The Constitutional Failure of the Strickland Standard in Capital Cases under the Eighth Amendment

Criminal defendants are guaranteed the right to effective assistance of counsel under the Sixth Amendment, but the Supreme Court\u27s decision in Strickland has given appellate courts overly broad discretion to determine exactly what constitutes ineffective assistance of counsel. Murphy reviews the right to counsel and discusses the crucial role of counsel in capital cases throughout the trial and appellate processes

Optimization of 4-Mercaptobenzoic Acid in SiO2-Ag Colloid Aerogel Using Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy

Aerogels have been studied as potential insulating and conducting materials, but little research has been conducted characterizing organic molecules in aerogel matrices using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). In this study, SiO2-Ag colloid aerogels were used as enhanced surfaces for SERS. SERS spectra of 4-mercaptobenzoic acid (4-MCBA) adsorbed to acid- and base-catalyzed SiO2-Ag colloid aerogels were obtained. It was observed that acid-catalyzed silver sol gels with 4-MCBA mixed within the matrix provided SERS spectra with sharper and more enhanced peaks than the base-catalyzed silver sol gels

An Ecological-Economic Integrated General Equilibrium Model

A thorough analysis of sustainable development requires a better understanding of how economic and ecological systems interact over the long run. This paper provides an integrated model to analyze interactions between economic and ecological systems. The linkages between these two systems are generated by a utility function contains both economic outputs and ecological services in the demand side and by introducing land as the common input in production of economic outputs and ecological services in the supply side. The optimal allocation of land between these two systems thus determines the trade-off between economic outputs and ecological services of an ecosystem.sustainable development, ecosystem, general equilibrium, the specific-factor model of trade

Parental problems, case plan requirements, and service targeting in child welfare reunification

Only about half of parents attempting to reunify with their children in foster care succeed in their efforts. Parents are ordered by the court to use treatment services in order to resolve their problems. These treatment services thus play a critical role in reunification, and in fact the use of services appropriately matched to parents\u27 problems has been found to be associated with a greater likelihood of reunification. However, there is little in the literature regarding the specific requirements of reunification case plans, and whether they are accurately targeted at reunifying parents\u27 problems. This mostly descriptive study uses case file data to examine the relationship between parental problems and case plan requirements for a sample of parents reunifying with their children in one large urban California county. Findings show that most reunifying parents had multiple problems, and were required to attend approximately 8 service events per week. There was a positive correlation between the total number of concerns (treatment problems and life challenges) and required weekly service events. While 85% of parents were ordered treatment services for all their identified problems, over 30% were ordered services targeting problems they were not known to have. Overall, 58% of parents were ordered both all appropriate and only appropriate services. Implications for policy and practice are discussed, including the need for models of service delivery that limit the burden of accessing multiple service locations for reunifying parents

The Social Value of Using Biodiversity in New Pharmaceutical Product Research

Biologists and conservation advocates have expressed grave concern over perceived threats to biological diversity. "Biodiversity prospecting"—the search among naturally occurring organisms for new products of agricultural, industrial, and, particularly, pharmaceutical value—has been advanced as both a mechanism and a motive for conserving biological diversity. Economists and others have attempted to estimate the value of biodiversity for use in new pharmaceutical project research. Most of these existing approaches are incomplete, however, as they have not yet considered full social welfare, i.e., both consumer surplus and profit. This paper addresses social welfare by calibrating a model of competition between differentiated products with data from the pharmaceutical industry. We find that the magnitude of losses from even catastrophic declines in biodiversity are negligible in comparison to the value of world production. While social values of biodiversity prospecting might motivate habitat conservation in some areas, these values are likely to be small relative to land value in other uses in even some of the more biologically rich regions of the world.