(1) Youth are particularly vulnerable to making suboptimal legal decisions due to added challenges in comprehension, as well as their ongoing neurological development. (2) This fact is especially problematic in our which frequently expects defendants to determine the outcome of their own cases (by accepting or rejecting plea offers). (3) To better ensure that guilty pleas entered by youthful defendants are indeed knowing, intelligent, and voluntary, legal counsel should be mandatory during any and all juvenile criminal proceedings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Appl
December 2021
Over 95% of criminal convictions in the United States are the result of guilty pleas. Consequently, it is critical that we ensure the process of pleading guilty is as free of coercion as possible. Yet, research has indicated that incarcerating defendants to await trial could have an undue influence on their decision to plead guilty.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInterpolated testing can reduce mind-wandering and proactive interference, and improve note-taking. However, recent research using face-name-profession triads, has also shown that interpolated testing can impair new learning (Davis, Chan, & Wilford, 2017). In the current study, we further examined the impact of switching from testing to new learning, but with objectively-true materials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA case of dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans (DFSP) in a 22-year old female associated with blunt trauma of the mid-upper back is presented in the current study with a review of the literature. DFSP is a rare slow growing sarcoma of the soft tissue most commonly seen on the trunk and upper extremities with a low to intermediate grade malignant potential, high chance of local invasion and a high local recurrence rate. The literature search revealed that both non-congenital mutation as well as trauma serve a role in the development of this dermal neoplasm, but the exact mechanism by which trauma may predispose to development of DFSP is unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examined how giving eyewitnesses a weak recognition experience impacts their identification decisions. In 2 experiments we forced a weak recognition experience for lineups by impairing either encoding or retrieval conditions. In Experiment 1 ( = 245), undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to watch either a clear or a degraded culprit video and then viewed either a culprit-present or culprit-removed lineup identification procedure.
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