BACKGROUND Coroners' death certificates form the basis of suicide statistics in England and Wales. Recent increases in coroners' use of narrative verdicts may affect the reliability of local and national suicide rates. METHOD We used Ministry of Justice data on inquests held between 2008 and 2009 and Local Authority suicide data (2001-02 and 2008-09) to investigate variations between coroners...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate and compare the characteristics of court verdicts on medical errors allegedly harming patients in Spain and Massachusetts from 2002 to 2012. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS We reviewed 1041 closed court verdicts obtained from data on litigation in the Thomson Reuters Aranzadi Westlaw databases in Spain (Europe), and 370 closed court verdicts obtained from the Controlle...

D. M. Rempala and F. B. Bernieri (2005) showed that in a date-rape trial scenario, increasing the amount of neutral, nondiagnostic information (i.e., information unrelated to the case) about the rape victim decreases the percentage of guilt verdicts. The authors attempted to determine the causal mechanism for this phenomenon. Participants read 1 of 4 rape trial scenarios (which differed only in...

The consumption of alcohol (ethanol) can contribute to a number of different causes of death, as shown by the Coroner's records in Birmingham for 1980. During 1980, 589 inquests were completed of which 119 (20%) were on people whose deaths were related to the consumption of alcohol. Verdicts of alleged homicide, road traffic accidents, suicides, open verdicts, and various "others" were related ...

OBJECTIVE To examine aspects of litigation involving iatrogenic dysphonia and injury to the recurrent laryngeal nerve in the adult population. STUDY DESIGN Legal database review. SETTING Medicolegal judicial system. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Jury verdicts and settlement reports listing voice impairment or recurrent laryngeal nerve dysfunction as a primary injury in adult patients were identifi...