This chapter begins with a discussion and critique of the courts' use of future dangerousness predictions in sentencing and postsentence commitment proceedings for capital murderers and sex offenders and in community notification requirements for sex offenders. It then addresses the growth of knowledge about the biology of violence and sexual violence and questions whether such information could be incorporated into actuarial instruments that might more reliably form the basis for sentencing and postsentencing determinations. It examines the problems of predicting violence based on genetic information. The chapter concludes that the courts' insistence on future dangerousness predictions is ill conceived for both legal and scientific reasons.
Y ears after the Sarbanes-Oxley ("SOX")' corporate governance reform was supposed to solve the problems of director dereliction that resulted in the Enron/WorldCom string of scandals, spectacles of corporate greed continue. Corporate directors-the supposed guardians of shareholders' interests-supinely have approved untoward levels of executive 2 3 4 pay, sky-high severance payments, 3 stock option backdating, * Professor of Law, Wayne State University Law School. Many thanks go to the participants at the Law & Society Association and Southeast Association of Law School Conferences and to Bethany Berger, Derek Bambauer, Steven Davidoff, and to participants at the Wayne State faculty forum for their comments on earlier drafts of this Article, as well as to my research assistant, Mila Cobanov.
Scientific evidence is crucial in a burgeoning number of litigated cases, legislative enactments, regulatory decisions, and scholarly arguments. Evaluating Scientific Evidence explores the question of what counts as scientific knowledge, a question that has become a focus of heated courtroom and scholarly debate, not only in the United States, but in other common law countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Controversies are rife over what is permissible use of genetic information, whether chemical exposure causes disease, whether future dangerousness of violent or sexual offenders can be predicted, whether such time-honored methods of criminal identification (such as microscopic hair analysis, for example) have any better foundation than ancient divination rituals, among other important topics. This book examines the process of evaluating scientific evidence in both civil and criminal contexts, and explains how decisions by nonscientists that embody scientific knowledge can be improved.
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