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 Title   Date   Author   Host 

works.bepress.com

by Saul M. Kassin, et al.

April 1, 2005

College students and police investigators watched or listened to ten prison inmates confessing to crimes. Half the confessions were true accounts; half were false-concocted for the study.

Consistent with much recent research, students were generally more accurate than police, and accuracy rates were higher among those presented with audiotaped than videotaped confessions. In addition, investigators were significantly more confident in their judgments and also prone to judge confessors guilty. To determine if police accuracy would increase if this guilty response bias were neutralized, participants in a second experiment were specifically informed that half the confessions were true and half were false. This manipulation eliminated the investigator response bias, but it did not increase accuracy or lower confidence. These findings are discussed for what they imply about the post-interrogation risks to innocent suspects who confess.

Slyck News

by Thomas Mennecke

March 20, 2005

United States Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has been appointed chairman of the new Intellectual Property Subcommittee.

"The subcommittee will have jurisdiction over all intellectual property laws and oversight on patent, copyright, trademark, and international intellectual property policies. Hatch named Bruce Artim, former staff director and chief counsel for the Judiciary Committee, the subcommittee's staff director and chief counsel." Why is this important to the P2P and file-sharing community' Let us take a look at Senator Hatch’s past record.

Rosenberg Herald Coaster (TX)

by STEPHEN PALKOT

March 12, 2005

While state legislators debate the finer points of a bill intended to overhaul Children's Protective Services, Fort Bend County officials agree: something needs to be done.

A bill proposed by Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Lewisville, calls for a increase in the number of CPS caseworkers throughout the state.

Questions remain as to how the state could fund the new workers, and legislators of both parties are debating a proposal to privatize some aspects of the foster care system. The measure, Senate Bill 6, passed in the Senate and will be up for a house vote. SB 6 was declared emergency legislation by Gov. Rick Perry and can become law within 60 days of its passage.

The Mercury News - [free subscription required]

by Jessie Seyfer

March 3, 2005

If a little more sunlight shone on the traditionally closed juvenile court, some say, the public could see how well the system works.

But sunshine also could expose abused and neglected children -- whom the juvenile justice system was designed to protect -- to even more trauma. So go the main opinions around the question, to be debated today in Redwood City, of whether juvenile dependency hearings should be open to the public.

seattlepi.com

by Thomas Shapley

February 26, 2005

"We humbly apologize." Those are words no appointed state official wants to utter to the chairman of a key legislative committee after just three weeks on the job.

But Washington State Patrol Chief John Batiste had little choice in making that apology after a state legislator received a barrage of nasty, even threatening, e-mail messages apparently sent by troopers and their families. Batiste, who took the top WSP job earlier this month, offered the apology "as an individual and as a group," to House Transportation Chairman Ed Murray, D-Seattle, and Rep. Toby Nixon, R-Kirkland, at a committee hearing Wednesday evening. "I and the union representative want to apologize for the behavior of a few," he said.

Stop The Drug War

February 11, 2005

In a 2006 federal budget proposal marked by hefty increases for the Pentagon and the State Department and belt-tightening for just about everyone else, even spending for police is on the chopping block.

The Bush administration has said the federal budget reflects its priorities, the document makes clear that those priorities are foreign war and homeland security. The Pentagon's already mammoth budget will increase from $400 billion to $419 billion, contributing to a whopping 41% increase in war spending since 2001. One of the biggest losers in the Bush budget is the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. Initiated by then President Clinton as part of his vow to "make America safer" by putting 100,000 additional police officers on the street, the program was funded last year at $499 million dollars, but the Bush 2006 budget slashes COPS by a whopping 95% to only $22 million. Overall, Bush administration grants to state and local law enforcement will drop by nearly 50%, from $2.8 billion in 2005 to $1.5 billion in 2006.

lewrockwell.com

by Rep. Ron Paul, Md

February 7, 2005

We've all heard the words democracy and freedom used countless times, especially in the context of our invasion of Iraq. They are used interchangeably in modern political discourse, yet their true meanings are very different.

George Orwell wrote about "meaningless words" that are endlessly repeated in the political arena.* Words like "freedom," "democracy," and "justice," Orwell explained, have been abused so long that their original meanings have been eviscerated. In Orwell's view, political words were "Often used in a consciously dishonest way." Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language. As a result, Americans have been conditioned to accept the word "democracy" as a synonym for freedom, and thus to believe that democracy is unquestionably good. The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this, as evidenced not only by our republican constitutional system, but also by their writings in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. James Madison cautioned that under a democratic government, "There is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual." John Adams argued that democracies merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights. Yet how many Americans know that the word "democracy" is found neither in the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, our very founding documents?

Salt Lake Tribune (UT)

by Ronnie Lynn

February 3, 2005

The Senate Education Committee unanimously advanced Senate Bill 59 before a packed room of home-school supporters.

School districts would be prohibited from monitoring the attendance, teacher credentials or facilities of home-schooled students under a bill sent to the Senate floor Wednesday.

Washington Post

by Elizabeth Williamson

February 1, 2005

NIH study: Risk-taking diminishes at age 25

A National Institutes of Health study suggests that the region of the brain that inhibits risky behavior is not fully formed until age 25, a finding with implications for a host of policies, including the nation's driving laws.

The research has implications beyond driving: Attorneys cited brain development studies as the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether juvenile offenders should be eligible for the death penalty. The court is expected to reach a decision by midyear.

Stop The Drug War

January 14, 2005

For nearly 20 years, federal judges have been sentencing defendants to sentences beyond the statutory maximum based on findings of fact never considered by a jury.

Under sentencing laws adopted as "reforms" in the 1980s, judges could use a lower standard of proof than required to convict defendants to find that they had, for example, trafficked in a certain quantity of drugs or embezzled a certain amount of money, and use those findings to add years to their sentences. In part because of the federal sentencing guidelines scheme, in the intervening period federal prison populations have swollen dramatically, with a majority of those prisoners being drug offenders.

      
Carschooling by Diane Flynn Keith
Carschooling

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