Pope Francis Calls for Peace, Justice in the New Year

Pope Francis, in New Year’s address, calls for peace and justice

Jan. 1, 2014 at 10:13 AM
Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square, the Vatican, March 19, 2013. UPI/Stefano Spaziani

| License Photo

VATICAN CITY, Jan. 1 (UPI) — Pope Francis, during his New Year’s address Wednesday to tens of thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square, called on people to build a more just world.The pope said he hopes the new year will bring peace, justice and liberty to the world, Vatican Radio reported.

“Peace requires the force of meekness, the force of nonviolence of truth and of love,” he said.

He noted the church is celebrating the feast of Mary and the World Day of Peace Wednesday.

He called for people to acknowledge violence and to work toward building a just society during his address, titled “Fraternity: the Foundation and Pathway to Peace.”

The pope deviated from his prepared speech and commented on a letter he recently received, the report said. He said the writer wanted to know: “What has happened in the hearts of men, in the heart of humanity? It is time to stop. It is time to stop.”

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2014/01/01/Pope-Francis-in-New-Years-address-calls-for-peace-and-justice/UPI-18701388589190/#ixzz2pBICDJD0

Eye Witness Testimony, Memory, & Emotion

Eyewitness Testimony Can Be Tragically Mistaken

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer & Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor
Date: 22 September 2011 Time: 06:39 PM ET
Lady Justice holding the scales of justice.
A statue of Lady Justice holding scales.
CREDIT: Rob WilsonShutterstock

Last night’s execution of convicted murderer Troy Davis reportedly sent those convinced of Davis’ innocence into hysterics. One of their concerns — that eyewitness testimony in the case had been recanted — also concerns cognitive scientists.

“This is not the first time a person is pretty much convicted based on eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence,” said Jason Chan, assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University, adding that the number of eyewitnesses who later recanted their testimony was “relatively unusual.”

Seven of nine witnesses who implicated Davis in the shooting of a police officer recanted their testimonies. Others reporting the man who originally implicated Davis was actually the killer.

Chan can’t speak to the truth of the case, but he said eyewitness accounts of crimes are like other memories: They’re not reliable.

Part of the problem with eyewitness statements comes from the mismatch between an eyewitness’ sureness in their memories and the true accuracy of those memories, Chan said.

“A lot of times people overestimate their ability to remember things, and this overconfidence can sometimes lead people [like a jury] to believe what they are saying,” Chan told LiveScience. “Guess what, most people’s memories are not all that reliable.”

The failure of memory

Some of this failure of reliability happens at the scene of the crime, said Maria Zaragoza, a psychologist at Kent State University in Ohio. Things happen quickly; the emotional charge of witnessing a crime may keep people from cuing into important details. If there’s a weapon, Zaragoza said, people tend to become hyper-focused on it. They pay more attention to a gun than to the face of the person holding it.

Often, “the information getting into the memory system is very limited,” Zaragoza told LiveScience.

The next source of memory uncertainty happens during the investigation. Suggestive questioning can distort memories, Zaragoza said. Each time you relive the crime, either out loud to an investigator or in your own head, that distorted memory is strengthened.

In one famous case, 22-year-old college student Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by an intruder in her bedroom. Through her terror, Thompson tried to categorize the details of her assailant’s face. She went to the police and worked with an artist to draw a composite sketch. In photo, in a lineup and in court, she identified her rapist as Ronald Cotton.

“I was completely confident,” Thompson (now Jennifer Thompson-Cannino) wrote in a 2000 editorial in the New York Times. “I was sure.”

But 11 years later, new DNA techniques disproved Cotton’s guilt. He’d spent more than a decade in prison for a crime committed by another man, Bobby Poole.

It’s likely that working on the police sketch altered Thompson’s memory of her rapist’s face, Zaragoza said. Later, when she’d picked him out of a lineup, her confidence only grew. Cotton’s face started haunting her flashbacks. When she met her real rapist in court, she didn’t even recognize him.

What happened to Cotton and Thompson, chronicled in the book “Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), wasn’t a weakness of Thompson’s, Zaragoza said. Anyone’s memory can become twisted with time.

And often in witnessing traumatic events, such as a murder or even the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we think we remember all of the details vividly. The truth is, we’re often wrong, research has shown. In one 2004 study, researchers were even able to corrupt witnesses’ memories of a terrorist bombing by suggesting to them that they’d seen things — such as an angry animal — that hadn’t actually been in the scene.

Combining memories

to read more, go to:

Maori Justice Model

Righting Wrongs the Maori Way

by Allan MacRae, Howard Zehr

Instead of prison, New Zealand chooses restorative justice and community problem-solving.

During the 1980s, New Zealand faced a crisis familiar to other Western nations around the world. Thousands of children, especially members of minority groups, were being removed from their homes and placed in foster care or institutions. The juvenile justice system was overburdened and ineffective. New Zealand’s incarceration rate for young people was one of the highest in the world, but its crime rate also remained high. At the same time, New Zealand’s punitive approach was also in part a “welfare” model. Although young people were being punished, they were also being rewarded by receiving attention. Yet they were not being required to address the actual harm they had caused.

Especially affected was the minority Maori population, the indigenous people of New Zealand. Maori leaders pointed out that the Western system of justice was a foreign imposition. In their cultural tradition, judges did not mete out punishment. Instead, the whole community was involved in the process, and the intended outcome was repair. Instead of focusing on blame, they wanted to know “why,” because they argued that finding the cause of crime is part of resolving it. Instead of punishment (“Let shame be the punishment” is a Maori proverb), they were concerned with healing and problem-solving. The Maori also pointed out that the Western system, which undermined the family and disproportionately incarcerated Maori youth, emerged from a larger pattern of institutional racism. They argued persuasively that cultural identity is based on three primary institutional pillars—law, religion, and education—and when any of these undermines or ignores the values and traditions of the indigenous people, a system of racism is operating.

Maori leaders pointed out that the Western system of justice was a foreign imposition. In their cultural tradition, the whole community was involved in the process.

Because of these concerns, in the late 1980s the government initiated a process of listening to communities throughout the country. Through this listening process, the Maori recommended that the resources of the extended family and the community be the source of any effort to address these issues. The FGC [Family Group Conference] process emerged as the central tool to do this in the child protection and youth justice systems.

 

to read more, go to: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/beyond-prisons/righting-wrongs-the-maori-way