This paper explores the use of mindset material in terrorism cases. Mindset material is a broad category of evidence, including social media activity and internet search histories, relied on to infer or imply that the accused is affiliated or aligned with terrorists. Although mindset material plays a central role throughout the justice process in terrorism cases, no work to date has explored and discussed its use in depth. In this paper I draw on doctrinal and empirical findings, including interviews, to examine how and why it has come to play such a central role in terror cases. While mindset material is a well-intentioned tool used to selectively enforce broadly drafted and vaguely defined terrorism offences, it is also a blunt tool, and sees great emphasis placed on the accused's inferred status as terrorist (or not). In this paper I explore and problematise the use of mindset material and the inferences drawn from it, specifically in relation to to fantasists, the merely curious, and young autistic defendants. I posit that mindset material is symptomatic of a need to revisit the substantive law and to rethink the proper role of the criminal law in preventing terrorism.

Throughout its two and a half centuries in existence, US mental health policy has repeatedly failed people living with schizophrenia. The failures are cyclical—the inhumane conditions uncovered in the first 75 years of existence were addressed with the construction of state asylums to deliver moral treatment. One hundred years later, the asylums were themselves revealed to be inhumane. Deinstitutionalization, the response to the failure of asylums starting in the 1960s, now drives outcomes such as homelessness, incarceration, and early death for people living with psychotic illnesses. In all cases, well-intentioned policy reform has failed at the level of implementation, largely due to a lack of accountability. The result has been a consistent failure to adequately treat people living with schizophrenia, which is now understood to be a highly treatable condition. As the country passes into a quarter millennium in existence, reform is once again underway. Unlike other points in history, there is good news. Other countries, such as Italy, have successfully leveraged reform to achieve greatly improved outcomes. Understanding US history and the successful implementation of policy change in other countries is imperative and teaches us that accountability in implementation is necessary to break the cycle of policy failure.

While governments have long discussed the promise of delegating important decisions to machines, actual use often lags. Consequently, we know little about the variation in the deployment of such delegations in large numbers of similar governmental organizations. Using data from crime laboratories in the United States, we examine the uneven distribution over time of a specific, well-known expert system for ballistics imaging for a large sample of local and regional public agencies; an expert system is an inference engine joined with a knowledge base. Our statistical model is informed by the push-pull-capability theory of innovation in the public sector. We test hypotheses about the probability of deployment and provide evidence that the use of this expert system varies with the pull of agency task environments and the enabling support of organizational resources—and that the impacts of those factors have changed over time. Within this context, we also present evidence that general knowledge of the use of expert systems has supported the use of this specific expert system in many agencies. This empirical case and this theory of innovation provide broad evidence about the historical utilization of expert systems as algorithms in public sector applications.

This article summarises the BJPsych Bulletin 2024 special edition on mental health in criminal justice and correctional settings. The edition considers issues across a range of settings, including police custody, the courts and prisons, as well as considering wider international questions and systems within the field. In this edition, we assert the right of the individual to healthcare services that should be available, accessible, acceptable and of good quality. Psychiatry must play a significant role in shaping this debate as it moves forward.

Prosecutors in adversarial systems are simultaneously expected to be impartial ministers of justice and partisan advocates. Leaving this tension unaddressed can result in poor-quality prosecutorial decision-making. This article develops a novel “dynamic” framework for prosecutors to navigate between and prioritize these competing considerations, which can be used to understand, evaluate, and improve prosecutorial performance. Under this framework, the prioritization should depend on which function the prosecutor is exercising at any given time. The article then deploys primary data collected in Delhi, through court observation and interviews with judges, lawyers, victims, and victim-support persons, to exemplify and justify the framework.

Why is the police role so broad in the United States today? Carceral state scholars have investigated how and why policymakers have treated so many social problems as policing problems, but they have not yet recognized the degree to which the call-for-service system has marginalized political control over police strategy. This Article traces the historical sources of this arrangement through extensive archival research into its evolution. We find that over the course of the twentieth century, the rise of new communications technologies gradually shifted the power to decide which problems are proper subjects of police attention to private individuals, eventually channeling their demands through centralized call centers that had been stripped of the authority and contextual knowledge needed to govern them in a meaningful way. That process fundamentally altered the character of public oversight over policing, elevating a distinctive set of individual interests as largely unchallenged determinants of the kinds of situations that are policeable. By illustrating how sociotechnical change unintentionally reallocated the authority to define the scope of an important institution’s mandate, this case sheds new light on the factors that shape the police role and the role the public plays in defining it.

Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) are legal means, alternative to trial, for the resolution of criminal business cases. Although DPAs are increasingly used in the US and are spreading to other jurisdictions, the ethics of DPAs has hardly been subjected to critical scrutiny. We use a multidisciplinary approach straddling the line between philosophy and law to examine the ethics of DPAs used to resolve cases of multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) foreign corruption. Deontologically, we argue that the normativity of DPAs raises critical concerns related to the notion of justice as punishment, with serious cases of international corruption resolved with minimal retribution for offending MNEs. Taking a utilitarian ethical perspective, we also evaluate the effect of DPAs on MNEs’ tendency to self-regulate or re-offend. Our conclusion, supported by critical analysis of the juridical literature and case evidence on MNEs’ recidivism, is that DPAs do not foster ethical behavior.

As the coronavirus pandemic swept the nation in 2020, many emphasized that carceral spaces were hotspots for the virus, leaving Black and Brown people especially vulnerable to infection. In combination with other critiques of racism in the carceral state, these observations created pressure to decarcerate, especially on the political left. How did political elites discuss the carceral state in this changed atmosphere? To answer this question, we analyze rhetoric in public statements across four liberal metropolitan areas during the spring and summer of 2020. In these statements, we find a long-standing discourse of racially paternalist penal welfarism, retrofitted to pandemic times and accompanied by a distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” criminals. Accommodating portrayals of incarcerated people as vulnerable to COVID-19 and in desperate need of care, this pattern of rhetoric positioned the carceral state as a protector in order to justify continued incarceration.

Japan is often said to have one of the lowest rape rates in the world, and Japanese police claim to solve 97 percent of rape cases. But in reality, only 5–10 percent of rape victims report it to police, and police record half or less of reported cases while prosecutors charge about one-third of recorded cases. The result of this process of caseload attrition is that for every 1,000 rapes in Japan, only 10–20 result in a criminal conviction – and fewer than half of convicted rapists are incarcerated. Similar patterns characterize Japan's criminal justice response to other sex crimes. This article shows that impunity for sex offenders is extremely common in Japan, and it argues that patriarchal social and legal norms help explain this pattern.

We explore electoral explanations for U.S. governors’ willingness to commute death sentences in their state. Across descriptive tests and pre-registered regression specifications, we find little evidence that election timing or term limits affect either the probability of commuting death sentences or the proportion of such sentences governors might commute. However, we do find evidence that governors are more likely to commute sentences – and commute sentences for a higher proportion of defendants – during the “lame duck” period after their successor’s election but before their inauguration.

Judiciary and litigation are the two most prominent types of activities within the legal profession. The judicial aspect of the profession entails the interpretation of laws and the administration of justice in a fair and impartial manner. As a concept, justice entails protecting society from offenders and evildoers who deviate from society’s norms and engage in illegal behaviour by punishing and sentencing them. Due to the predominance of the human factor in the legal profession, which has such a significant impact on the lives of all members of society, it is crucial to investigate whether there is a guiding force behind dispensing justice and, if so, how effective these guidelines or policy measures have been. As crime rates rise and societal standards fall in the contemporary era, the legal profession grapples with the complexities of modern criminal behaviour. Particularly in the realm of judicial sentencing, there is a need for guidelines that account for the diversity of crimes and their individualistic nature. In India, long pungencies in court cases and a decline in the State’s conviction rate further exacerbate these issues. This paper examines the pressing need for comprehensive, well-structured sentencing guidelines that promote transparency, fairness and efficiency in the judicial process. Through a detailed review of recent high-profile court cases and an analysis of current practices and policies, this paper highlights the urgency of reform in the sentencing process to enhance public trust in the legal system. This article provides additional information on the subject.

Dementia within the criminal system, from arrest through incarceration, has been largely ignored. While the health system has begun grappling with the chronic conditions that will accompany an aging society, the criminal system has yet to meaningfully respond. Dementia is a clinical syndrome characterized by impairment in cognitive domains (memory, executive function, visuospatial). Additionally, dementia often includes behavioral symptoms that increase the likelihood that an individual’s actions may violate social norms and in some circumstances be deemed criminal. Prior studies have established criminal behavior as a trend among individuals living with dementia. Yet, the criminal system has yet to establish protections for individuals who commit a crime while impaired by dementia. This paper will report on an empirical study to evaluate the treatment of persons with dementia within the criminal justice system. We will report on interviews with attorneys (n=15) regarding their experience and perspective on the treatment of persons with dementia post-arrest. In the paper, we will explore topics identified through these interviews including pre-trial release, competency, placement (housing), criminal liability determination, sentencing, and post-conviction release. We will highlight key findings including the lack of a systematic screening process for dementia post-arrest, placement is a significant challenge, attorneys’ lack of training on dementia to be able to understand how the disease could impact decision-making, and the two legal mechanisms available to divert miss the mark given their focus on psychiatric populations. We will use these data and findings to argue for a research and policy agenda to address a gap in legal policies to appropriately manage persons with dementia post-arrest.

This in-depth analysis illuminates a translational journey of a community-university research collaboration that examined health disparities among incarcerated pregnant women and spanned the translational spectrum, with the initial collaboration in 2011 paving the way for consequent research grants, publications, practices, programs, and legislation passed years later. The case study utilized data from interviews with research stakeholders, institutional and governmental sources, peer-reviewed publications, and news stories. Identified research and translational challenges included cultural differences between research and prison system; the prison system’s lack of transparency; politics of using and translating research to policy change; and issues of capacity, power, privilege, and opportunity when doing community-engaged research/science. Among the facilitators of translation were the Clinical and Translational Science Award and institutional support; engagement of key stakeholders and influencers; authentic collaboration and team science; researchers as translation catalysts; pragmatic scientific approach; and policies and legislative activities. The research contributed to a variety of community and public health, policy/legislative, clinical/medical, and economic benefits. The case study findings enhance our understanding of translational science principles and processes leading to improved wellbeing and serve as a call for advancing the research agenda addressing health disparities related to criminal and social justice issues.

It is recognised that civil litigation has a place within the police accountability infrastructure. However, the role of actions against the police for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment, assault, and malicious prosecution (hereafter police actions) is underexplored. Taking citizenship as its analytical frame, this paper probes the relationship between police actions and the police complaints and discipline system over the last 60 years. Its primary focus is the Court of Appeal decision Thompson v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, Hsu v Same [1998] QB 498 (Thompson). Here the potential for police actions to expose questionable police responses to officer misconduct, and failings in external oversight mechanisms, came into conflict with the drive towards proportionate civil justice. In prioritising the latter, Thompson increased police autonomy over settlement of police actions, thereby deprioritising the role of the courts in demarcating the limits of state interference with citizens’ rights. It is not suggested that Thompson should be overruled. Instead, it is contended that recognising the impact of the decision on subsequent reforms to police accountability processes and contemporary conceptions of the police-citizen relationship is crucial to understanding the roots of current disquiet concerning police accountability (and therefore to the development of meaningful reforms).