A number of variable selection methods have been proposed involving nonconvex penalty functions. These methods, which include the smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) penalty and the minimax concave penalty (MCP), have been demonstrated to have attractive theoretical properties, but model fitting is not a straightforward task, and the resulting solutions may be unstable. Here, we demonstr...

Because the death penalty is the ultimate penalty, the question of whether guilty persons are being fairly convicted and appropriately sentenced claims the attention of the public and legal communities alike. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 87 people have been released from death row, wrongfully convicted of capital murder. 2 In January of 2000, Republican and pro-death penalty ...

A substantial minority (35%) of the Dutch population is in favor of capital punishment. In this paper, it is argued that in a staunchly abolitionist country such as The Netherlands, the existence and perseverance of such support can be better understood and explained by conceiving of capital punishment support in attitudinal terms as part of a law and order syndrome. Death penalty attitudes are...

It has been part of the role of medical organizations in Western nations to develop position statements on various sociopolitical issues. Both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association have established position statements related to social policy, including capital punishment. In 2001, AAPL endorsed a moratorium on capital punishment. Recent calls for AAPL to end...

The death penalty remains an intensely divisive topic in American society. Recently, there has been a series of cases, first involving defendants with mental retardation and more recently involving juveniles, in which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled by a five-to-four margin that the death penalty in both these classes violates the Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment...

Predictions of dangerousness, violence, and recidivism continue to play an ever-growing role in the legal system. These psycho-legal assessments determine a myriad of legal outcomes including, but not limited to, probation status (i.e., prediction of recidivism), civil commitment (i.e., prediction of danger to self or others), psychotherapist liability under a Tarasoff duty (i.e., prediction of...

These seminar notes report preliminary findings from a survey run in July 1998 in France on individual attitudes toward income inequality. The main finding is that people simply do not seem to disagree very much about the ideal pay scale and income ratios across individuals. Low-income individuals, as well as left-wing voters, do indeed tend to favor a more compressed income distribution than h...

I further like the boldness of Professor Lee’s strategy. The data presented by Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court in Roper v. Simmons would seem to be special in purporting to show a literally unanimous, worldwide rejection of the juvenile death penalty outside of the United States. 2 If even such a total worldwide consensus could be shown to lack instructiveness when applying the Eighth A...

SummaryOngoing political controversies around the world exemplify a long-standing and widespread preoccupation with the acceptability of homosexuality. Nonheterosexual people have seen dramatic surges both in their rights and in positive public opinion in many Western countries. In contrast, in much of Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Oceania, and parts of Asia, homosexual behavior remai...