Ensuring an Impartial Jury in the Age of Social Media

The explosive growth of social networking has placed enormous pressure on one of the most fundamental of American institutions—the impartial jury. Through social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, jurors have committed significant and often high-profile acts of misconduct. Just recently, the Arkansas Supreme Court reversed a death sentence because a juror Tweeted about the case during deliberations. In light of the significant risks to a fair trial that arise when jurors communicate through social media during trial, judges must be vigilant in monitoring for potential outside influences and in deterring misconduct. In this Article, we present informal survey data from actual jurors on their use of social networking during trial. We discuss the rise of web-based social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and the concerns that arise when jurors communicate about a case through social media before returning a verdict. After surveying how courts have responded to jurors’ social media use, we describe the results of the informal survey. The results support a growing consensus in the legal profession that courts should frequently, as a matter of course, instruct jurors not to use social media to communicate about trial. Although others have stressed the importance of jury instructions in this area, we hope that the informal survey data will further the dialogue by providing an important perspective—that of actual jurors

The lottery paradox, the preface paradox and rational belief

Traditionally rationality has been analysed in rather puristic terms; thus rational acceptance has been presented as unsullied by the demands of competing claims -- the only demand admitted generally being truth ('Do not have false beliefs'). Such a view leads us to the straightforward rejection of the thesis that a. rule of detachment forprobability statements is sufficient to explicate rational acceptance; since such a rule leads, apparently unavoidably, to the lottery paradox. (Lottery Paradox: Accept only those propositions whose probability is shown to be greater than N people enter a lottery, therefore the probability of an individual losing is this goes for each separately and so we may accept that each will lose, and so that all will lose. But we know that this is false.). The appeal of this rather contemptuous treatment diminishes in the face of the Preface Paradox. (Preface Paradox: A man writes the following, eminently reasonable, lines: Each of the propositions I assert in this book I believe to be true; but I am also sure that some will be proved false.). If we reason as before we have to accept the impossibility of rational belief. The two paradoxes are examined in detail and their consequences spelt out in Chapter One; giving us two alternatives:(1) To show, despite appearances, that neither set of beliefs is inconsistent, or (2) To show some difference between the two paradoxes that enables the traditional view of rationality to separate them. (1) is rejected, and (2) in the course of the same argument, in Chapters Two and Three, where we formulate a criterion for the consistency of sets of beliefs, defend it against apparent counter-examples, (versions of Moore's Paradox) and demonstrate that both sets of beliefs are inconsistent. This despite attempts by some, notably Kyburg, to show the opposite. If we are to avoid concluding rationality bankrupt, and yet maintain our original reaction to the rule of detachment must do two things: (a) reject the rule of detachment on grounds other than the Lottery paradox. (b) give an account of rationality that will accommodate the Preface paradox. In Chapter Four we justify (a) by considering the asymmetries that can be shown to exist between the syntax of the classical probability calculus and the syntax of confirmation in ordinary language, and by pointing to the difficulties encountered in giving an adequate semantics to such a calculus when cast in the role of s calculus of confirmation. Finally, in Chapter Five, we present a more complex account of rationality, capable of accommodating the Preface Paradox, one which takes seriously the diverse needs of human beings.<p

A Progressive Universal Noiseless Coder

The authors combine pruned tree-structured vector quantization (pruned TSVQ) with Itoh's (1987) universal noiseless coder. By combining pruned TSVQ with universal noiseless coding, they benefit from the “successive approximation” capabilities of TSVQ, thereby allowing progressive transmission of images, while retaining the ability to noiselessly encode images of unknown statistics in a provably asymptotically optimal fashion. Noiseless compression results are comparable to Ziv-Lempel and arithmetic coding for both images and finely quantized Gaussian sources

The Outrageous Government Conduct Defense: An Interpretive Argument for Its Application by SCOTUS

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Due Process Clause protects defendants from Outrageous Government Conduct (“OGC”) via the OGC defense, but the Court has not yet been presented with a set of facts it believes warrants its application. As a result, the Court has not set forth such criteria for application of the OGC defense, leaving the lower courts to apply their own standards. While some critics contend there is no use for the OGC defense due to the availability of the entrapment defense, this Note will uncover why this is not the case. More specifically, this Note will (i) advocate for the application of the OGC defense to appropriate facts and circumstances, (ii) outline the facts and circumstances where the lower federal, as well as state, courts have applied the OGC defense, and (iii) argue for the Supreme Court’s clarification of standards to guide lower courts’ application of the facts and circumstances that constitute OGC, i.e., where law enforcement action rises to the level of a violation of Fifth Amendment Due Process protection

Clinical applications of otoacoustic emissions in assessment of olivocochlear dysfunction

The efferent olivocochlear system provides feedback to the sensory receptors and afferent nerves of the cochlea. This study examined efferent auditory effects in humans by measurement of otoacoustic emissions during contralateral acoustic stimulation. Results were analyzed with a view to optimizing protocols for non-invasive clinical assessment of olivocochlear dysfunction. An experimental paradigm for assessing the loss of olivocochlear innervation was applied to vestibular nerve section patients whose olivocochlear bundle had been severed for treatment of peripheral labyrinthine disorders. Control patients were studied, who had undergone a similar surgical procedure for vascular decompression of the vestibular nerve, but without section of the olivocochlear fibres. The role of middle ear reflexes was investigated in patients with unilateral section of the middle ear muscle tendons for treatment of myoclonus. Patients with pathological lesions along the olivocochlear pathway from cochlea to cortex were also investigated. Normal subjects demonstrated significant and repeatable inhibition of otoacoustic emission amplitude during contralateral white noise at least 25dB above sensation level in normal subjects. The test was sensitive to olivocochlear disruption via vestibular nerve section, lesions of the olivary nuclei, or cerebello-pontine angle. Cases with a history of noise exposure also showed a loss of inhibitory effects. Control cases with lesions not affecting the olivocochlear pathway maintained normal levels of inhibition. The findings support the conclusion that otoacoustic emissions provide a means of evaluating efferent function, and that surgical or pathological disruption of the olivocochlear system results in a significant loss of efferent auditory effects

Four Decades of the Journal \u3ci\u3eLaw and Human Behavior\u3c/i\u3e: A Content Analysis

Although still relatively young, the journal Law and Human Behavior (LHB) has amassed a publication history of more than 1300 full-length articles over four decades. Yet, no systematic analysis of the journal has been done until now. The current research coded all full-length articles to examine trends over time, predictors of the number of Google Scholar citations, and predictors of whether an article was cited by a court case. The predictors of interest included article organization, research topics, areas of law, areas of psychology, first-author gender, first-author country of institutional affiliation, and samples employed. Results revealed a vast and varied field that has shown marked diversification over the years. First authors have consistently become more diversified in both gender and country of institutional affiliation. Overall, the most common research topics were jury/judicial decision-making and eyewitness/memory, the most common legal connections were to criminal law and mental health law, and the most common psychology connection was to social-cognitive psychology. Research in psychology and law has the potential to impact both academic researchers and the legal system. Articles published in LHB appear to accomplish both