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The death penalty holds a crucial, conflicted place in a nation deeply divided over crime and punishment, and whether the state should ever take a life. But for such a long, very public legal process, only a small number of people see what unfolds inside the country’s death houses.

There is no uniformity when they look back on the emotions that surround the minutes when they watched someone die.

You’re watching through glass, and then the process starts.

no physical evidence

until 2012

Factors leading to wrongful convictions include:

Speaking of ideology versus reality, there is, it seems to me, a parallel on the left. That is the current attempt to deny the profound natural differences between men and women, and to assert, with a straight and usually angry face, that gender is in no way rooted in sex, and that sex is in no way rooted in biology.

This unscientific product of misandrist feminism and confused transgenderism is striding through the culture, and close to no one in the elite is prepared to resist it.

And so we have the establishment of gender-neutral birth certificates in Canada; and, in England, that lovely old phrase, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” is being removed from announcements on the Tube

Higgs maintained his innocence until his death,

The tone of his voice was calm but defiant as he said his last words, "I'd like to say I am an innocent man,"

Nolan also argued that Higgs was unfairly sentenced, since the actual gunman is serving a life sentence.

For more than a decade, both parties in Washington have mostly looked the other way when mass shootings occur. And they have mostly ignored the 34 victims who are murdered with guns every single day.

prohibit the manufacture and sale of the military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips that have been used in too many mass shootings, including in Newtown. The previous ban on assault weapons expired in 2004. While President George W. Bush supported reinstating it, Congress never acted. The time has plainly come.

fix the broken background check system. Currently, nearly half of all gun sales in the U.S. are conducted without a background check. Criminals, the mentally ill, minors and domestic abusers are all prohibited from purchasing guns, but they all can do so as easily as attending a gun show or going online.

China's decision to end its 36-year-old one-child policy imposed on 1.3 billion people was surprising but not entirely unexpected.

By 2025, the U.N. projects that China will be the most elderly nation on Earth, with more Chinese 60 and over than 14 and under, drastically burdening social welfare infrastructures and slashing workforce productivity.

Will the new two child policy really encourage Chinese parents to start having two children?

The federal government Thursday night executed a drug trafficker responsible for seven murders in 1992.

He is the 12th person to be executed by the government since July after the Trump administration restarted federal executions following a 17-year hiatus.

Dustin Higgins is the last person scheduled to be executed before President-elect Joe Biden, is sworn in.

The U.S. government has executed Dustin Higgs, the last prisoner to be executed during the Trump administration, and the 13th in the span of six months.

The Supreme Court declined to stop the execution, although some justices dissented, noting that before the first of the 13, it had been 17 years since a federal execution had been carried out.

the Government should have proceeded with some measure of restraint to ensure it did so lawfully."

a third of Americans say that they are personally worried about losing their jobs or missing out on career opportunities if they express their real political opinions.

Cancel culture now poses a real threat to intellectual freedom in the United States.

Americans in all walks of life have been publicly shamed, pressured into ritualistic apologies or summarily fired

Twitter reached a $150 million settlement with the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission over alleged misrepresentations of its data privacy practices, the agencies announced on Wednesday.

The settlement, which still needs to be approved by a federal judge, would resolve claims from the government that Twitter did not adequately inform its users about how their contact information would be used to target ads rather than just secure their accounts, in violation of the FTC Act and a 2011 settlement it reached with the agency.

The agencies alleged Twitter told users it collected phone numbers and email addresses to secure their accounts with two-factor authentication, but did not disclose it also used that information to help advertisers target their messages.

“I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases,” he told Judge Castel.

At times during the hearing, Mr. Schwartz squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead with his left hand. He stammered and his voice dropped. He repeatedly tried to explain why he did not conduct further research into the cases that ChatGPT had provided to him.

For nearly two hours Thursday, Mr. Schwartz was grilled by a judge in a hearing ordered after the disclosure that the lawyer had created a legal brief for a case in Federal District Court that was filled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations, all generated by ChatGPT.

Too many men still think a woman who cries is acting hysterical. For some baffling reason, punching a hole in the wall or another person in the face is a more culturally acceptable way to release pain than sobbing into a pillow. And politics is no different. Anger makes you a strong candidate while sadness makes you frail. The result is that many female politicians swallow their emotions in an effort to appear tough.

The stereotype that women are overly emotional, hormonal beings who are unfit to lead still exists. Powerful men like Obama and Biden who embrace their feelings on a public stage help to combat the ridiculous political stigma against sensitivity. Every time these political powerhouses become misty-eyed, they send the message that having human feelings doesn’t equal incompetence.

By being the kind of men who are unafraid to openly love one another and cry in public, they have sent a message to aspiring female politicians that being human doesn’t come with a penalty.

Most urgent questions of public policy turn on empirical imponderables, and so policymakers fall back on ideological predispositions or muddle through. Is there a better way?

The gold standard for empirical research is the randomized field trial (RFT).

The RFT works better than most other types of empirical investigation. Most of us use anecdotes or common sense empiricism to make inferences about the future, but psychological biases interfere with the reliability of these methods

members of the upper class are more likely than others to behave unethically, to lie during negotiations, to drive illegally and to cheat when competing for a prize.“Greed is a robust determinant of unethical behavior,” the authors conclude. “Relative to lower-class individuals, individuals from upper-class backgrounds behaved more unethically in both naturalistic and laboratory settings.”

Our findings suggest that when a person is suffering, upper-class individuals perceive these signals less well on average, consistent with other findings documenting reduced empathic accuracy in upper-class individuals (Kraus et al., 2010). Taken together, these findings suggest that upper-class individuals may underestimate the distress and suffering in their social environments.

each participant was assigned to listen, face to face, from two feet away, to someone else describing real personal experiences of suffering and distress.The listeners’ responses were measured two ways, first by self-reported levels of compassion and second by electrocardiogram readings to determine the intensity of their emotional response. The participants all took a test known as the “sense of power” scale, ranking themselves on such personal strengths and weaknesses as ‘‘I can get people to listen to what I say’’ and ‘‘I can get others to do what I want,” as well as ‘‘My wishes do not carry much weight’’ and ‘‘Even if I voice them, my views have little sway,’’ which are reverse scored.The findings were noteworthy, to say the least. For “low-power” listeners, compassion levels shot up as the person describing suffering became more distressed. Exactly the opposite happened for “high-power” listeners: their compassion dropped as distress rose.

Baseball is a team sport, but it is basically an accumulation of individual activities. Throwing a strike, hitting a line drive or fielding a grounder is primarily an individual achievement. The team that performs the most individual tasks well will probably win the game.

In soccer, almost no task, except the penalty kick and a few others, is intrinsically individual. Soccer, as Simon Critchley pointed out recently in The New York Review of Books, is a game about occupying and controlling space. If you get the ball and your teammates have run the right formations, and structured the space around you, you’ll have three or four options on where to distribute it. If the defenders have structured their formations to control the space, then you will have no options. Even the act of touching the ball is not primarily defined by the man who is touching it; it is defined by the context created by all the other players.

Most of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize.

Two Ohio men wrongly accused of murder four decades ago are walking free Friday morning after spending 39 years behind bars.

Jackson had been the longest-held U.S. prisoner to be exonerated.

convicted along with Bridgeman and Bridgeman’s brother, Ronnie, in the 1975 shooting death and robbery of Harold Franks, a Cleveland-area money order salesman.

Jury selection continues for the second week in the trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Later this week, the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys are expected to question prospective jurors. They will ask about jurors’ backgrounds, their feelings about the death penalty and whether they already have an opinion about Tsarnaev.

. Some say brain science is likely to play a role in the trial, because courts are increasingly looking at what neuroscience tells us about adolescence and the developing brain.

In their 2012 book, “It’s Even Worse Than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein argued that America’s political dysfunction had two causes: First, the mismatch between our constitutional system, requiring compromise, and our increasingly polarized, parliamentary-style politics.

Second, the fact that polarization has been asymmetric, turning the GOP into an insurrectionary anti-government party, even when in power.

Despite overwhelming historical data showing asymmetrical polarization in Congress (more recent additions here), their argument did not convince the anecdote-obsessed Beltway pundit class, with its deep belief that “both sides do it,” no matter what “it” may be.

The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.

So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?

Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.