An Examination of Website Advice to Avoid Jury Duty

The use of a jury in legal proceedings can be traced as far back as the participatory democracies that emerged in Greece in the sixth century BC, although it was not until the signing of the Magna Carta that the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers emerged.1 In the United States, the Sixth and Seventh Amendments of the U.S. Constitution expressly provide this right in both criminal and civil proceedings.2 Furthermore, these amendments provide individuals with the right to a trial before an impartial jury.3 This right intends to serve as a safeguard against unfair treatment during a trial, providing a system of checks and balances to pursue the goal that justice remains at the heart of the legal system. A jury is intended to serve as a cross-section of the community, as it is drawn from and purports to represent the collective community conscience and common sense when resolving disagreements.4 Despite this rich constitutional history and community context, many residents of the United States actively seek to avoid jury service when they are called, for reasons we discuss further below. Some individuals search the Internet for information about how to avoid participating in jury service. As trial judges are tasked with oversight that spans the entire process of impanelment through voir dire, this study sought to provide a contextual background to assist the judiciary in easily recognizing and assessing potential jury avoidance. In the current study, the investigators examined advice offered by popular websites about how reluctant jurors may attempt to be excused from jury service

Observing Supermassive Black Holes across cosmic time: from phenomenology to physics

In the last decade, a combination of high sensitivity, high spatial resolution observations and of coordinated multi-wavelength surveys has revolutionized our view of extra-galactic black hole (BH) astrophysics. We now know that supermassive black holes reside in the nuclei of almost every galaxy, grow over cosmological times by accreting matter, interact and merge with each other, and in the process liberate enormous amounts of energy that influence dramatically the evolution of the surrounding gas and stars, providing a powerful self-regulatory mechanism for galaxy formation. The different energetic phenomena associated to growing black holes and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), their cosmological evolution and the observational techniques used to unveil them, are the subject of this chapter. In particular, I will focus my attention on the connection between the theory of high-energy astrophysical processes giving rise to the observed emission in AGN, the observable imprints they leave at different wavelengths, and the methods used to uncover them in a statistically robust way. I will show how such a combined effort of theorists and observers have led us to unveil most of the SMBH growth over a large fraction of the age of the Universe, but that nagging uncertainties remain, preventing us from fully understating the exact role of black holes in the complex process of galaxy and large-scale structure formation, assembly and evolution.Comment: 46 pages, 21 figures. This review article appears as a chapter in the book: "Astrophysical Black Holes", Haardt, F., Gorini, V., Moschella, U and Treves A. (Eds), 2015, Springer International Publishing AG, Cha

From the outside in: narratives of creative arts practitioners working in the criminal justice system

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley-Blackwell in The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice on 31/12/2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12318 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.The penal voluntary sector is highly variegated in its roles, practices and functions, though research to date has largely excluded the experiences of front-line practitioners. We argue that engaging with the narratives of practitioners can provide fuller appreciation of the potential of the sector’s work. Though life story and narrative have been recognised as important in offender desistance (Maruna, 2001), the narrative identities of creative arts practitioners, who are important ‘change agents’ (Albertson, 2015), are typically absent. This is despite evidence to suggest that a practitioner’s life history can be a significant and positive influence in the rehabilitation of offenders (Harris, 2017). Using narratological analysis (Bal, 2009), this study examined the narratives of 19 creative practitioners in prisons in England and Wales. Of particular interest were the formative experiences of arts practitioners in their journey to prison work. The findings suggest that arts practitioners identify with an ‘outsider’ status and may be motivated by an ethic of mutual aid. In the current climate of third sector involvement in the delivery of criminal justice interventions, such a capacity may be both a strength and weakness for arts organisations working in this field

An Examination of Website Advice to Avoid Jury Duty

The use of a jury in legal proceedings can be traced as far back as the participatory democracies that emerged in Greece in the sixth century BC, although it was not until the signing of the Magna Carta that the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers emerged.1 In the United States, the Sixth and Seventh Amendments of the U.S. Constitution expressly provide this right in both criminal and civil proceedings.2 Furthermore, these amendments provide individuals with the right to a trial before an impartial jury.3 This right intends to serve as a safeguard against unfair treatment during a trial, providing a system of checks and balances to pursue the goal that justice remains at the heart of the legal system. A jury is intended to serve as a cross-section of the community, as it is drawn from and purports to represent the collective community conscience and common sense when resolving disagreements.4 Despite this rich constitutional history and community context, many residents of the United States actively seek to avoid jury service when they are called, for reasons we discuss further below. Some individuals search the Internet for information about how to avoid participating in jury service. As trial judges are tasked with oversight that spans the entire process of impanelment through voir dire, this study sought to provide a contextual background to assist the judiciary in easily recognizing and assessing potential jury avoidance. In the current study, the investigators examined advice offered by popular websites about how reluctant jurors may attempt to be excused from jury service