“Actual” and “Constructive” Possession in Alaska: Clarifying the Doctrine

In two cases, one recent and one now nearly a decade old, Judge David Mannheimer has raised important questions about Alaska’s jury instruction on “possession.” In particular, Judge Mannheimer has expressed a worry that Alaska’s definition of “constructive possession” invites juries to find possession where the defendant is only near an object and has knowledge of its presence. As Judge Mannheimer correctly points out, such a definition is too expansive. But how can we avoid this problem? My short article takes Judge Mannheimer’s opinions in Alex v. State and Dirks v. State as the starting point for an investigation of Alaska’s possession doctrine. After summarizing the two opinions in Part II, Part III attempts to clarify the seemingly straightforward idea of “actual possession,” and finds that many courts wrongly treat many cases of actual possession as cases of constructive possession. Part IV tries to provide a solution to the problem—as presented by Judge Mannheimer—with Alaska’s instruction on constructive possession. It offers that the key to constructive possession is not the idea that one intends to have control over an object, but that one has a legal right (or the functional equivalent of a legal right) over the object, or the space where the object is. If we understand this idea of “authority” as essential to constructive possession, it turns out that pure cases of constructive possession are actually quite rare, and that many supposed cases of constructive possession are really cases of past actual possession. Part V proposes a new jury instruction on actual and constructive possession

Prolate spheroidal slosh model for fluid motion

Mathematical model, designed for zero gravity conditions, analyzes dynamic effects of large amplitude fluid motion interior to a rigid body. It has two advantages over other mathematical models: (1) constrains slosh motion to given region in natural manner, and (2) allows equilibrium position of slosh mass to be anywhere on slosh surface

Kinematic capability in the SVDS

The details of the Remote Manipulator System kinematic model implemented into the Space Vehicle Dynamics Simulation are given. Detailed engineering flow diagrams and definitions of terms are included

RMS massless arm dynamics capability in the SVDS

The equations of motion for the remote manipulator system, assuming that the masses and inertias of the arm can be neglected, are developed for implementation into the space vehicle dynamics simulation (SVDS) program for the Orbiter payload system. The arm flexibility is incorporated into the equations by the computation of flexibility terms for use in the joint servo model. The approach developed in this report is based on using the Jacobian transformation matrix to transform force and velocity terms between the configuration space and the task space to simplify the form of the equations

On approximating two distributions from a single complex-valued function

We consider the problem of approximating two, possibly unrelated probability distributions from a single complex-valued function $\psi$ and its Fourier transform. We show that this problem always has a solution within a specified degree of accuracy, provided the distributions satisfy the necessary regularity conditions. We describe the algorithm and construction of $\psi$ and provide examples of approximating several pairs of distributions using the algorithm.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure