Although executive dysfunctions are commonly hypothesized to contribute to sexual deviance or aggression, evidence of this relationship is scarce and its specificity is unproven, especially among adolescents. The objective of this study was to compare the executive functioning (EF) of adolescents with sexual offense convictions (ASOC) to that of non-sex-delinquents (NSD). A secondary goal was t...

Thus far in this book, on the basis of the investigative and forensic science practice literature, the types of crime scene evidence that are typically available and submitted for analysis by law enforcement investigators have been described. The process of crime reconstruction, in which attempts are made to translate these pieces of crime scene evidence into a narrative of crime events and off...

CONTEXT Under current federal law, many persons with prior convictions for misdemeanor offenses pass criminal records background checks and legally purchase handguns. OBJECTIVE To determine whether authorized handgun purchasers with prior misdemeanor convictions are more likely than those with no criminal history to be charged with new crimes, particularly offenses involving firearms and viol...

This paper aims to examine the death penalty in Zoroastrianism, the Quran, and the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran. By studying antient Zoroastrian texts, we face a variety of crimes and punishments such as murder, robbery, adultery, magic, rape, and assault that were always considered to be the worst offenses. Zoroastrian religious scholars wrote books on crimes and their punishment in th...

Asperger's Syndrome is one of the diagnostic subcategories of pervasive developmental disorders. It is characterized by a defect in reciprocal social interaction, lack of empathy for others and poor non-verbal communication. Antisocial acts, including aggression and sexual offense, are not considered to be common in this disorder. We describe an adolescent with Asperger's Syndrome whose main pr...

The recently enacted Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act will expand and standardize the registration of adolescent sex offenders. To evaluate the effectiveness of this and similar legislation, the authors assessed 91 juvenile males who had been adjudicated for a sexual felony offense and 174 juvenile males who had no history of sexual offending with several risk measures. On admission t...

OBJECTIVE In this longitudinal study, the predictive validity of a psychiatric diagnosis of sexual sadism was compared with three behavioral indicators of sadism: index sexual offense violence, sexual intrusiveness, and phallometrically assessed sexual arousal to depictions of sexual or nonsexual violence. METHOD Five hundred and eighty six adult male sexual offenders were assessed between 19...

BACKGROUND Epilepsy and traumatic brain injury are common neurological conditions, with general population prevalence estimates around 0.5% and 0.3%, respectively. Although both illnesses are associated with various adverse outcomes, and expert opinion has suggested increased criminality, links with violent behaviour remain uncertain. METHODS AND FINDINGS We combined Swedish population regist...

Some jurisdictions have legally decreed that certain nonsexual offenses (e.g., promoting prostitution of a minor, arson, burglary) can be considered sexual offenses. Offenders convicted of these crimes can be subjected to sexual offender-specific social control policies such as registration, as well as be included in sexual offender research such as recidivism studies. No studies, however, have...

Defenses protect prey, while offenses arm predators. Some defenses and offenses are constitutive (e.g. tortoise shells), while others are phenotypically plastic and not always expressed (e.g. neckteeth in water fleas). All of them are costly and only adaptive at certain prey densities. Here, I analyse such density-dependent effects, applying a functional response model to categorize defenses an...