We study intentional action in stit-logic. The formal logic study of intentional action appears to be new, since most logical studies of intention concern intention as a mental state. We model an intentional action as an action that possibly deviates from the actual action conducted by an agent. First, an actual action may deviate from an intended action because the agent is not able to carry o...

We give the following sketch from Sir George Stephen's " Juryman's Guide," as illustrative of the opinion of an intelligent jurist on the plea of monomania in criminal cases. " All criminality depends 011 intention, or on a carelessness which amounts to gross negligence: thus, in the case of shooting a man, the absence of intention to kill will relieve the charge from the guilt of murder; but y...

Psychopathy is considered one of the best predictors of violence and prison misconducts and is arguably an important clinical construct in the correctional setting. However, we tested whether psychopathy can be used to predict misconducts in prison environments for women as has been done for men. To date, few studies exist that examine and validate this association in female offender samples. T...

Valid conclusions can be defeated if people can think of conditions that prevent the consequent to occur although the antecedent is given. The goal of the present research was to investigate how people consider these conditions when reasoning with legal conditionals such as "If a person kills another human, then this person should be punished for manslaughter." In Experiments 1 and 2 legal cond...

Author's abstract Torture does need to be defined ifwe are to know exactly what we are seeking to ban; but no single definition will do, because there are many possible ones, and we may want to treat different practices that might be called torture differently. Compare the case ofhomicide; we do not want to punish manslaughter as severely as murder, and may not want to punish killing in self-de...

Fatal and near-fatal maulings of humans by pit bulls have recently become a topic of major public concern, resulting in the passage of laws in some jurisdictions that make the owner of a pit bull criminally liable for manslaughter if his or her pet causes a human death. The authors recently investigated two cases in which children were fatally injured by pet dogs. In the first case, a 17-day-ol...

OBJECTIVES Missed diagnosis of child abuse may lead to chronic abuse with potential for death. This paper reports 3 such cases. METHODS This is a retrospective chart review of 38 cases diagnosed as abusive head trauma between January 1, 2004 and December 31, 2006 at a university hospital. We sought to identify fatal cases with a past medical history of physical abuse that was missed by the me...

Healthcare-associated infections are a major clinical and public health problem that involve, in a variety of ways, healthcare professionals, hospital administrators and, above all, patients. In Italy, the incidence of infectious complications generally varies from 5-10% (hospitalized patients) to 1% (home care patients); 5-10% of such infections manifest epidemically, and infections caused by ...

In Italy, a judge reduced the sentence of a defendant by 1 year in response to evidence for a genetic predisposition to violence. The best characterized of these genetic differences, those in the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), were cited as especially relevant. Several months previously in the USA, MAOA data contributed to a jury reducing charges from 1st degree murder (a capital offence) to volun...