In Canada, illicit drug use and addiction have traditionally been considered as a criminal justice problem and have been addressed from a legal perspective. Over the past century, a medical approach to drug addiction has slowly crept into the criminal justice processing of drug offenders. This has happened through the combination of principles of punishment with principles of addiction treatmen...

Three studies using between-subjects designs examined the effect of facial tattoos on two stages of a courtroom trial. The presence of a facial tattoo affected judgments of guilt, but it did not lead to higher punishment ratings. This was the case for different types of crime varying in offense seriousness and for faces varying in perceived trustworthiness. The effect on guilt was fully mediate...

Perceptions of criminality and remorse are critical for legal decision-making. While faces perceived as criminal are more likely to be selected in police lineups and to receive guilty verdicts, faces perceived as remorseful are more likely to receive less severe punishment recommendations. To identify the information that makes a face appear criminal and/or remorseful, we successfully used two ...

We present a model where groups attempt to exert in‡uence on policies using both bribes (plata, Spanish for silver) and the threat of punishment (plomo, Spanish for lead). We then use it to make predictions about the quality of a country’s public o¢ cials and to understand the role of institutions granting politicians with immunity from legal prosecution. The use of punishment lowers the return...

In recent decades, national governments and international authorities have increasingly emphasized the role of legal institutions in restoring order after political violence. This study explores how, following the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government created new decentralized grassroots legal forums that aimed to produce community out of a divided population. The legal institutions were design...

Over the course of the last decade there has been an increasing interest in neurobiological analyses of the causes of behavior among many practitioners of criminal law. In some institutional circles this has crystallized as an interest in providing a physical method for classifying the actions of human agents according to preexisting social–legal categories. The impetus driving this search for ...

For at least 111 years society has been searching for a will o' the wisp "legal test" of criminal responsibility, i.e., liability for punishment provided by law, applicable to all cases in which the defense of insanity is raised.' The purpose of the search is obvious: Society wants a legal standard by which to judge whether or not a man should be held responsible for his acts in order to establ...

Legal precedent establishes juvenile offenders as inherently less culpable than adult offenders and thus protects juveniles from the most severe of punishments. But how fragile might these protections be? In the present study, simply bringing to mind a Black (vs. White) juvenile offender led participants to view juveniles in general as significantly more similar to adults in their inherent culp...

Jian Hua1 and Sanjay Bapna2 1School of Business and Public Administration, University of the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C., USA 2Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA ABSTRACT In order to deter cyber terrorism, it is important to identify the terrorists, since punishment may not deter them. The identification probability relies heavily on tracking cyber terrorists. However,...

Internet proliferation and ubiquity are easing the process for individuals to copy, download, share, sell and distribute copyrighted software without purchasing a legal license. The prevalent piracy issue has not only caused a tremendous loss of revenues for legal software makers, but also raised piracy ethicality. The current study shows that moral attitude is one of important predictors for p...