Determining whether race, sex, or other juror characteristics influence how capital case jurors vote is difficult. Jurors tend to vote for death in more egregious cases and for life in less egregious cases no matter what their own characteristics. And a juror's personal characteristics may get lost in the process of deliberation because the final verdict reflects the jury's will, not the indivi...

The three-judges protocol, recently advocated by Mclver and Morgan as an example of stepwise refinement of security protocols, studies how to securely compute the majority function to reach a final verdict without revealing each individual judge’s decision. We extend their protocol in two different ways for an arbitrary number of 2n+1 judges. The first generalisation is inherently centralised, ...

BACKGROUND A litigation crisis exists in this country, and it may be better understood through analysis of lawsuits. Verdict summary analysis has been used for this purpose. METHODS Ninety-nine jury verdict reviews from 1986 to 2001 were obtained from a computerized database. Reviews compiled data on defendants, plaintiffs, allegations of wrongdoing, cancer cell types, sites, outcomes, and ca...

So, what’s the verdict, good or bad? Boring algae clearly have important functions in reef ecosystems and will influence how they cope with climate change and ocean acidification in the near future. However, we cannot yet give a verdict as to whether they will act as a buffer against these environmental changes or make the situation worse. Little is known about the ecophysiological diversity of...

At any level of computer networks, interoperability testing generally deals with several components that communicate while trying to provide a designated service. When a component remains silent, the assigned testing verdict is generally Fail, assuming that its behavior is non-conformant. Sometimes, this silence may be anticipated given the component’s specifications. In these cases, the fail v...

I commend John Melville and David Naimark for their commentary in this issue of the Journal demonstrating how the guilty but mentally ill (GBMI) verdict perverts the insanity defense by encouraging jurors to find insane defendants guilty (but mentally ill) and by imposing punishment on those found GBMI that is more severe than would have been imposed on them if they had simply been found guilty...

To the Editor: Cocaine is one of the most widespread drugs of abuse; therefore, clinical laboratories are frequently requested to screen for the presence of cocaine and its metabolites in urine. When screening a urine specimen from a potential study participant for drugs of abuse, using a Verdict II lateral flow test slide (MEDTOX Diagnostics), multiple technologists obtained a negative screeni...

Black and White mock jurors' sensitivity to the cross-race effect was investigated by varying the race of the eyewitness in a simulated murder trial of a Black defendant. Participants heard an audiotape of a trial after which they rendered a verdict and rated the credibility of the witnesses. White participants found the prosecution witnesses (including the eyewitness) more credible, and the de...