One Sunday morning in May of 2000, a 15-year-old Black youth named Brenton Butler was walking to a video store to apply for a job when he was picked up by police as a possible suspect in a brutal murder that had occurred earlier that morning. Taken back to the motel where the murder had taken place, Butler was positively identified by the murder victim’s husband, James Stevens, who had observed...

Immediately prior to publication, one of the authors of this book gave a public 'ecture entitled "Psychopathology and Homicide" to a medical audience. As a result ?f this, certain of the more informed, and therefore be it acknowledged, more sensitive doctors among his hearers came to the conclusion that both his own views and those to be expressed in the book would be that "many psychiatric pat...

Enhanced sensitivity to information of negative (compared to positive) valence has an adaptive value, for example, by expediting the correct choice of avoidance behavior. However, previous evidence for such enhanced sensitivity has been inconclusive. Here we report a clear advantage for negative over positive words in categorizing them as emotional. In 3 experiments, participants classified bri...

Background Euthanasia is one of the most intriguing ethical, medical and law issues that marked whole XX century and beginning of the XXI century, sharply dividing scientific and unscientific public to its supporters and opponents. It also appears as one of the points where all three major religions (Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic) have the same view. They are strongly against legalizing mercy...

Violence and murder has its roots in biological, psychological, and sociological factors. This article will focus on one specific element of the biological aspects of violence and murder, specifically neurological and neuropsychological aspects. The author will provide a literature review contrasting structural brain abnormalities and dysfunction (neuropathology) and brain behavior (neuropsycho...

The Sally Clark case was notorious for the prosecution’s misuse of statistics in respect of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). In particular, the claim made by Roy Meadows at the original trial – that there was “only 1 in 73 million chance of both children being SIDS victims” – has been thoroughly, and rightly, discredited. However, as made clear by probability experts who analysed the case, ...

Building on earlier research undertaken at the Australian Institute of Criminology (Pinto & Wilson 1990), the current research explores the serial murder phenomenon in Australia using data collected as part of the Institute’s National Homicide Monitoring Program (NHMP). Results show that between July 1989 and June 2006, there were 11 groupings of serial murders identified in the NHMP, committed...