Behavioral Sciences & the Law最新文献

Best practice in violent extremist risk assessment and management recommends adopting a Structured Professional Judgement (SPJ) approach. The SPJ approach identifies relevant, evidence-based risk and protective factors and requires experts to articulate hypotheses about a) what the person might do (risk of what), and b) how they've come to engage in the concerning behaviour (and why) (Logan 2021) to inform who, needs to do what, and when. Whilst the field continues to move towards adopting an SPJ approach, there remains a gap between what is known empirically and what is needed in practice. We apply psychometric network modelling to a sample of 485 individuals entered into Channel, the UK's preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) program. We model the system of interactions from which susceptibility to violent extremism emerges, providing data driven evidence which speaks to risk of what and why. Our research highlights a way to generate evidence which captures the multifactorial nature of susceptibility to violent extremism, to support professional decision making in the context of an SPJ approach.

Research on sexual homicides has primarily focused on male offenders, and thus little is known about female offenders who perpetrated sexual homicides. This study aimed to develop the first statistical classification of female single-victim (SV) sexual homicide offenders (SHOs) using the U.S. FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports database that spanned over a 47-year period (1976–2022). A latent class analysis (LCA) was computed to detect subtypes of female SHOs in a sample of 158 offenders. Findings of the LCA identified two unique classes of female SHOs exist within the data: White intra-familial offenders and Black extra-familial offenders. The distinguishing features of these two classes were the offender's racial group, the victim's age and racial groups, the offender-victim relationship, the geographical urbanness level of crime location, and weapon use. This empirically-derived offender classification can be informative to law enforcement agents and security professionals in their investigative strategies.

Victims of sexual homicide may be deceived by perpetrators who use a friendly approach to gain access to them, making it difficult for the victim to assess the danger posed by the stranger. When investigating sexual homicides committed by strangers, investigators often lack direct information, including how the perpetrator gained access to the victim. To identify potential predictors of the approach method used in sexual homicides, this study analyzed the preferences and behaviors of sexual murderers who target strangers based on their approach method. The results of the logistic regression analysis showed that in comparison to offenders using “blitz” or “surprise” attacks, those using a deceptive “con” approach tended to have more male victims, exploit vulnerability, and exhibit post-crime organization by relocating the victim's body and successfully disposing of the weapon used in the crime. Their crimes also more frequently involved oral sex and had lower rates of victim beating. This study discusses the investigative implications of these findings.

Confessions are an important evidentiary part of the legal process, and false confessions have been notable contributors to wrongful convictions. However, academic research in the psychology and law field primarily relies on student or volunteer samples in staged exercises, methodological features that lack ecological validity for replicating police interrogation or the pressures distinctive to high stakes crime investigations. Here, we provide an integrative review of research and data on false confessions during police interrogations with distinctions of key concepts, relevant case law pertaining to confessions including several U.S. Supreme Court decisions, updating the typology of false confessions, the quantification of false confessions, risk factors for false confessions, interrogation risk factors for false confessions, validity threats to false confessions research, and recommended directions for informing courts and the law.

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a new measurement tool designed to capture endorsement of myths surrounding female perpetrated sexual violence against men, specifically in ‘forced-to-penetrate’ cases. Data were collected among a sample of 4152 UK adults aged 18–55+ (52% female). Dimensionality and construct validity of the Forced-to-Penetrate Myth Acceptance Scale (FTP-MAS) was investigated using traditional Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) techniques separately for the complete sample, males only, and females only. CFA results indicated that FTP-MAS scores are best captured by a three-factor model (1. Distorted Sex and Gender Roles; 2. Harm Minimisation; 3. Offence Denial) across all samples tested. Excellent composite reliability and differential predictive validity were observed for all three subscales. The validated 22-item FTP-MAS constitutes the first measurement tool which allows for the assessment and evaluation of public attitudes towards female perpetrators who force men to penetrate them without consent. As such, this tool enables researchers to better understand the multi-faceted nature of these myths, assess prevalence in different contexts, and can also be used as an outcome measure in research seeking to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions that aim to debunk endorsement of such myths and stereotypes.

A court may move the location of the trial to another jurisdiction if the jury pool is deemed biased by the judge, a legal maneuver based on a “Change of Venue” motion (CoVm). We surveyed the frequency and the factors associated with granting the motion at the state level when the defendant was charged with murder. We reviewed court transcripts of appealed murder convictions during the 2000–2020 years from Nexis. We complied a sample of 832 CoVm and conducted a nested regression analysis. We repeated the procedure with a subset of 360 CoVm for which we could identify the race of the defendant and victim. Overall, the success rate of CoVm was 23.5% but varied widely between the states. The motion was more likely to be granted in jurisdictions with smaller populations and a policeman was the victim. It was also found that Black and Latino defendants were less successful than Whites in winning CoVm. The racial disparity in CoVm decisions is especially concerning given past findings that people of color suffer heightened negative local pretrial publicity. In light of the findings, we advocate for a more uniform state legislation.

We conducted a pre-registered meta-analysis of studies that directly compared the predictive validity of risk assessment tools to unstructured judgments of risk for violent, any, or sexual offending. A total of 31 studies, containing 169 effect sizes from 45,673 risk judgments, met inclusion criteria. Based on the results of three-level mixed-effects meta-regression models, the predictive validity of total scores on risk assessment tools was significantly higher than that of unstructured judgments for predictions of violent, any, and sexual offending. Tools continued to outperform unstructured judgments after accounting for risk of bias. This finding was also robust to variations in population, assessment context, and outcome measurement. Although this meta-analysis provides support for the use of risk assessment tools, it also highlights limitations and gaps that future research should address.