What is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome?
Potential Biomarker for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is defined as a sudden and unexplained cause of death in a seemingly healthy baby that is less than a year old. This type of death usually occurs during sleep and the cause has alluded researchers for decades. As of 2019, there were […]
Childhood Sexual Abuse and Its Effect on Criminal Behavior
How Adverse Childhood Experiences Relate to Criminal Behavior: Part 3 The definition of child sexual abuse has been controversial. Some scholars, practitioners, and organizations believe that peer-perpetrated abuse should be included in the definition and others believe that the definition should be limited to interactions between children and adults. Therefore, the research includes two separate […]
How Can Early Environments Influence Future Criminal Behavior?
Environmental Influences and Effects on Future Criminal Behavior A healthy family environment is critical to a child’s emotional and physical wellbeing. We all know that no one is perfect and therefore no family is perfect. However, a severely dysfunctional family can influence antisocial or criminal behavior. Known risk factors are poverty, education level, parenting […]
When Does Discipline Cross The Line Of Abuse?
Discipline or Child Abuse? Many experts are asked to answer this question when they are retained on child abuse cases. It is not as black and white as one might think. Corporal punishment is defined as “an act carried out with the intention of causing a child to experience physical pain, but not injury, for […]
What Are The Long-Term Effects of Repetitive Head Trauma?
Traumatic Brain Injury in Criminal Cases After Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), people can experience personality changes, social anxiety, irritability, anger, depression, general anxiety, mood swings, emotional lability, and feelings of being overwhelmed. The bottom line is that the brain no longer functions exactly the way it did prior to the head injury. The location of […]
Does Childhood Trauma Lead To Criminal Behavior?
How Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Relate to Criminal Behavior This article is the first in a series about the effects of stressful and traumatic events in a child’s life and its relationship to the likelihood of this child committing serious, violent crimes later in life. These events can include such things as physical abuse, sexual […]
How Alternative Light Sources Are Used In Forensics
Alternative Light Sources and Their Effectiveness in Enhancing the Visibility of Injuries History of ALS A fairly new science has emerged within the past 70 years regarding the use of alternative light sources (ALS) to enhance the visibility of injuries, being used in forensics starting around 1990. There has been research done on this topic, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
