Arquivo da tag: Justiça

Deeply Held Religious Beliefs Prompting Sick Kids to Be Given ‘Futile’ Treatment (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 13, 2012) — Parental hopes of a “miraculous intervention,” prompted by deeply held religious beliefs, are leading to very sick children being subjected to futile care and needless suffering, suggests a small study in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

The authors, who comprise children’s intensive care doctors and a hospital chaplain, emphasise that religious beliefs provide vital support to many parents whose children are seriously ill, as well as to the staff who care for them.

But they have become concerned that deeply held beliefs are increasingly leading parents to insist on the continuation of aggressive treatment that ultimately is not in the best interests of the sick child.

It is time to review the current ethics and legality of these cases, they say.

They base their conclusions on a review of 203 cases which involved end of life decisions over a three year period.

In 186 of these cases, agreement was reached between the parents and healthcare professionals about withdrawing aggressive, but ultimately futile, treatment.

But in the remaining 17 cases, extended discussions with the medical team and local support had failed to resolve differences of opinion with the parents over the best way to continue to care for the very sick child in question.

The parents had insisted on continuing full active medical treatment, while doctors had advocated withdrawing or withholding further intensive care on the basis of the overwhelming medical evidence.

The cases in which withdrawal or withholding of intensive care was considered to be in the child’s best interests were consistent with the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health guidance.

Eleven of these cases (65%) involved directly expressed religious claims that intensive care should not be stopped because of the expectation of divine intervention and a complete cure, together with the conviction that the opinion of the medical team was overly pessimistic and wrong.

Various different faiths were represented among the parents, including Christian fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism, and Roman Catholicism.

Five of the 11 cases were resolved after meeting with the relevant religious leaders outside the hospital, and intensive care was withdrawn in a further case after a High Court order.

But five cases were not resolved, so intensive care was continued. Four of these children eventually died; one survived with profound neurological disability.

Six of the 17 cases in which religious belief was not a cited factor, were all resolved without further recourse to legal, ethical, or socio-religious support. Intensive care was withdrawn in all these children, five of whom died and one of whom survived, but with profound neurological disability.

The authors emphasise that parental reluctance to allow treatment to be withdrawn is “completely understandable as [they] are defenders of their children’s rights, and indeed life.”

But they argue that when children are too young to be able to actively subscribe to their parents’ religious beliefs, a default position in which parental religion is not the determining factor might be more appropriate.

They cite Article 3 of the Human Rights Act, which aims to ensure that no one is subjected to torture or inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment.

“Spending a lifetime attached to a mechanical ventilator, having every bodily function supervised and sanitised by a carer or relative, leaving no dignity or privacy to the child and then adult, has been argued as inhumane,” they argue.

And they conclude: “We suggest it is time to reconsider current ethical and legal structures and facilitate rapid default access to courts in such situations when the best interests of the child are compromised in expectation of the miraculous.”

In an accompanying commentary, the journal’s editor, Professor Julian Savulescu, advocates: “Treatment limitation decisions are best made, not in the alleged interests of patients, but on distributive justice grounds.”

In a publicly funded system with limited resources, these should be given to those whose lives could be saved rather than to those who are very unlikely to survive, he argues.

“Faced with the choice between providing an intensive care bed to a [severely brain damaged] child and one who has been at school and was hit by a cricket ball and will return to normal life, we should provide the bed to the child hit by the cricket ball,” he writes.

In further commentaries, Dr Steve Clarke of the Institute for Science and Ethics maintains that doctors should engage with devout parents on their own terms.

“Devout parents, who are hoping for a miracle, may be able to be persuaded, by the lights of their own personal…religious beliefs, that waiting indefinite periods of time for a miracle to occur while a child is suffering, and while scarce medical equipment is being denied to other children, is not the right thing to do,” he writes.

Leading ethicist, Dr Mark Sheehan, argues that these ethical dilemmas are not confined to fervent religious belief, and to polarise the issue as medicine versus religion is unproductive, and something of a “red herring.”

Referring to the title of the paper, Charles Foster, of the University of Oxford, suggests that the authors have asked the wrong question. “The legal and ethical orthodoxy is that no beliefs, religious or secular, should be allowed to stonewall the best interests of the child,” he writes.

Psychopaths Get a Break from Biology: Judges Reduce Sentences If Genetics, Neurobiology Are Blamed (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 16, 2012) — A University of Utah survey of judges in 19 states found that if a convicted criminal is a psychopath, judges consider it an aggravating factor in sentencing, but if judges also hear biological explanations for the disorder, they reduce the sentence by about a year on average.

The new study, published in the Aug. 17, 2012, issue of the journalScience, illustrates the “double-edged sword” faced by judges when they are given a “biomechanical” explanation for a criminal’s mental disorder:

If a criminal’s behavior has a biological basis, is that reason to reduce the sentence because defective genes or brain function leave the criminal with less self-control and ability to tell right from wrong? Or is it reason for a harsher sentence because the criminal likely will reoffend?

“In a nationwide sample of judges, we found that expert testimony concerning the biological causes of psychopathy significantly reduced sentencing of the psychopath” from almost 14 years to less than 13 years, says study coauthor James Tabery, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Utah.

However, the hypothetical psychopath in the study got a longer sentence than the average nine-year sentence judges usually impose for the same crime — aggravated battery — and there were state-to-state differences in whether judges reduced or increased the sentence when given information on the biological causes of psychopathy.

The study was conducted by Tabery; Lisa Aspinwall, a University of Utah associate professor of psychology; and Teneille Brown, an associate professor at the university’s S.J. Quinney College of Law.

The researchers say that so far as they know, their study — funded by a University of Utah grant to promote interdisciplinary research — is the first to examine the effect of the biological causes of criminal behavior on real judges’ reasoning during sentencing.

Biological Explanation of Psychopathy Helps Defendant

The anonymous online survey — distributed with the help of 19 of 50 state court administrators who were approached — involved 181 participating judges reading a scenario, based on a real Georgia case, about a psychopath convicted of aggravated battery for savagely beating a store clerk with a gun during a robbery attempt.

The judges then answered a series of questions, including whether they consider scientific evidence of psychopathy to be an aggravating or mitigating factor that would increase or decrease the sentence, respectively, and what sentence they would impose. They were told psychopathy is incurable and treatment isn’t now an option.

While psychopathy isn’t yet a formal diagnosis in the manual used by psychiatrists, it soon may be added as a category of antisocial personality disorder, Tabery says. The study cited an expert definition of psychopathy as “a clinical diagnosis defined by impulsivity; irresponsibility; shallow emotions; lack of empathy, guilt or remorse; pathological lying; manipulation; superficial charm; and the persistent violation of social norms and expectations.”

The researchers recruited 207 state trial court judges for the study. Six dropped out. Twenty others were excluded because they incorrectly identified the defendant’s diagnosis. That left 181 judges who correctly identified the defendant as a psychopath, including 164 who gave complete data on their sentencing decisions.

The judges were randomly divided into four groups. All the judges read scientific evidence that the convicted criminal was a psychopath and what that means, but only half were given evidence about the genetic and neurobiological causes of the condition. Half the judges in each group got the scientific evidence from the defense, which argued it should mitigate or reduce the sentence, and half the judges got the evidence from the prosecution, which argued it should aggravate or increase the sentence.

Judges who were given a biological explanation for the convict’s psychopathy imposed sentences averaging 12.83 years, or about a year less than the 13.93-year average sentence imposed by judges who were told only that the defendant was a psychopath, but didn’t receive a biological explanation for the condition. In both cases, however, sentencing for the psychopath was longer than the judges’ normal nine-year average sentence for aggravated battery.

Even though the year reduction in sentence may not seem like much, “we were amazed the sentence was reduced at all given that we’re dealing with psychopaths, who are very unsympathetic,” Brown says.

Aspinwall notes: “The judges did not let the defendant off, they just reduced the sentence and showed major changes in the quality of their reasoning.”

The study found that although 87 percent of the judges listed at least one aggravating factor in explaining their decision, when the judges heard evidence about the biomechanical causes of psychopathy from the defense, the proportion of judges who also listed mitigating factors rose from about 30 percent to 66 percent.

Psychopathy was seen as an aggravating factor no matter which side presented the evidence, but it was viewed by the judges as less aggravating when presented by the defense than when presented by the prosecution.

A Disconnect between Sentencing and Criminal Responsibility

One surprising and paradoxical finding of the study was that even though the judges tended to reduce the sentence when given a biological explanation for the defendant’s psychopathy, the judges — when asked explicitly — did not rate the defendant as having less free will or as being less legally or morally responsible for the crime.

“The thought is that responsibility and punishment go hand in hand, so if we see reduced punishment, we would expect to see the judges feel the defendants are less responsible,” Tabery says. “So it is surprising that we got the former, not the latter.”

The researchers also counted explicit mentions by the judges of balancing or weighing factors that increase or reduce sentencing. When evidence of a biological cause of the defendant’s psychopathy was presented by the defense, the judges were about 2.5 times more likely to mention weighing aggravating and mitigating factors than when it was presented by the prosecution or when no biological evidence was presented.

The data show that “the introduction of expert testimony concerning a biological mechanism for psychopathy significantly increased the number of judges invoking mitigating factors in their reasoning and balancing them with aggravating factors,” the researchers conclude. “These findings suggest that the biomechanism did invoke such concepts as reduced culpability due to lack of impulse control, even if these concepts did not affect the ratings of free will and responsibility.”

Brown adds: “In the coming years, we are likely to find out about all kinds of biological causes of criminal behavior, so the question is, why does the law care if most behavior is biologically caused? That’s what is so striking about finding these results in psychopaths, because we’re likely to see an even sharper reduction in sentencing of defendants with a more sympathetic diagnosis, such as mental retardation.”

State Variations in Sentencing

While the overall results showed a reduction in sentencing when judges read biological evidence about the cause of psychopathy, the reduction was greater in some of the 19 states surveyed and nonexistent in others. That is not surprising due to variations in sentencing guidelines, rules of evidence and the extent of judges’ discretion.

There were too few responses from eight states to analyze them individually. In three states — Colorado, New York and Tennessee — biological evidence of psychopathy actually increased the sentence, although the findings weren’t statistically significant.

In eight other states — Alabama, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Washington state — biological evidence of psychopathy reduced the sentence or had no effect, and the reduction was statistically significant in two of those states: Utah and Maryland. When just those eight states were examined, the defendant received an average sentence of 10.7 years if evidence was introduced that psychopathy has a biological cause, versus 13.9 years without such evidence.

“We saw sentencing go up in a few states and down in most, and that’s just evidence that it [the double-edge sword] could cut either way,” Brown says.

Aspinwall adds: “When you look at the reasons the judges provide, what is striking to us is the vast majority found the psychopathy diagnosis to be aggravating and, with the presentation of the biological mechanism, also mitigating. So both things are happening.”

Brazil study finds youth homicides have soared 346 percent over last three decades (AP)

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By Associated Press, Published: July 18

RIO DE JANEIRO — The homicide rate for Brazilian young people under age 19 shot up 346 percent over the past three decades, according to research published Wednesday by the Latin American School of Social Sciences.

During that period, youths became a far higher percentage of Brazil’s murder victims — rising from 11 percent of the total in 1980 to 43 percent in 2010, the report said. The homicide rate for young people rose from 3.1 per 100,000 people younger than 19 years old to 13.8 per 100,000.

This means deadly violence against the most vulnerable members of Brazilian society has surpassed the 10 deaths per 100,000 that mark the accepted threshold of an epidemic, said Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, a researcher also affiliated with the Brazilian Center for Latin American Studies.

A country’s homicide rate conveys much more than just the number of people who have died, Waiselfisz said.

“Homicide is not a casual act. There is a culture of violence that is leading to the solving of conflicts by exterminating the bothersome element,” he said.

Waiselfisz said part of the increase in youth homicides might be due to the improvement in Brazil’s record keeping in recent decades.

But, he added, it is undeniable Brazil is experiencing an epidemic of violence against young people. Unlike a disease epidemic, however, the violence is not contained or short-lived because it has become part of society, built into relationships, he said.

“There is a discourse that blames the victims, that says these kids are dying because they are doing drugs, or they got into trouble,” Waiselfisz said. “There is a process of institutional omission when faced with these facts, which are taken as natural.”

The numbers in Waiselfisz’s study rank Brazil as the fourth-worst among 91 countries when it comes to youth homicides, behind El Salvador, Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago.

Perla Ribeiro, head of the nonprofit Association of Centers for the Defense of Children and Adolescents, called the study shocking, and said she hoped that Brazilians will face up to this reality and bring some change.

“Society needs to reflect on these numbers. This isn’t something often discussed, this increase in homicides of adolescents,” Ribeiro said. “All levels of government — municipal, state and federal — need to face up to this as a real public policy problem.”

Antonio Carlos Costa, a pastor who has worked for years in some of Rio de Janeiro’s most violent communities, said the homicide numbers aren’t just statistics, but names as well.

“There is Fabiana, who died in Morro dos Macacos, inside her house; there was the case of Juan,” he said, remembering an 11-year-old boy shot by police near his home and dumped in a river. “There is Joao Roberto, who died in Tijuca, and the boy Ramon from Costa Barros …,” he added, then his voice trailed off.

The cases of children who met violent deaths are too many to name, Costa said.

The majority of young victims suffer both at the hands of police and of drug traffickers and other criminal gangs, a part of Brazil that the rest of the population easily forgets — “the expendable Brazil,” he said.

“One thing I can tell you: This survey doesn’t fully reflect reality. Reality is far more dramatic,” Costa said.

He noted the numbers used in the study came from the Health Ministry’s database, and thus reflect deaths officially recorded, not the untold number of poor or marginalized youths whose disappearance or death is simply never recorded.

“Teenagers who are executed, dumped in rivers, those will never be counted,” Costa said.

Texas judge rules atmosphere, air to be protected like water, may aid climate change lawsuits (Washington Post)

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By Associated Press, Published: July 11

HOUSTON — A Texas judge has ruled that the atmosphere and air must be protected for public use, just like water, which could help attorneys tasked with arguing climate change lawsuits designed to force states to cut emissions.

The written ruling, issued in a letter Monday by Texas District Court Judge Gisela Triana, shot down arguments by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that only water is a “public trust,” a doctrine that dates to the Roman Empire stating a government must protect certain resources — usually water, sometimes wildlife — for the common good.

Adam Abrams, one of the attorneys arguing the case against TCEQ, said Triana’s ruling could be used as a persuasive argument in lawsuits pending in 11 other states.

In Texas, though, a ruling to protect air and the atmosphere has added significance. Republican Gov. Rick Perry is one of the most vocal opponents against widely accepted scientific research that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming. And the state has refused to regulate greenhouse gases, forcing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to work directly with industries to ensure they comply with federal law.

“The commission’s conclusion that the public trust doctrine is exclusively limited to the conservation of water is legally invalid,” Triana wrote.

She also wants the case brought to a standstill, saying that so long as Texas has open-ended litigation on similar issues on the federal level, she cannot compel the TCEQ to write rules to protect the atmosphere and the air.

The TCEQ said in an emailed comment that it was reviewing the judge’s letter and is awaiting her final order, but it appears Triana will support the agency’s move to deny the request for new rules.

The lawsuit was brought by the Texas Environmental Law Center, and is part of a court campaign in a dozen states by an Oregon-based nonprofit, Our Children’s Trust. The group is using children and young adults as plaintiffs in the lawsuits — some state and some federal — filed in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas and Washington.

By relying on “common law” theories, the group hopes to have the atmosphere declared a public trust for the first time, granting it special protection. The doctrine has been used to clean up rivers and coastlines, but many legal experts have been unsure if it could be used successfully to combat climate change.

Still, Abrams, who has handled the Texas case on behalf of the Texas Environmental Law Center, believes Triana’s ruling can be used to argue the cases in other states. So far, he said, this is the first judge to back the group, though a New Mexico court recently allowed the case to go forward.

“I think it’s huge that we got a judge to acknowledge that the atmosphere is a public trust asset and the air is a public trust asset,” Abrams said. “It’s the first time we’ve had verbage like this come out of one of these cases.”

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Heart Rules the Head When We Make Financial Decisions (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (May 21, 2012) — Our ‘gut feelings’ influence our decisions, overriding ‘rational’ thought, when we are faced with financial offers that we deem to be unfair, according to a new study. Even when we are set to benefit, our physical response can make us more likely to reject a financial proposition we consider to be unjust.

Conducted by a team from the University of Exeter, Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and University of Cambridge, the research is published in the journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioural Neuroscience.

The research adds to growing evidence that our bodies can sometimes govern how we think and feel, rather than the other way round. It also reveals that those people who are more in tune with their bodies are more likely to be led by their ‘gut feelings’.

The study was based on a well-known psychological test, the Ultimatum Game. 51 participants were presented with a series of financial offers, based on different ways of dividing £10. Players frequently reject unfair offers in this game even though it leads to personal financial loss — an ‘irrational’ decision from an economic perspective.

The researchers measured participants’ physical responses to each offer by recording how much they sweated through the fingertips and how much their heart rate changed. How accurately participants could ‘listen’ to their bodies was measured on a different task by asking them to count their heartbeats and comparing their accuracy to their actual heart rate recording. Those people who showed a bigger physical response to unfair offers were more likely to reject them, but this was only the case if individuals were also able to accurately ‘listen’ to what their bodies were telling them.

The findings show that individuals who have a strong ‘gut-reaction’ and are in tune with their own physical responses are more likely to reject unfair financial offers, even if this decision results in personal losses.

Lead researcher Dr Barney Dunn of Psychology at the University of Exeter said: “This research supports the idea that what happens in our bodies can sometimes shape how we think and feel in our minds. Everyday phrases like ‘following your heart’ and ‘trusting your gut’ can often, it seems, be accurate.”

“Humans are highly attuned to unfairness and we are sometimes required to weigh up the demands of maintaining justice with preserving our own economic self-interest. At a time when ideas of fairness in the financial sector — from bankers’ bonuses to changes to pension schemes — are being widely debated, it is important to recognise why some individuals rebel against perceived unfairness, whereas other people are prepared to accept the status quo.”

Wrongful Convictions Can Be Reduced Through Science, but Tradeoffs Exist (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (May 22, 2012) — Many of the wrongful convictions identified in a report this week hinged on a misidentified culprit — and a new report in a top journal on psychological science reveals the paradox of reforms in eyewitness identification procedure. In our efforts to make sure that good guys don’t get locked up, we could let more bad guys go.

In the May issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, leading scholars in psychology and the law explore and debate various aspects of eyewitness identification procedures, providing a scientific foundation for this important social issue.

In recent years, researchers and policymakers have called for specific reforms to eyewitness identification procedures that would help to reduce the rate of false identification. These reforms affect various aspects of identification procedure, including how lineups are constructed, what witnesses are told prior to the lineup, and how police officers should behave during the procedure.

Such procedural reforms are often viewed as having ‘no cost’ — they reduce the false identification rate without affecting the correct identification rate. But psychological scientist Steven Clark (University of California, Riverside) argues that ‘no cost’ view may not actually be true. After extensive review of the existing data, Clark points out the paradoxical tradeoffs to reforms in eyewitness identification procedure. Existing data suggest that when we choose to enact reforms that are designed to reduce false identifications, we may also reduce the number of correct identifications at the same time.

But this tradeoff does not tell the whole story, say Gary Wells (Iowa State University), Nancy Steblay (Augsburg College), and Jennifer Dysart (John Jay College of Criminal Justice). While reform procedures may reduce the number of ‘hits,’ they do so by minimizing the influence of suggestive and coercive practices, such as biased instructions and cues from lineup administrators. Wells and his co-authors argue that the so-called ‘lost’ hits aren’t actually relevant, because hits that result from suggestive practices are not legitimate identifications. Eryn Newman from Victoria University of Wellington and Elizabeth Loftus from the University of California, Irvine agree, arguing that eyewitness identification evidence should be based solely on the independent memory of the witness, not on the results of suggestive or coercive procedures.

There is, however, a scientifically valid way to compare witness-identification procedures, say John Wixted and Laura Mickes, both of the University of California, San Diego. If we identify the procedures that reliably differentiate between innocent and guilty suspects over time and across different situations, we will be able to determine which techniques are diagnostically superior to others.

Until we have such comprehensive data, the best way to protect innocent defendants, says Larry Laudan of the University of Texas, is by clearly communicating the fact that eyewitness identifications, regardless of their format, are fallible. According to Laudan, we now have enough empirical data to be able to inform jurors about the error profiles of various eyewitness identification procedures. Sharing this information, he argues, is more important than trying to arrive at “the one unique and definitive format for conducting identifications.”

In the end, Clark points out that the goal of his article is not to argue for or against any particular witness identification procedure. Rather, he hopes to create strong links between social science data and public policy. “To the extent that social science research has a useful role in shaping policy decisions,” says Clark, “social scientists must do for policymakers what they do best and what policymakers cannot do for themselves: conduct careful studies, and provide a clear and complete analysis of the empirical data.”

  • Steven E. Clark et al. “Costs and Benefits of Eyewitness Identification Reform: Psychological Science and Public Policy,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, May 2012
  • Nancy K. Steblay et al., “Eyewitness Identification Reforms: Are Suggestiveness-Induced Hits and Guesses True Hits?”Perspectives on Psychological Science, May 2012
  • Elizabeth F. Loftus et al., “Clarkian Logic on Trial,”Perspectives on Psychological Science, May 2012
  • John T. Wixted et al., “The Field of Eyewitness Memory Should Abandon Probative Value and Embrace Receiver Operating Characteristic Analysis,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, May 2012
  • Larry Laudan et al. “Eyewitness Identifications: One More Lesson on the Costs of Excluding Relevant Evidence,”Perspectives on Psychological Science, May 2012

US police sentenced for Katrina killings (Al Jazeera)

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The brother of Lance Madison (C) was shot dead on September 4, 2005, at the Danziger Bridge in new Orleans [Reuters]

Five ex-police officers given prison terms for roles in shootings and cover-up in days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Last Modified: 05 Apr 2012 01:03

The brother of Lance Madison (C) was shot dead on September 4, 2005, at the Danziger Bridge in new Orleans [Reuters]

Five former New Orleans police officers have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to 65 years for their roles in deadly shootings of unarmed residents in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina.

The presiding judge lashed out at prosecutors for two hours on Wednesday on their handling of the case in which police shot six people at a bridge on September 4, 2005, killing two, less than a week after Katrina made landfall.

To make the shootings appear justified, officers conspired to plant a gun, fabricate witnesses and falsify reports. The case became the centerpiece of the US Justice Department’s push to clean up the troubled New Orleans Police Department.

Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso and Robert Faulcon were convicted of federal firearms charges that carried mandatory minimum prison sentences of at least 35 years. Retired officer Arthur Kaufman, who was assigned to investigate the shootings, was convicted of helping orchestrate the cover-up.

Faulcon, who was convicted on charges in both fatal shootings, faces the stiffest sentence of 65 years. Bowen and Gisevius each face 40 years, while Villavaso was sentenced to 38. Kaufman received the lightest sentence at six
years.

Community ‘disservice’

Afterward, US District Judge Kurt Engelhardt accused prosecutors of cutting overly lenient plea deals with five other officers who cooperated with the civil rights investigation. The former officers pleaded guilty to helping cover up the shooting and are already serving prison terms ranging from three to eight years.

“These through-the-looking-glass plea deals that tied the hands of this court … are an affront to the court and a disservice to the community,” Engelhardt said.

The judge also questioned the credibility of the officers who pleaded guilty and testified against those who went to trial.

In particular, the judge criticized prosecutors for seeking a 20-year prison sentence for Kaufman, yet Michael Lohman, who was the highest-ranking officer at the scene of the shooting, received four years under his deal for pleading guilty to participating in the cover-up.

‘Unbearable’ pain

Engelhardt heard several hours of arguments and testimony earlier on Wednesday from prosecutors, defense attorneys, relatives of shooting victims and the officers. Ronald Madison and 17-year-old James Brissette died in the shootings.

“This has been a long and painful six-and-a-half years,” said Lance Madison, whose 40-year-old, mentally disabled brother, Ronald, was killed at the bridge. “The people of New Orleans and my family are ready for justice.”

Madison individually addressed each defendant, including Faulcon, who shot his brother: “When I look at you, my pain becomes unbearable. You took the life of an angel and basically ripped my heart out.”

Madison also said he was horrified by Kaufman’s actions in the cover-up: “You tried to frame me, a man you knew was innocent, and send me to prison for the rest of my life.”

Lance Madison was arrested on attempted murder charges after police falsely accused him of shooting at the officers on the bridge. He was jailed for three weeks before a judge freed him.

None of the officers addressed the court before they were sentenced.

Chaotic aftermath

Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, leading to the collapse of levees and flooding an estimated 80 per cent of the city. New Orleans was plunged into chaos as residents who hadn’t evacuated were driven from their homes to what high places they could find.

Officers who worked in the city at the time but were not charged in the bridge case on Wednesday told Engelhardt of the lawlessness that followed the flood, and that they feared for their lives.

On the morning of September 4, one group of residents was crossing the Danziger Bridge in the city’s Gentilly area in search of food and supplies when police arrived.

The officers had received calls that shots were being fired. Gunfire reports were common after Katrina.

Faulcon was convicted of fatally shooting Madison, but the jury decided the killing didn’t amount to murder. He, Gisevius, Bowen and Villavaso were convicted in Brissette’s killing, but jurors didn’t hold any of them individually responsible for causing his death.

All five officers were convicted of participating in a cover-up.

O papel da confiança na decisão social (FAPESP)

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08/12/2011

Por Mônica Pileggi

Estudo realizado no Mackenzie e publicado no The Journal of Neuroscience indica que cérebro não percebe injustiça de amigos em situações de decisão econômica (Wikimedia)

Agência FAPESP – Durante situações de decisão econômica, a amizade é uma das variáveis que modulam nosso cérebro, tornando o ser humano incapaz de se sentir injustiçado. Essa é uma das conclusões de uma pesquisa desenvolvida no Laboratório de Neurociência Cognitiva e Social da Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie (UPM) e publicada no The Journal of Neuroscience.

O trabalho, liderado pelo professor Paulo Sérgio Boggio, coordenador de pesquisa do Centro de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde da UPM, foi realizado durante o mestrado “Estudo preliminar sobre potenciais cognitivos em tarefa de tomada de decisão social”, da psicóloga Camila Campanhã, que atualmente faz o doutorado na UPM, ambos com bolsas da FAPESP.

Segundo Campanhã, o estudo teve como objetivo estudar o papel da confiança na tomada de decisão social e suas bases neurobiológicas. Para isso, ela se baseou na teoria dos jogos, ramo da matemática aplicada que estuda situações estratégicas nas quais jogadores escolhem diferentes ações na tentativa de melhorar seu retorno.

Inicialmente desenvolvida como ferramenta para compreender comportamento econômico e depois usada até mesmo para definir estratégias nucleares, a teoria dos jogos é hoje aplicada em diversos campos acadêmicos. Tornou-se um ramo proeminente da matemática especialmente após a publicação, em 1944, de The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior de John von Neumann e Oskar Morgenstern.

Campanhã – cujo estudo foi realizado em colaboração com os pesquisadores Ludovico Minati, do Istituto Neurologico “Carlo Besta” (Itália), e Felipe Fregni, da Universidade Harvard (Estados Unidos) – conta que para a realização do experimento foi utilizado o Ultimatum Game, jogo utilizado na neuroeconomia e por estudiosos do comportamento social.

Composto por participantes da faixa etária de 18 a 25 anos, o jogo foi dividido em dois blocos. No primeiro, o computador enviou propostas econômicas justas e injustas de amigos (que se encontravam em ambientes diferentes). No segundo, as propostas foram feitas por integrantes do laboratório, desconhecidos dos participantes.

Os valores das propostas foram classificadas como justas (50:50), mais ou menos justas (70:30) e muito injustas (80:20 e 90:10). “Os participantes receberam a mesma quantidade de propostas justas e injustas, tanto do amigo como do desconhecido, enviadas pelo computador. Registramos toda a atividade eletroencefalográfica desses participantes durante o experimento”, disse Campanhã à Agência FAPESP.

Nesse tipo de experimento, caso a pessoa aceite a proposta, ambos recebem o valor combinado. Se ela recusar, os dois não recebem nada. “Do ponto de vista comportamental, observamos que as pessoas rejeitaram muito mais as propostas injustas do desconhecido do que as oferecidas pelo amigo – nas quais o amigo sairia ganhando mais. Além disso, essas pessoas pontuaram os amigos como mais justos do que os desconhecidos”, destacou.

O estudo apontou uma inversão positiva na atividade neuroelétrica para as propostas de amigos. “A expectativa era que os dados seriam negativos conforme se recebessem propostas injustas do amigo. No entanto, os participantes não perceberam essa injustiça”, disse Campanhã.

Segundo ela, a inversão de polaridade positiva está relacionada à satisfação de receber algo bom e justo, cuja recompensa está acima do esperado. Nesse caso, a dopamina é liberada. No sinal negativo há quebra de expectativa e a substância é inibida, gerando raiva.

“Ao realizarmos a análise para identificar a área do cérebro ativada naquele momento, observamos que o sinal elétrico apareceu no córtex pré-frontal medial anterior. Essa é uma área relacionada à habilidade de imaginar e tentar entender o que o outro está pensando e sentindo”, disse.

“Não significa que as pessoas não processam a injustiça, mas esse processo é diferente quando se confia em alguém. É como se não precisasse tentar entender o que se passa com a outra pessoa ou o que ela está sentindo”, disse.

O artigo Responding to Unfair Offers Made by a Friend: Neuroelectrical Activity Changes in the Anterior Medial Prefrontal Cortex (doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1253-11.2011), de Camila Campanhã e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da The Journal of Neuroscience emwww.jneurosci.org/content/31/43/15569.full.pdf+html?sid=94d0a3e8-79b9-47a8-89d8-24dcf41750e7. 

Women in Prison: An Issue of Blaming the Individual for Social Problems (Science Daily)

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Science Daily (Oct. 11, 2011) — Researchers have long claimed that physical abuse and marginalization lead to criminal activity; however, women in prison are taught to overlook socioeconomic issues and blame only themselves for their behavior, according to a new study published in SAGE Open.

Authors Traci Schlesinger and Jodie Michelle state that there is a real connection between the type of abuse experienced by women, marginalization, and whether or not they will turn to drugs and criminal activity to cope with their experiences. Still, the authors contend current psychiatric and popular discourse portrays female incarceration as the result of poor choices and bad behavior “rather than identifying structural conditions that lead to imprisonment — including changes in laws, racist and sexist legislation, poverty, lack of resources and jobs, and social vulnerability over the course of one’s life.”

The authors analyzed surveys from 170 incarcerated women as well as personal history interviews conducted with 11 formerly imprisoned women and found that women who experience non-sexual physical abuse as well as any type of abuse as adults are more likely to begin using drugs, while women who are victims of sexual abuse as children claim that their imprisonment is a direct, nearly inevitable result of their abuse. They also found that marginalized women (such as women whose parents were also incarcerated and women who were unemployed at the time of their arrest) are more likely to turn to drugs to deal with interpersonal violence than women with the resources to find other ways to cope with their experiences of violence.

“Having few or no options because of their marginalized socioeconomic positions, entrenched racial inequality, and repeated episodes of violence, respondents indicated that criminalized activities became survival mechanisms, which led to incarceration,” write the authors.
The authors point to institutional change and support systems for victims of abuse as a way to prevent female criminal activity.

The authors wrote, “Radical education, community support, decriminalization, job creation, and automatic expungement could work together to push back against the web of interpersonal and state violence experienced by so many marginalized women.”

Rio state has 60,000 unsolved murders in 10 year (AP)

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RIO DE JANEIRO (AP, 10.jul.2011) — Rio de Janeiro’s public defenders’ department says the Brazilian state has accumulated more than 60,000 unsolved murders in the last 10 years.

The department investigated the matter for the federal Ministry of Justice as part of a national plan to improve public safety.

The survey shows that 24,000 of the victims haven’t even been identified.
Creation of a special homicide division in the city of Rio de Janeiro did little to improved the solution rate. It went from 11 percent to 14 percent.

Across Brazil, police solve about 8 percent of murders. In the United States and in European countries the rates are reportedly around 70 percent to 80 percent.