Fair Questions: A Call and Proposal for Using General Verdicts with Special Interrogatories to Prevent Biased and Unjust Convictions

Bias and other forms of logical corner-cutting are an unfortunate aspect of criminal jury deliberations. However, the preferred verdict system in the federal courts, the general verdict, does nothing to counter that. Rather, by forcing jurors into a simple binary choice — guilty or not guilty — the general verdict facilitates and encourages such flawed reasoning. Yet the federal courts continue to stick to the general verdict, ironically out of a concern that deviating from it will harm defendants by leading juries to convict. This Essay calls for a change: expand the use of a special findings verdict, the general verdict with special interrogatories, to every case in order to guard against prejudicial reasoning and like shortcuts. Moreover, to ensure that such a change is feasible and does not run afoul of the concerns that bind courts to the general verdict, it suggests that courts require jurors to answer special interrogatories when, but only when, they have proceeded down the path towards finding the defendant guilty, using a verdict procedure designed to retain the benefits of general verdicts while jettisoning their flawed elements and complying with current practice. That change hopefully could vastly improve our jury system and allow the jury to truly serve — in the words of the Supreme Court — as “a criminal defendant’s fundamental ‘protection of life and liberty against race or color prejudice.’

A Formulaic Recitation Will Not Do: Why the Federal Rules Demand More Detail in Criminal Pleading

When a plaintiff files a civil lawsuit in federal court, her complaint must satisfy certain minimum standards. Specifically, under the prevailing understanding of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a), a complaint must plead sufficient factual matter to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face, rather than mere conclusory statements. Given the significantly higher stakes involved in criminal cases, one might think that an even more robust requirement would exist in that context. But in fact a weaker pleading standard reigns. Under the governing interpretation of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 7(c), indictments that simply parrot the language of a statute are often sufficient. As this Article shows, however, that pleading balance is misguided. The drafters of Rule 7(c) designed the Rule to be at least as stringent as Rule 8(a), as demonstrated by the text of Rules 7(c) and 8(a), the history of American pleading, the original Advisory Committee Note to Rule 7(c), and the drafting history of the Criminal Rules. And the drafters’ original design should govern today, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s amplification of the civil pleading standard in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal. All of that means that our current pleading regime should be rethought, that criminal defendants should receive more protections and information about the case against them than they presently do, and that policy arguments—which seem to favor a stronger criminal pleading standard—are all the more critical

A Search for Low-Amplitude Variability in Six Open Clusters Using the Robust Median Statistic

We used point-spread function fitting and a differential ensemble determined from a robust median statistic (RoMS) to examine stars in six open clusters in a search for δ Scuti variables. In the search for new variable stars among hundreds or thousands of stars, the RoMS is proved more effective for finding low-amplitude variables than the traditional error-curve approach. This high-precision differential approach was applied to the open clusters NGC 225, NGC 559, NGC 6811, NGC 6940, NGC 7142, and NGC 7160. Thirteen variables, 29 suspected variables, and 65 potential variables were found, and time-series data of the variables are presented. Among the 13 variables we found nine new δ Scuti variables

Prior Knowledge Base Of Constellations And Bright Stars Among Non-Science Majoring Undergraduates And 14-15 Year Old Students

As part of an effort to improve students’ knowledge of constellations and bright stars in an introductory level descriptive astronomy survey course, we measured the baseline knowledge that students bring to the class and how their score evolve over the course of the semester.  This baseline is needed by the broader astronomy education research community for future comparisons about which strategies and environments are the best for learning the stars and constellations.  As a comparison group, we also examined the baseline knowledge of 14-15 year old, 9th grade students from the United States. 664 university students averaged 2.04±0.08 on a constellation knowledge survey, while 46 additional students averaged higher at 8.23±0.23. The large, lower scoring group is found to have the same knowledge level as the 14-15 year old 9th grade students which scored 1.79±0.13.  The constellations most often identified correctly were Orion and Ursa Major. For the star portion of the survey, which was only given to the university students, we found essentially no statistically significant prior knowledge for the 17 brightest stars surveyed. The average score for the stars was 1.05±0.05, as expected for guessing, although Polaris and Betelgeuse are labeled correctly more often than any other stars

Harvesting Farmland: An Analysis of National Factors Contributing to the Use of Large-Scale Land Acquisitions as a Food Security Strategy

This thesis analyzes factors contributing to the recent trend of nations purchasing, leasing, or otherwise acquiring agricultural land abroad as a food production resource. These “large-scale land acquisitions” (LSLAs) have been studied extensively; however, scholars have mainly focused on LSLAs’ effects on “host” nations, providing only cursory explanations of “investor” nations’ motivations. This thesis corrects this deficiency in the literature by investigating drivers underlying the selection of a LSLA food security strategy. It conducts controlled comparisons of four case study nations, China, South Korea, India, and Saudi Arabia, which are diverse in terms of size, economics, politics, and other factors, but which all pursue food security LSLAs; it seeks to establish whether these nations share specific motivations for LSLAs, despite their differences, to determine the extent to which nations employing such a strategy, in general, share such motives. The first two chapters compare direct food security drivers of LSLAs in these states; the third examines if these nations share economic paradigms, to test if such paradigms act as an “underlying” stimulus of LSLAs. Regarding food security drivers, this thesis finds that all four face long-term rising and diversifying food product demand, limited production capacity, and reliance on food imports combined with a national preference for self-sufficiency; thus, LSLAs seem to be a method of reducing import dependence and securing access to food. Regarding economic outlook, this thesis finds that all four share an illiberal paradigm, consistent with these states’ aversion to markets. Given significant projected growth in world food demand, these findings could aid in predicting which nations might pursue such a policy in the future

Establishing Observational Baselines for Two δ Scuti Variables: V966 Herculis and V1438 Aquilae

We have examined the previously understudied δ Scuti stars V966 Herculis and V1438 Aquilae. We find that V966 Her is a stable pulsator with a refined period of 0.1330302 days with a full V amplitude of 0.096 mag. We also find that V966 Her has an average radial velocity of +7.8 km s-1, a full radial velocity amplitude of 7.6 km s-1, and a v sin i = 63.8 km s-1. For V1438 Aql we report a revised Hipparcos period of 0.1612751 days with a full amplitude of 0.056. The average radial velocity is found to be -43 km s-1, with full amplitude of 9.7 km s-1, and a v sin i = 76.7 km s-1. Due to some anomalies seen in V1438 Aql we feel that a much larger photometric and spectroscopic campaign is required to determine the true nature of this star

Design and evaluation of neural classifiers application to skin lesion classification

We address design and evaluation of neural classifiers for the problem of skin lesion classification. By using Gauss Newton optimization for the entropic cost function in conjunction with pruning by Optimal Brain Damage and a new test error estimate, we show that this scheme is capable of optimizing the architecture of neural classifiers. Furthermore, error-reject tradeoff theory indicates, that the resulting neural classifiers for the skin lesion classification problem are near-optimal. 1 INTRODUCTION Melanoma is the most lethal of skin cancers. However, patients may be saved from this life threatening cancer if their lesion is detected at an early stage. Computer imaging may assist and improve the detection of such early lesions. The "State of the art" in this field was recently reviewed in an editorial in the journal "Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics" [1]. Although applied to the problem of skin lesion classification, the main objective of this paper is to introduce and app..