The jury on trial: Guilty or not guilty? Investigating jury trial issues through a comparative approach

In response to the democratic principle ‘justice by the people and for the people’, many jurisdictions worldwide choose to use the jury trial. European juries differ from Anglo-American juries and from one another in several aspects. However, despite the differences, none of the jurisdictions that uses juries seems to have found the ‘perfect recipe’ for a well-functioning jury system. The occurrence of miscarriages of justice involving incorrect jury verdicts demonstrates that the jury trial as a whole may be failing to respond to those democratic needs that constituted the foundations of its introduction. Nevertheless, the jury system appears to be ineradicably rooted in those jurisdictions that chose to introduce it. Clearly, the current situation calls for reform. This chapter, looking at juries from an international standpoint, proposes a critical comparative analysis of some of the most worrying issues occurring in jury decision-making contexts. As the chapter will show, in the search for solutions, comparisons at the international level can offer fruitful insights on how to promote improvement and reform of the jury trial worldwide. </p

Naming the threat: lay prototypes of organized crime in Italy and the US

Aims. Our goal is to detail the development of RS Ophiuchi and the other Galactic symbiotic-like recurrent novae throughout their outburst and quiescence, with a particular emphasis on the propagation of the shock wave during the outburst of the binaries. Methods. The spectral analysis has been performed using archival data according to the features of the individual datasets. Swift grism spectra were reduced and extracted using a combination of the pre-existing UVOTPY Python routine and newly written pipelines in Matlab. Other datasets were directly available in reduced form, already corrected for instrumental or background contamination, and calibrated in wavelength and flux or intensity. The work on these was done through pipelines suited for reading the data and elaborating them to extract quantities of interest for the analysis. Results. We find striking similarities in different outbursts of the same object and for different novae. For example, RS Oph 2021 was almost identical to the 2006 outburst, despite having occurred at a different orbital phase with the observations made from a different line of sight through the red giant wind. Despite the intrinsically different properties of the binaries, striking similarities are found for different systems of the same class, for instance, the trend of the electron density over time during outburst appears to follow a general temporal development.</p