Honesty Without Truth: Lies, Accuracy, and the Criminal Justice Process

Focusing on “lying” is a natural response to uncertainty but too narrow of a concern. Honesty and truth are not the same thing and conflating them can actually inhibit accuracy. In several settings across investigations and trials, the criminal justice system elevates compliant statements, misguided beliefs, and confident opinions while excluding more complex evidence. Error often results. Some interrogation techniques, for example, privilege cooperation over information. Those interactions can yield incomplete or false statements, confessions, and even guilty pleas. Because of the impeachment rules that purportedly prevent perjury, the most knowledgeable witnesses may be precluded from taking the stand. The current construction of the Confrontation Clause right also excludes some reliable evidence—especially from victim witnesses—because it favors face-to-face conflict even though overrated demeanor cues can mislead. And courts permit testimony from forensic experts about pattern matches, such as bite-marks and ballistics, if those witnesses find their own methodologies persuasive despite recent studies discrediting their techniques. Exploring the points of disconnect between honesty and truth exposes some flaws in the criminal justice process and some opportunities to advance fact-finding, truth-seeking, and accuracy instead. At a time when “post-truth” challenges to shared baselines beyond the courtroom grow more pressing, scaffolding legal institutions, so they can provide needed structure and helpful models, seems particularly important. Assessing the legitimacy of legal outcomes and fostering the engagement necessary to reach just conclusions despite adversarial positions could also have an impact on declining facts and decaying trust in broader public life

Retelling racialized violence, remaking white innocence: the politics of interlocking oppressions in transgender day of remembrance

Transgender Day of Remembrance has become a significant political event among those resisting violence against gender-variant persons. Commemorated in more than 250 locations worldwide, this day honors individuals who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. However, by focusing on transphobia as the definitive cause of violence, this ritual potentially obscures the ways in which hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality constitute such acts. Taking the Transgender Day of Remembrance/Remembering Our Dead project as a case study for considering the politics of memorialization, as well as tracing the narrative history of the Fred F. C. Martinez murder case in Colorado, the author argues that deracialized accounts of violence produce seemingly innocent White witnesses who can consume these spectacles of domination without confronting their own complicity in such acts. The author suggests that remembrance practices require critical rethinking if we are to confront violence in more effective ways. Description from publisher's site: http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/srsp.2008.5.1.2

Moral panic and social theory: Beyond the heuristic

Copyright @ 2011 by International Sociological Association.Critcher has recently conceptualized moral panic as a heuristic device, or 'ideal type'. While he argues that one still has to look beyond the heuristic, despite a few exceptional studies there has been little utilization of recent developments in social theory in order to look 'beyond moral panic'. Explicating two current critical contributions - the first, drawing from the sociologies of governance and risk; the second, from the process/figurational sociology of Norbert Elias - this article highlights the necessity for the continuous theoretical development of the moral panic concept and illustrates how such development is essential to overcome some of the substantial problems with moral panic research: normativity, temporality and (un) intentionality

Public relations and journalism: truth, trust, transparency and integrity

Truth, trust, integrity and reputation are key concepts for understanding the relationship between journalists and public relations practitioners. This the paper: first, considers the current debate on the inter-relationship between journalism and public relations; second distinguishes varieties of public relations and journalism; third, analyses the Editorial Intelligence controversy; fourth, deconstructs aspects of "truth" and "trust" in the context of that debate; fifth, considers why the virtue of individuals is vitally important for both public relations and journalism. Public Relations & Journalism: stereotypes and identity crisis In terms of public perception of both professions perhaps stereotypes of the practitioner as fundamentally dishonest are widespread. However, those stereotypes of journalism and public relations conflate the variety of activities that come under the headings "journalism" and "public relations". Public relations and journalism: "hard" versus "soft" "Soft public relations" is characterised by a concern with providing publicity for a client. By delivering a good story the public relations practitioner offers the journalist a means of satisfying users of his medium. "Soft" journalism is concerned with entertainment and truth is irrelevant, it is essentially concerned with comics for adults. "Hard" public relations and journalism are difficult to characterise simply but are characterised by a concern for truth and trust in relation to the integrity and reputation of the individual practitioner; Public Relations and journalism: long spoon or spooning? Although a distinction between "entertainment" ("Soft" public relations and journalism) and "what matters" ("hard" public relations and journalism) is not regarded as a significant distinction by all commentators it provide a locus for deconstructing the role of truth, trust and integrity in journalism and public relations An important source of "soft" journalism stories is "soft" public relations. The fact is that Editorial intelligence primarily suited "soft" public relations practitioners and journalists. Public relations and journalism: "truth" & "trust" In the case of both public relations and journalism the related notions of trust and truth are central to their professional activities. Transparency, truth, trust and public interest are dimensions of the relationship between public relations and journalism. A hard and soft truth distinction is not exhaustive and an important other category is artistic or emotional truth. Audiences do not always understand what genre they are witnessing so consequently do not automatically know how to interpret what they see and hear. Public Relations and Journalism: virtuous expediency On the basis of an individual transparently identifiable communicator's track record audiences should decide whether or not to trust that journalists or public relations practitioner. Consequently, there is a need for publics and audiences to be informed so that they are able to make valid judgements about communicators and what they say. Regarding the relationship between public relations and journalism, at the "hard" end, both journalist and public relations practitioner are dealing with matters of public interest and need to cooperate but at arm's length. Conclusion "Truth" and "trust" are both important in the practice of journalism and public relations. It is vital, therefore, that both "hard" journalists and public relations practitioners act with professional integrity. Transparency of the communicator's identity is crucial. Power needs to rest with a citizen public exercising the right to give or withhold belief in the communicator and in determining his or her reputation for veracity and also to exercise real power as consumers and voters

A Black Swan in a Sea of White Noise: Using Technology-Enhanced Learning to Afford Educational Inclusivity for Learners with Asperger’s Syndrome

Against a backdrop of increasingly vocation-focussed course provision within higher education, of widening participation initiatives intended to promote greater inclusion for learners affected by learning difficulties, and of moves towards greater use of social and collaborative forms of learning, this paper discusses the case of an undergraduate Computing student affected by Asperger’s Syndrome (AS).While there is recognition in the literature of problems associated with face-to-face dialogue for persons affected by AS, there is a paucity of research both into the experience of students in higher education, and around the issue of participation in group-work activities increasingly found in creative aspects of computing. This paper highlights a tension between moves towards collaborative learning and UK disabilities legislation in relation to learners with AS. Employing a qualitative case-study methodology, the investigation revealed how a technology-enhanced learning intervention afforded an AS-diagnosed learner greater opportunities to participate in group-work in a higher education context. The findings suggest that not only can computer-mediated communications afford AS-diagnosed learners opportunities to participate meaningfully in group-work, but also that the learner demonstrated higher levels of collective-inclusive versus individual-exclusive phraseology than neurotypical peers, thereby challenging assumptions around participation in collaborative learning activities and assimilation of peer-feedback

Proving Genocide? Forensic Expertise and the ICTY

This article works towards developing a theoretical framework outlining the premises and parameters under which forensic experts operate during various stages of international criminal investigations and the presentation of expert witness testimony in court.With reference to law and science literature, the article explores the reasons for undertaking resource-intensive forensic investigations; secondly it outlines the ways in which evidence is gathered and interpreted, the process of constructing ‘forensic truth’; and finally it examines what happens to ‘forensic truth’ once it enters the legal arena. The International Criminal Tribunal for the formerYugoslavia and its activities are used to illustrate the issues involved during the ‘forensic expertise meets international law’ interface. Specifically the forensic exhumations conducted around the Srebrenica events of July 1995 and their use in the Krstic¤ trial serve to contextualize the debate

Intoxicated eyewitnesses:the effect of a fully balanced placebo design on event memory and metacognitive control

Few studies have examined the impact of alcohol on metacognition for witnessed events. We used a 2x2 balanced placebo design, where mock-witnesses expected and drank alcohol, did not expect but drank alcohol, did not expect nor drank alcohol, or expected but did not drink alcohol. Participants watched a mock-crime in a bar-lab, followed by free recall and a cued-recall test with or without the option to reply ‘don’t know’ (DK). Intoxicated mock-witnesses’ free recall was less complete but not less accurate. During cued-recall, alcohol led to lower accuracy, and reverse placebo participants gave more erroneous and fewer correct responses. Permitting and clarifying DK responses was associated with fewer errors and more correct responses for sober individuals; and intoxicated witnesses were less likely to opt out of erroneous responding to unanswerable questions. Our findings highlight the practical and theoretical importance of examining pharmacological effects of alcohol and expectancies in real-life settings

Punishment and penal activity : the expansion of legal fines and fees in Texas from 1985 to 2015

Across the United States, legal fines and fees generate millions of dollars per year in revenue despite widening the net of criminalization and increasing penal severity for poorer individuals. Unlike in other penal policy domains, legal fines and fees represent an ambiguously defined form of punishment that has received bipartisan support. Understudied is how legal fines and fees have become an increasingly preferred policy choice among state-level political actors. In this study, I use archival data on legal statutes and legislative sessions in Texas – home to one of the largest prison and jail system in the U.S. – to investigate the development of legal fines and fees across a 30-year period. I use insights from socio-political and legal theories to offer a comprehensive analysis of the structure of legislative policy networks and the development of legal fines and fees legislation. I demonstrate that both liberal and conservative political actors facilitated the passage of legal debt legislation. Furthermore, I consider the role of legislative testimony to show the association between testimony and the rate of legislation on legal fines and fees. I discuss the implications of my findings for understanding how policy networks and legislative activity are related to criminal justice outcomes and are influenced by a variety of social actors. My study contributes to theoretical explanations on the roles of state actors in developing policies that become increasingly implicated in social inequalities.Sociolog