The legal, social and ethical controversy of the collection and storage of fingerprint profiles and DNA samples in forensic science

The collection and storage of fingerprint profiles and DNA samples in the field of forensic science for nonviolent crimes is highly controversial. While biometric techniques such as fingerprinting have been used in law enforcement since the early 1900s, DNA presents a more invasive and contentious technique as most sampling is of an intimate nature (e.g. buccal swab). A fingerprint is a pattern residing on the surface of the skin while a DNA sample needs to be extracted in the vast majority of cases (e.g. at times extraction even implying the breaking of the skin). This paper aims to balance the need to collect DNA samples where direct evidence is lacking in violent crimes, versus the systematic collection of DNA from citizens who have committed acts such as petty crimes. The legal, ethical and social issues surrounding the proliferation of DNA collection and storage are explored, with a view to outlining the threats that such a regime may pose to citizens in the not-to-distant future, especially persons belonging to ethnic minority groups

Experience on trial: criminal law and the modernist novel

The cultural forms of modernity become truly modern only when specific experience, as opposed to tradition or faith, is made the basis of epistemological authority. By taking the primary examples of law and literature, this thesis argues that the criminal trial and realist novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries perfectly conform to this statement. But by the early twentieth-century, experience had, as Walter Benjamin put it, ‘fallen in value’. As such, the modernist novel and trial come to have foundations in a non-experience which nullifies identity, subverts repetition and supplants presence with absence. The philosophical basis of experience, its fundamental basis within the novel and trial, and the theoretical manifestations of its dissolving, are outlined in the substantial Introduction to this thesis. Chapter One then specifically examines E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) within the context of the administration of justice in British India. Adela Quested’s supposed assault within the Marabar cave is argued to be a non-event which in no way conforms to the modern sense of experience outlined in the Introduction. This resonates with the state of the trial in British India, in which many magistrates became convinced of the rampant perjury of the natives, turning their decisions into a matter of deciding between the less untrue of two false accounts. Like the non-event in the Marabar cave, the crime that was supposedly at the heart of the trial, the experience at its core, was thus slipping from view. In the second part of Chapter One, it is argued that in his theoretical work, Aspects of the Novel (1927), Forster, responding to anxieties about the novel’s experiential loss, attempted to codify the laws of the realism. This project had much in common with the Acts of legal codification that took place in British India in the 1860s and ‘70s, particularly that of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen’s Indian Evidence Act 1872, which sought to retain a form of representation that was congruent with a traditional conception of experience, thus safeguarding judgment. In Chapter Two, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) is analysed in the light of legal developments in expert witnessing and criminal identification. One of the specific issues of Ford’s novel is the kind of identity it portrays. Without commensurable experiences that can be reasonably assimilated and communicated, the identities of The Good Soldier resist the common recognition of a realist character. Legal developments in the attribution of responsibility and the identification of criminals are argued to parallel the methods by which Ford’s ‘Literary Impressionism’, by contrast, provides the image of his actors. In many ways, these issues were matters for expert witnesses, a growing number of whom were taking the stand in British courts. By taking judgment out of the hand of the layman, expertise was supplanting experience. But this was not limited to the legal forum – in the final part of Chapter Two it is suggested that Ford’s novel, itself, responds to a sense of expert reading. Chapter Three discusses Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) in connection to two points of legal interest. Firstly, the Dreyfus case, which, in its reliance upon absent evidence parallels the denigration of presence that exists in Proust’s novel. Secondly, Dreyfus’ supporters, in calling for a re-trial, asked for a certain form of repetition to take place. The repetitious legal forms of review, appeal, and precedent are then examined in relation to the various forms of repetition that exist within Proust’s work. By utilising Platonic, Nietzschean, and Freudian theories of repetition, it is argued that experience has truly fallen in value when the origins of repetition can be only obliquely discerned. In the Conclusion, the continuity of a realist tradition, and a modernist impulse of non-experience, will be traced in contemporary works – Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and The Staircase (2005), a documentary film by Jean-Xavier De Lestrade about a real murder trial in North Carolina. Finally, a view is offered of the future of experience in the novel and courtroom: one which, based upon John D. Caputo’s reading of Jacques Derrida’s work, stresses the ethical nature of doing truth and making reality in the very act of allowing experience to slip away

Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age

At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed ""death,"" Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, and universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms. It flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence largely overlooked by national media. It's this second life, or better, Poetry's Afterlife, that his book examines and celebrates

Olivet Nazarene University Annual Catalog 2010-2011

https://digitalcommons.olivet.edu/acaff_catalog/1083/thumbnail.jp

Olivet Nazarene University Annual Catalog 2010-2011

https://digitalcommons.olivet.edu/acaff_catalog/1083/thumbnail.jp

Olivet Nazarene University Annual Catalog 2010-2011

https://digitalcommons.olivet.edu/acaff_catalog/1083/thumbnail.jp

Alternative perspectives on school exclusion

This thesis explores, from non-standard, alternative perspectives, the subject of the permanent exclusion of children from school, especially avoidable exclusions. I discuss my work as a teacher and educational psychologist, a witness to and actor in this recurring phenomenon. I have considerable experience to draw from. Bearing witness to so many exclusions has proven challenging, bringing with it emotional cost. I cite research that reveals the extent of the school exclusion problem, research that is impotent in terms of promoting much-needed change. In pursuit of reason I go in new directions, exploring the works of four philosophers, using their insights as tools to explore the void between theory and practice, logic and reason; and how we want things to be and the reality of how things are for our most vulnerable children. Permanent exclusion from school is a complex social event the incidence rate of which is obfuscated by the agencies of school, local authority and government. I expose the numbers fiasco, which disguises the magnitude of the problem. The number of children formally excluded is, I argue, massaged downwards, the number informally excluded is concealed. The most vulnerable children are disproportionately affected and their voices rarely heard. We who contribute to these acts of exclusion do so dogmatically, ignorantly and blindly. Our role in the matter remains concealed even from ourselves. This thesis examines that role. Exclusion from school continues with machine-like regularity - something is driving it. To make an emotional connection with the subject matter I use the qualitative tools of personal reflection and fictional stories, the latter using a method inspired by Clough (2002). I address two research questions. I evaluate my study using the criteria suggested by Yardley (2000)