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Medically Conscious but Legally Unconscious?

Conscious or Unconscious? Can someone be medically conscious but considered legally unconscious? What an interesting conundrum! According to the Oxford Dictionary, “unconsciousness is the state of being unconscious or the state of being uninformed or unaware” and “automatism is the performance of actions without conscious thought or intention, involuntary” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2021). Even in Read More...

Projectile Injury During a Protest

A Literature Review of “Death, injury and disability from kinetic impact projectiles in crowd-control settings: a systematic review” (Haar, Iacopino, Ranadive, Dandu, & Weiser, 2017) According to a review of worldwide literature (26 articles) between 1990 and 2017 regarding deaths, injuries, and permanent disability from rubber and plastic bullets, bean bag rounds, shot pellets, and Read More...

One Deadly Punch Leads To Prison

Our faithful readers may remember that I wrote a newsletter back in 2011 called “Can One Punch Kill” but it has been many years since then and I asked one of my nurses to write up a newsletter. Ironically, she dug through some of my ideas and came across the same article. Her take on Read More...

Are alcoholics really at fault for their crimes?

In April, I covered delirium and noted that there are many underlying etiologies that can cause it. One such etiology is Wernicke encephalopathy. What is encephalopathy? Encephalopathy is a general term describing any disease of the brain that alters the function or structure of the brain. There are many types of encephalopathy and causes.  The Read More...

What a criminal attorney needs to know about brain injuries.

In April, I covered delirium and noted that there are many underlying etiologies that can cause it. One of those underlying causes is brain injuries, or intracranial processes such as stroke, tumor or traumatic injury. Symptoms of certain intracranial processes are not always immediately apparent or obvious to the person being affected or even their Read More...