practices they used in reaching their conclusions. The federal standard gives far more latitude to trial judges to accept or reject an expert's proposed testimony based on its perceived relevance and reliability. These new standards permanently change the criteria attorneys will use in selecting experts to provide mental health testimony. Now attorneys must find experts who not only are qualified but whose testimony can withstand rigorous examination to determine its scientific merit. This paper acquaints potential mental health experts with these new guidelines and presents criteria for developing more objective guidelines to evaluate the adequacy of any suicide assessment while ensuring the scientific reliability of testimony.

A History of the Synoptic Problem: The Canon, the Text, the Composition, and the Interpretation of the Gospels

A History of the Synoptic Problem: The Canon, the Text, the Composition, and the Interpretation of the Gospels, by David Laird Dungan. ABRL. New York: Doubleday, 1999Pp. xiv + 526. $39.95 (cloth). David Dungan's recent contribution to the ABRL, A History of the Synoptic Problem, is an excellent intermediate-level survey of the Synoptic Problem. This recent history is commendable for at least three reasons: (1) it sets the debate in its historic economic, political, and intellectual settings; (2) it comprehensively covers the debate through the past two millennia; and (3) it rationally calls into question common assumptions among the majority of scholars today. As the title suggests, Dungan describes the history of the debate from the first century to the present. As his is a single-volume treatment, the author must often use broad strokes to sketch the picture of this history. With each stroke, however, Dungan offers a plethora of documentation to support his statements and reconstructions. The result is a quality historiography that offers the student a guide and the scholar a reference to the development of the debate through the centuries. Dungan lays out the history of the debate according to the way major figures have answered the central question Where may I find reliable testimony to the Lord Jesus?' In demonstrating the responses to this question, Dungan discusses the development of the debate according to three main periods. The first stretches from the first century until the time of Augustine; the second is from the Italian Renaissance until the end of World War II; and the third includes the decades since WWII. In a highly readable, narrative style, Dungan discusses the salient developments and challenges in the early church through the texts of Luke, Papias, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Marcion, and Celsus. Then he illustrates how Origen addressed all four elements of the Synoptic Problem for the first time (canon, text, composition, and hermeneutics). Here, Dungan goes beyond many treatments of this topic as he demonstrates the need to consider the canonical and textual issues before one addresses the compositional and hermeneutical elements of the problem. Next, the author illustrates the Christian movement embattled by Porphyry's attacks and gives a plausible interpretation of Eusebius's works (Preparation for the Gospel, Demonstration of the Gospel, Ecclesiastical History, and Gospel Canons) as a response to the critic. Further, Tertullian's remarks on the logic of canonization in The Prescription of Heretics are used to demonstrate the view that unity was equated with veracity. Dungan closes the first part of the book with a discussion of Augustine's harmonization of the Gospels. In this second form of the Synoptic Problem, the author recounts Augustine's assumptions and method in resolving the issue. This refutation of the Manichaeans is also seen to close the book on the Porphyrian and Neoplatonic criticisms. Dungan grants that the official suppression of these views may be more the reason for the silence than Augustine's writing; nevertheless, Augustine's treatment stood until the beginning of the Enlightenment. In the second part of the book, Dungan addresses the cultural, political, economic, and technological elements that contributed to the development of the historical-critical method and the modern understanding and common resolution of the Synoptic Problem. Beginning with the Italian Renaissance, Dungan demonstrates how the scientific approach to biblical studies developed out of the breakdown of the medieval synthesis and resulted in denaturing the Bible so that it became no more than a handbook of morality any decent person could accept (p. 148). In successive chapters, Dungan shows how the Enlightenment and Romantic understandings of nature changed the basis of reason. The purely physical view of the cosmos precipitated the understanding of the universe as a thing and the basis of knowledge as empirical data. …

The Reliability of Testimony

Are we entitled or justified in taking the word of others at face value? An affirmative answer to this question is associated with the views of Thomas Reid. Recently, C. A. J. Coady has defended a Reidian view in his impressive and influential book, Testimony: A Philosophical Study. His central and most original argument for his positions involves reflection upon the practice of giving and accepting reports, of making assertions and relying on the word of others. His argument purports to show that testimony is, by its very nature, a reliable form of evidence about the way the world is. The argument moves from what we do to why we are justified in doing it. Although I am sympathetic with both the Reidian view and Coady's attempt to connect why we rely on others with why we are entitled to rely on others, I find Coady's argument ineffective.

The management of opiate addicts in police custody

Many suspects detained at police stations for questioning are under the influence of illicit drugs. This presents a problem, as the reliability of confessions made under the influence of drugs or whilst experiencing withdrawal symptoms may be adversely affected. This paper reviews the current management of opiate addicts in police custody and relevant legislation in the UK to highlight some of the difficulties that arise. It concentrates in particular on the specific problem of defining and assessing fitness for interview in this group and reviews the current evidence of the effect of opiates and opiate withdrawal symptoms on the reliability of testimony. It concludes that any framework for the assessment of fitness for interview must address the question of reliability. More needs to be known about the effects of opiates and opiate withdrawal symptoms on the reliability of testimony in the police interview situation.

The management of opiate addicts in police custody.

Many suspects detained at police stations for questioning are under the influence of illicit drugs. This presents a problem, as the reliability of confessions made under the influence of drugs or whilst experiencing withdrawal symptoms may be adversely affected. This paper reviews the current management of opiate addicts in police custody and relevant legislation in the UK to highlight some of the difficulties that arise. It concentrates in particular on the specific problem of defining and assessing fitness for interview in this group and reviews the current evidence of the effect of opiates and opiate withdrawal symptoms on the reliability of testimony. It concludes that any framework for the assessment of fitness for interview must address the question of reliability. More needs to be known about the effects of opiates and opiate withdrawal symptoms on the reliability of testimony in the police interview situation.

Facilitating the Communicative Competence of the Child Witness

Efforts to elicit reliable testimony from children are frustrated by developmental limitations on children's communicative competence. This study examines (a) how children cope when adults ask incomprehensible questions, and (b) whether interview perfonnance can be enhanced by facilitating children's comprehension monitoring and response strategies. One hundred and eighty children, half 6 and half 8-years-olds, were assigned randomly within age group to 1 of 3 treatment conditions (training, instructions, control) and I of 2 interviewer conditions (familiar, unfamiliar). Children's memories of a previously staged event were tested with interview questions varying in comprehensibility. Results suggest that when confronted with difficult-to-comprehend questions regarding easily recalled information, children in the control group tried to answer anyway but were as likely to respond incorrectly as correctly. In contrast, when children were instructed to verbalize their lack of comprehension, and given a rationale for doing so, they performed significantly better than the control group. Moreover, when children received instructions and prepared for the interview with practice detecting and coping with noncomprehension, the training group demonstrated marked improvements in interview performance compared with the other 2 groups. Results demonstrate that although children's limited communication skills present a barrier to reliable testimony, it is one that might be minimized by instructions or preparation of child witnesses.

Justifying Deception in Social Science Research

The use of deceptive techniques is common in social science research. It is argued that the use of such techniques is incompatible with the standard of informed consent, which is widely employed in the ethical evaluation of research involving human subjects. A number of proposals to justify the use of deceptions in social science research are examined, in the face of its apparent incompatibility with the standard of informed consent, and found to be inadequate. An alternative method of justification is outlined, which enables some deceived participants in social science research to rationally and autonomously choose to participate in that research. The alternative method of justification appeals to the idea of indirect consent, which is introduced. It is argued that research subjects who receive reliable testimony regarding research procedures can sometimes be placed in a position to rationally and autonomously consent indirectly to participation in experiments and studies, even if these involve significant deceptions.