A Question of ‘Desirability’: Balancing and Improperly Obtained Evidence in Comparative Perspective

Debates about improperly obtained evidence continue to arise in common law appellate courts on a surprisingly regular basis. In 2015, the Irish Supreme Court handed down a decision on the topic which ran to over 155,000 words. Among the major common law jurisdictions outside the United States, Australia can be regarded as something of a pioneer in its approach to the admissibility of illegally or otherwise improperly obtained evidence. In 1978 the High Court of Australia in Bunning v Cross, building on its earlier decision in R v Ireland, established the existence of a discretion to exclude such evidence that was distinct from the discretion to exclude evidence to ensure fairness to a defendant at trial. Section 138 of the UEL, the focus of this chapter, was closely modelled on this common law jurisprudence. At the time of Bunning, the law in England and Wales was characterised by little judicial analysis of the issue of improperly obtained evidence, and Canada was still some years away from introducing the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms with its well-known provision on evidence obtained in consequence of Charter violations. In the light of major continuing developments in the common law world in this area of evidence law, this chapter seeks to provide a searching and timely analysis of selected aspects of section 138, as viewed from the perspective of an evidence scholar working in England and Wales, with the aim of asking what lessons may be learnt from a contemporary comparison of section 138 with the approaches taken to improperly obtained evidence in other common law jurisdictions. The chief focus will be on the particular species of evidence that can be considered to highlight most clearly the relevant theoretical and practical issues raised by improperly obtained evidence—evidence that was not brought into fruition by any interaction between a member, or agent, of the executive and a suspect. In other words, the improprieties that will be the primary concern of this chapter are those that do not contribute in some way to the generation of the evidence in question; the situations are such that there is no suspicion that evidence of doubtful reliability or veracity has been produced by the impropriety. So, for example, within the primary scope of the chapter will be evidence obtained as a result of an illegal search, or evidence obtained by improper means of ‘spontaneous’ conversations that were not in some way induced by the conduct of the executive. Outside the primary scope of the chapter will be evidence obtained improperly during formal police interrogations, or ‘informal’ interrogations involving the covert questioning of a suspect by a police agent

Year in Review 2014: England and Wales

This case contains an important discussion of the scope of section 41 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, which restricts the admissibility of sexual history evidence

Robust Malware Detection for Internet Of (Battlefield) Things Devices Using Deep Eigenspace Learning

Internet of Things (IoT) in military setting generally consists of a diverse range of Internet-connected devices and nodes (e.g. medical devices to wearable combat uniforms), which are a valuable target for cyber criminals, particularly state-sponsored or nation state actors. A common attack vector is the use of malware. In this paper, we present a deep learning based method to detect Internet Of Battlefield Things (IoBT) malware via the device's Operational Code (OpCode) sequence. We transmute OpCodes into a vector space and apply a deep Eigenspace learning approach to classify malicious and bening application. We also demonstrate the robustness of our proposed approach in malware detection and its sustainability against junk code insertion attacks. Lastly, we make available our malware sample on Github, which hopefully will benefit future research efforts (e.g. for evaluation of proposed malware detection approaches)

NASA Workshop on future directions in surface modeling and grid generation

Given here is a summary of the paper sessions and panel discussions of the NASA Workshop on Future Directions in Surface Modeling and Grid Generation held a NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, December 5-7, 1989. The purpose was to assess U.S. capabilities in surface modeling and grid generation and take steps to improve the focus and pace of these disciplines within NASA. The organization of the workshop centered around overviews from NASA centers and expert presentations from U.S. corporations and universities. Small discussion groups were held and summarized by group leaders. Brief overviews and a panel discussion by representatives from the DoD were held, and a NASA-only session concluded the meeting. In the NASA Program Planning Session summary there are five recommended steps for NASA to take to improve the development and application of surface modeling and grid generation

The Impact of Simplified UNBab Mapping Function On GPS Tropospheric Delay

The atmospheric delay issue is widely investigated in order to minimize the positioning error due to tropospheric and ionospheric delay. The mathematical modeling on the tropospheric model mapping functions should be revised and also simplified to represent simpler mapping function models. The zenith tropospheric delay can be amplified by a coefficient factor called mapping function to form total tropospheric delay. The simplified UNBab mapping function models for both hydrostatics and non-hydrostatics can provide better understanding due to its simpler models compared to the established models. The simplified mapping functions for UNBab models for hydrostatic and non hydrostatic components are given in a form of hyperbolic rather than continued fraction form for the established models. By using linear, hyperbolic, logarithm and also regression method, the mapping function models can be simplified and at the same time can produce similar result with the original models. The calculation of tropospheric delay by using simplified UNBab models for both components does not give significant difference from the original models