Vital functions and the effect of injuries on quality of life are important from a viewpoint of causation in willful injury crimes committed against a pregnant woman. In such conditions, which should be evaluated separately in criminal law and compensation law, permanent losses of organ function that may negatively affect the woman's fertility, the features of permanent functional impairments a...

Over the course of the last two decades, DNA profiling has grown to be one of the most widely known and applied techniques for the identification of biological samples in forensic science. Arguably, the “fame” of DNA profiling is responsible for the courts’ current interest in the raising of standards for scientific examination of all forms of physical evidence (e.g., toolmarks, soils, fingerpr...

BACKGROUND Persons subject to domestic violence restraining orders (DVROs), known as respondents, are generally prohibited from possessing firearms. Efforts to enforce that prohibition have not been evaluated. The study objective was to determine whether associations exist between risk of incident arrest among DVRO respondents and 1) respondents' access to firearms, and 2) law enforcement recov...

OBJECTIVE To determine the household prevalence of firearms in Pennsylvania, and describe the storage practices for these weapons. DESIGN A statewide telephone survey of 3,620 Pennsylvania adults selected from households by random digit dialing in 1994. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Firearm ownership and storage practices were computed by household characteristics using logistic regression. RESUL...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To describe fatal childhood injury patterns in an urban county and evaluate the use of the emergency medical services system. DESIGN Retrospective chart review of medical examiner files, prehospital and hospital records, and police and fire personnel reports. SETTING Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, an urban county with a population of approximately 1 million. PARTICIPANTS All...

OBJECTIVES To examine the prevalence of household firearms and firearm-storage practices in the 50 states and the District of Columbia and estimate the number of children exposed to unsafe storage practices. METHODS We analyzed data from the 2002 cross-sectional Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey of 240735 adults from randomly selected households with telephones in the 50 state...

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to so many who have encouraged me, instructed me, inspired me, and distracted me throughout the course of this project. Thank you to all of the BUSM Biomedical Forensic Sciences Program students and faculty for the support the last two years. First, I must thank my thesis advisor Catherine Grgicak. Your efforts and energy spent training me, teaching me the bas...

Canadian Bill C-17 was implemented in 1991 to restrict the use of firearms, providing a chance to investigate the effect of firearm control laws in the use of firearms for suicide and homicide. Following Lester and Leenaars' comprehensive studies, the present study examined the use of firearms for suicide and homicide during the period prior to the bill and during the period after the passing o...

BACKGROUND The 1996 Australian National Firearms Agreement introduced strict access limitations. However, reports on the effectiveness of the new legislation are conflicting. This study, accessing all cases of suicide 1997-2004, explores factors which may impact on the choice of firearms as a suicide method, including current licence possession and previous history of legal access. METHODS De...

Gunshot detection finds application in the fields of law enforcement, forensic science, and defense (military applications). The first task of a sniper detector, aiming to estimate the direction of arrival of a given gunshot, is to detect automatically the presence of this audio event. Since it is a typical on-line application where a fast response is of paramount importance, a non (computation...