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I don't know about you, but I find it incredibly hard to keep up with the burgeoning research in risk assessment. In this era of international fear and carceral control, disciplines from psychology to criminology to nursing to juvenile justice are cranking out more articles each month, and the deluge can feel overwhelming. Fortunately, two prominent researchers are offering to help us stay organized and up to speed -- for free. The newly created Alliance for International Risk Research (AIRR) will send out a monthly email containing references to all new articles related to forensic risk ...
In an unprecedented case, a Washington news council has determined that the Seattle Times was inaccurate and unfair to a forensic psychologist targeted in an investigative series on the state's sexually violent predator program. Reporter Christine Willmsen went too far in her four-part investigative series on the costs of implementing SVP laws by singling out psychologist Richard Wollert for public censure. Relying on prosecution sources, she portrayed Wollert as a defense hack who promulgated unorthodox theories in order to line his own pockets, quoting detractors who called him an ...
Courts cling to DSM as "bible" As alluded to yesterday, in Part I, mental health professionals know not to take the DSM (or the ICD, for that matter) too seriously. It's just convenient fiction, or at best "useful constructs," mainly used to attain insurance reimbursement. Only, there's this curious phenomenon: In the legal system, where the consequences of error can be grave, DSM diagnoses have taken on a mantra of grand truth. Increasingly, I find myself being asked during court testimony about some nit-picky little criterion or another (such as the six-month specifier for pedophilia) as if ...
Ambitious "paradigm shift" fizzles By now, you've seen the bad press about the American Psychiatric Association's new diagnostic codebook: Media pundits are labeling it "a manual run amok," so ambitious in scope that almost everyone qualifies for some mental illness or another. But browsing through my crisp new copy, I find myself curiously dispassionate. Sure, it's even more bloated than the DSM-IV. But mainly, they just moved the chapters around and renamed a diagnosis here and there (dysthymia, for example, is now persistent depressive disorder). Even the typefaces will look familiar. ...
Two years ago, I reported on a California appellate opinion upholding the sacredness of patient-therapist confidentiality even for convicted felons who are mandated to treatment as a condition of parole. Today, the California Supreme Court upheld the gist of the ruling -- but with a proviso. Using strained logic, the court held that the breach of confidentiality was not so prejudicial as to merit overturning Ramiro Gonzales's civil commitment, as the Sixth District Court of Appeal had done.Gonzales is a developmentally disabled man whose therapist turned over prejudicial therapy records ...
While the US Congress deliberates about changes to the immigration system, hundreds of sets of human bones remain unidentified in Arizona at the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. Shocking but not surprising; since the 1990s, more than 6,000 people have lost their lives crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. For a long time, identification of those remains was difficult.
One approach to solve this crisis is the use of technology. The Pima County Office and Humane Borders came up with the idea of launching a web-based system that will allow the public to identify the approximately 2000 ...
A mummy is a human or animal that has been preserved, through artificial or accidental means (i.e. by exposure to chemicals, very low humidity or extreme cold, lack of air, etc.). People tend to associate the word mummy with the well-known mummies of Egypt or South America but never with contemporary preserved bodies.
From time to time, Forensic Anthropologists and other forensic scientists face the challenge of analyze and identify mummified bodies (normally through fingerprint analysis). The first stage is to rehydrate the tissues in order to regain something of its normal texture. With or ...
We all know from our History classes that the explorer and colonizer Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy. Or at least that is the the general consensus among historians…
Recently, the forensic document examiner Jesús Delgado published a book entitled “Christopher Columbus, his origin and life examined with 21st century police techniques” (my translation of ”Cristóbal Colón, su origen y vida investigados con técnicas policiales del siglo XXI “.
In his book , Delgado states that Columbus was from Catalonia. A careful study of files containing ...
The body of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is set to be exhumed on November 26, eight years after his death, to investigate whether he may have been poisoned. Palestinians are coordinating with Russian, Swiss, and French experts.
Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Hussein , popularly known as Yasser Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority and a symbol of Palestinian resistance, was a a highly controversial figure. He died in France in 2004, aged 75, a month after being flown, seriously ill, from his battered headquarters in Ramallah, and no ...
According to the IAPBA (International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts, “bloodstain pattern analysis can yield valuable information concerning the events which lead to their creation when examined by a qualified analyst“.
This type of analysis involves the examination of the size, shape and distribution of bloodstains at scenes involving bloodshed in order to conduct a scientifically based reconstruction of a crime.
BPA as a forensic discipline is credited to Dr. Paul Leland Kirk. He became involved in the famous case of Dr. Sam Sheppard. He was tried and convicted ...
Hi everyone,
The kindle version of my new Psychology book is available for free for the next 5 days (May 17-21) See following links.
www.amazon.com/dp/B00CR1DX22 (USA Link)
www.amazon.com/dp/B00CR1DX22 (UK Link)
The book is based on topics I've posted about over the last six years which have stood out in terms of the response they elicited, be that in number of likes, comments made, how often the post was shared etc. This type of content makes you think, it's relevant to people's lives, it challenges assumptions and makes you exclaim "Well I never!" Basically, it's about things that ...
Psychology Student Guide
I'm very excited to announce that my Psychology Student Guide has just been published worldwide on the Amazon Kindle. See following link for full details.
http://goo.gl/5TmWl
The guide has already had some great independent reviews and if you do decide to take a look I would be very grateful if you rate the book and let Amazon know what you think.
Priced super low with students in mind the guide only costs around $3.99 (price might vary slightly from country to country).
No Kindle - No Problem.
You can read the Psychology Student Guide on ...
I'm delighted to announce that the latest version of the Psychology Student Survival Guide is now available for free download on the iPhone/iPod/iPad.
Comprehensively updated with even more invaluable information this is a must have resource for anybody currently studying or thinking about studying psychology.
Since it's launch last year over 12,000 psychology students have downloaded the Psychology Student Survival Guide App. You can join them today via the following link.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/psychguide/id440790994?mt=8
Please share this post.
...
Interview with forensic psychologist Dr. Steve Porter
Dr. Stephen Porter is an academic and consultant in the area of psychology and law. Steve is the Founding Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science & Law (CAPSL) in Canada. He has published numerous scholarly articles on deception, psychopaths and violent behaviour, and forensic aspects of memory.
You can access the interview via the following link.
http://www.all-about-body-language.com/steve-porter.html
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(Photo Credit: taliesin, Via MourgeFile)
If you're interested in learning all about body language and non-verbal communication I'm delighted to announce that I have just launched a new website dedicated to the topic.
I had originally planned just to have a body language section on my psychology website but such is the scope and range of this fascinating topic it soon became clear that it needed a dedicated website to do justice to all the things we intend to cover. I say we because I am extremely fortunate to be developing the website in collaboration with Craig-James ...
Jodi Arias has been convicted of brutally murdering, with premeditation, her boyfriend Travis Alexander. Today the jury was declared deadlocked regarding whether to sentence her to death or life imprisonment. What do the tragic cases of Casey Anthony, Joran van der Sloot and Jodi Arias have in common? And what can they teach us about the psychology of evil? read
On May 6, 2013, we mark Sigmund Freud's 157th birthday. Though much maligned today, for the most part unfairly so, Freud is the indisputable father of modern psychotherapy. And much of what he had to say about the human psyche more than a century ago remains true. read
Tonight Al Pacino plays Phil Spector in a made-for-television drama about his creative life and 2009 conviction for the tragic killing of Lana Clarkson. read
London – Austria's alpine lakes are warming, and that's bad news for the region's fish and economy, according to new research in the journal Hydrobiologia .
LONDON – Just as rich nations have passed the responsibility for carbon dioxide emissions to the developing nations, so the rich provinces of China have exported the problem to the poorest regions, according to new research.
Although I mostly think about conservation, ecology and nature, I have a soft spot for medicine and, in particular, genetics. It's partly due to my own family history and experience, partly my interest in how people think about medicine and death, and partly my 6-month internship at Nature Medicine , which began more than two years ago this month.So when Arikia Millikan , editor of LadyBits --a space for "tech-savvy women creating the content we want to consume"--asked me to write my own take on the recent Supreme Court case about gene patenting, I had to give it a go. I didn't write about ...
[caption id="attachment_2131" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Dragonfly sporting antenna-laden backpack"] [/caption]Dragonflies are straight "A" hunters, capturing fruit flies in mid-air about 95 percent of the time, a grade that puts a head-of-the-class predator like a lion to shame.
A cutting-edge biological terror alert system detected a potential threat in the air one morning back in 2008, threatening to derail then-Senator Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver for his party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Initial results from a pricey national air sampling system suggested that bacteria that could cause tularemia had been detected. The microbe, Francisella tularensis , might have been weaponized to cause the infectious disease. ...
STORY: "Men wrongly convicted or arrested on bite evidence," by reporter Amanda Lee Myers, published by the Associated Press on June 15, 2013. PHOTO CAPTION: In this Jan. 30, 2009, file photo Robert Lee Stinson, second right, hugs a family friend as his sister Charlene Stinson, right, wipes her tears after Stinson walked out of the New Lisbon, Wis., Correctional Institution. Stinson was convicted in 1985 of raping and killing a 63-year-old Milwaukee woman and sentenced to life in prison. Stinson was exonerated and released in 2009 after more than 23 years in prison. ...
STORY: "Defence lawyers want review of cases involving pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne: Pathologist's trial testimony at issue," by reporter Jerry Mitchell, published by the Clarion-Ledger on June 15, 2013.GIST: "Some defense lawyers are calling for an independent review of cases in which pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne has testified. “What needs to happen is the attorney general, the Mississippi Supreme Court or the Legislature need to appoint an inspector general or independent counsel to handle it,” said Tucker Carrington, who heads the Mississippi Innocence Project. ...
STORY: "Lundy appeal begins in Privy Council," published by NZ Newswire on June 17, 2013.GIST: "The validity of scientific evidence used to convict Mark Lundy of murdering his wife and daughter will come under the spotlight at the Privy Council in London. Lundy was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 20 years after a jury found him guilty of murdering his wife Christine and his seven-year-old daughter Amber in Palmerston North in 2000. He was granted permission to appeal his conviction in February. The Privy Council has set aside three days to hear the ...
STORY: "Aarushi Talwar murder: Indian prosecutors say defence shouldn't use forensics or witnesses: Indian prosecutors say a Delhi couple accused of killing their daughter and cook should not be allowed to call defencc witnesses," by Shree Paradkar, published by the Toronto Star on June 14, 2013.GIST: In the latest twist in a high-profile murder trial in India, prosecutors say a Delhi couple accused of killing their daughter and cook should not be given access to test results that may have shown the involvement of three other men. Nor, prosecutors argued, should they be allowed to ...
STORY: "Out on Annie Dookhan," by reporter Chris Orchard, published by the Summerville Parch on June 10, 2013.GIST: "One Chelsea man who was arrested less than a month after being released allegedly said, "I just got out on Annie Dookhan and I ain’t going back to jail" as police escorted him out of a McDonalds. Pasquarello, speaking to the Somerville Board of Aldermen Tuesday, said Somerville police have formed a partnership with the Middlesex County District Attorney's office to monitor and potentially help the former inmates residing in Somerville. "When these people are out ...
