Blog Archive for March 2022

The decision making of jurors can be influenced by a number of factors and bias can enter the jury room from a number of different sources. In this weeks blog, Dr Lee John Curley (The Open University), Dr James Munro (The Open University) and Dr Itiel Dror (UCL) discuss potential biases that might influence jurors and they give some recomendations for fighting juror bias. The original article was published in The Conversation and can be found here: https://theconversation.com/juries-are-subject-to-all-kinds-of-biases-w…

In this article, Sharon Hartles reflects upon the events that have unfolded since the publications of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review, First Do No Harm report and the Department of Health and Social Care, Government response to the report of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review. She sheds light on the ongoing debacle over the government's pledge in fulfilling their policy recommendations. Sharon Hartles is a member of the Open University’s Harm and Evidence Research Collaborative. 

The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 changed the way in which crimes which are thought to have generated financial gain are prosecuted.  As a result, such offences are prosecuted under criminal law as they normally would, with a punishment which is supposed to be proportionate to the gravity of the offence, but this punishment is then followed up with an additional court process which leads to the imposition of a confiscation order based upon the court’s assumed calculation of ‘benefit’, and the subsequent confiscation of any assets within that value. In this article, Craig Fletcher and Becky Clarke begin to expose the lived reality of both the confiscation court process, and how this additional form of punishment is experienced, enabling you to begin to understand the significant gap between confiscation ideology and its lived reality.