reputable imami jurisprudents believe that liability for involuntary manslaughter (wergild or diyah) is incumbent upon the institution called ‘āqilah (paternal kinship group of the criminal). from the very beginning, the verdict has faced challenges, including its conflict with the principle of individual criminal responsibility, which have prompted jurisprudents to offer various justifications...

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 338 26 OCTOBER 2012 451 C R E D IT : R A N IE R O P IZ Z I/ A P L’AQUILA, ITALY—In a decision that has sent shock waves through the scientifi c community, a judge in this central Italian town has handed down manslaughter sentences of 6 years to each of seven experts who gave advice ahead of the deadly earthquake that struck here in 2009. The four scientists, two e...

On 22 October 2012, seven members of the Italian Major Risk Commission were found guilty the injuries of 4 and manslaughter of 29 people in relation to the 2009 earthquake that hit L’Aquila, a town in Central Italy. ese members were sentenced to six years in prison for failing to meet their obligations to adequately analyse seismic risk and provide clear, correct and complete information, whic...

SIR There is cause for concern in the different outcomes of the trials in the cases of baby Brown's parents and Dr Leonard Arthur respectively. Mr Brown was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to five years imprisonment amid public opprobium for supposedly killing his 'mongol infant' (the euphemism is clumsy!), in drunken disappointment; whereas, Dr Arthur was acquitted amid almost unive...

Life is normally expected to proceed through childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. What happens then if death occurs at some earlier phase of life and not at a far distant time in people’s everyday lives? This will most often be a sudden and unexpected death. How do the nearest family, friends and acquaintances of the deceased cope with this? How and why are new rituals created, how are they...

On December 16, 2017, four preterm infants died consecutively in 81 minutes in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of Ewha Womans University Mokdong Hospital, Seoul, Korea, which triggered an immediate police investigation.1 Combining the results of the epidemiological investigation by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and those of the autopsies conducted by the National ...

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...

The author suggests that by providing ventilators (or other equipment) with a mechanism which would automatically switch them off, (thus allowing the patient to die without the intervention of another human being switching the machine off) doctors would somehow be spared the moral dilemma and responsibility of acceding to a patient's request for a life-support system to be withdrawn. This "lega...

During the 30-year period 1961-1990, a total of 22 deaths with criminal multilation/dismemberment of the human body were registered in Sweden. The multilations occurred in time clusters, mostly during the summer and winter periods, and increased during the three decades, with incidence rates of 0.05, 0.1, and 0.125 per million inhabitants and year, respectively. Multilation was noted 6.6 times ...