R v Mika: An investigation into the Court of Appeal’s neglect of s 27 of the Sentencing Act 2002

<p>The Court of Appeal in the case of R v Mika failed to engage with section 27 of the Sentencing Act 2002 in dismissing Mr Mika’s appeal against his sentence. In both the High Court and Court of Appeal the focus was on Mr Mika’s argument for a discount of 10 per cent to be applied to his sentence to reflect his Māori heritage and associated social disadvantages. Section 27 of the Sentencing Act would allow a court to take into account cultural information regarding Maori offenders’ backgrounds and the systemic disadvantages stemming from this. In dismissing Mika’s appeal, the Court erred in not considering the clear signals from Parliament that the judiciary were to take into account Maori offenders’ backgrounds at the sentencing stage through s 27 in an effort to fit appropriate sentences to Maori offenders. Recent developments in Canada have seen the Canadian judiciary recognise their role in the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the Canadian prison population. The New Zealand judiciary can take lessons from the willingness of the Canadian judiciary to take cultural information into account at sentencing.</p>

R v Mika: An investigation into the Court of Appeal’s neglect of s 27 of the Sentencing Act 2002

<p>The Court of Appeal in the case of R v Mika failed to engage with section 27 of the Sentencing Act 2002 in dismissing Mr Mika’s appeal against his sentence. In both the High Court and Court of Appeal the focus was on Mr Mika’s argument for a discount of 10 per cent to be applied to his sentence to reflect his Māori heritage and associated social disadvantages. Section 27 of the Sentencing Act would allow a court to take into account cultural information regarding Maori offenders’ backgrounds and the systemic disadvantages stemming from this. In dismissing Mika’s appeal, the Court erred in not considering the clear signals from Parliament that the judiciary were to take into account Maori offenders’ backgrounds at the sentencing stage through s 27 in an effort to fit appropriate sentences to Maori offenders. Recent developments in Canada have seen the Canadian judiciary recognise their role in the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the Canadian prison population. The New Zealand judiciary can take lessons from the willingness of the Canadian judiciary to take cultural information into account at sentencing.</p>

The Challenge of Imposing Just Sentences Under Mandatory Minimum Statutes: A Qualitative Study of Judicial Perceptions

Mandatory minimums limit judicial discretion in many jurisdictions in the United States, often compelling judges to impose harsh incarcerative terms. Using qualitative interviews with 41 criminal term judges presiding in a state in the United States, we explore how mandatory minimums influence the judicial sentencing function. We find that judges vary in their approaches to sentencing and that their approaches correspond with their perceptions of mandatory minimum statutes. While our respondents consider case-level, systemic, and pragmatic factors, the majority of judges are focused on the case level and perceive that mandatory minimums often strip away the flexibility they need to craft appropriate sentences in individual cases, leading to punishments that are unduly harsh, and sometimes preventing the imposition of promising alternatives to incarceration. Some judges experience moral dilemmas and guilt feelings during this process. In contrast, judges who highlight pragmatic factors (e.g., public perceptions) are more receptive to statutory restrictions.

Text Summarization as a Multi-objective Optimization Task: Applying Harmony Search to Extractive Multi-Document Summarization

Today, automated extractive text summarization is one of the most common techniques for organizing information. In extractive summarization, the most appropriate sentences are selected from the text and build a representative summary. Therefore, probing for the best sentences is a fundamental task. This paper has coped with extractive summarization as a multi-objective optimization problem and proposed a language-independent, semantic-aware approach that applies the harmony search algorithm to generate appropriate multi-document summaries. It learns the objective function from an extra set of reference summaries and then generates the best summaries according to the trained function. The system also performs some supplementary activities for better achievements. It expands the sentences by using an inventive approach that aims at tuning conceptual densities in the sentences towards important topics. Furthermore, we introduced an innovative clustering method for identifying important topics and reducing redundancies. A sentence placement policy based on the Hamiltonian shortest path was introduced for producing readable summaries. The experiments were conducted on DUC2002, DUC2006 and DUC2007 datasets. Experimental results showed that the proposed framework could assist the summarization process and yield better performance. Also, it was able to generally outperform other cited summarizer systems.

TEACHING GRAMMAR TO YOUNG LEARNERS USING COMIC STRIPS AND GTM AND THE IMPACT ON THEIR SPEAKING SKILLS

Practicing speaking in EFL to the young learners especially to the fifth graders is challenging. They do not have enough vocabulary in their repertoire so that it is often difficult for them express their ideas in the foreign language.They also could not construct appropriate sentences to reflect how well they have learnt so far. For this reason, the implementation of the grammar-translation method may be needed to help them focus on grammatical aspect of the foreign language to enhance their perspective in learning grammar and reading comprehension. Moreover, the use of books, podcast, comic strips and electronic dictionary could support the process of treatment. By implementing this kind of method, the students could enhance their speaking skills. They also have the opportunity to experience with language use and support their progress in speaking. This kind of development could be seen from the result of the pre-test and post-test. The progress of development was significant which reflect the positive impact of comic strips and GTM on children speaking skills

Effects of Fundamental Frequency Contours on Sentence Recognition in Mandarin-Speaking Children With Cochlear Implants

Purpose Fundamental frequency (F0) is the primary acoustic cue for lexical tone perception in tonal languages but is processed in a limited way in cochlear implant (CI) systems. The aim of this study was to evaluate the importance of F0 contours in sentence recognition in Mandarin-speaking children with CIs and find out whether it is similar to/different from that in age-matched normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method Age-appropriate sentences, with F0 contours manipulated to be either natural or flattened, were randomly presented to preschool children with CIs and their age-matched peers with NH under three test conditions: in quiet, in white noise, and with competing sentences at 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio. Results The neutralization of F0 contours resulted in a significant reduction in sentence recognition. While this was seen only in noise conditions among NH children, it was observed throughout all test conditions among children with CIs. Moreover, the F0 contour-induced accuracy reduction ratios (i.e., the reduction in sentence recognition resulting from the neutralization of F0 contours compared to the normal F0 condition) were significantly greater in children with CIs than in NH children in all test conditions. Conclusions F0 contours play a major role in sentence recognition in both quiet and noise among pediatric implantees, and the contribution of the F0 contour is even more salient than that in age-matched NH children. These results also suggest that there may be differences between children with CIs and NH children in how F0 contours are processed.

Crosslinguistic Interference in Simultaneous Acquisition of Turkish and Italian

This study compared the acceptability judgment task (AJT) and translation task (TT) in 10 simultaneous Turkish–Italian bilinguals with age-matched Turkish and Italian monolinguals as a control group. The position of subjects occurring with unaccusative verbs was investigated as the linguistic property. The results of the AJT in Turkish revealed no significant difference between the groups. However, in the Italian AJT, high variability was found in the younger bilinguals. Only bilinguals could participate in the TT. The participants, while translating into Turkish, always produced pragmatically appropriate sentences. In the case of translation to Italian, a significant effect correlated with the position of the subject in the Turkish stimulus was found.

Generational differences in response to youth offenders: myth or reality?

This empirical study examined generational cohort differences in perceptions of youth offending. Based on own-group bias, it was hypothesised that younger participants would be more tolerant of youth crime than the older generation, which would be shown by attitudes in favour of more lenient sentencing of offenders. Predicated on attribution theory, it was hypothesised that the provision of mitigating information about the offender would change individual's attitudes, and in turn, behaviour towards the offender leading to less draconian sentencing. Sixty participants, divided into four groups (2 groups of 15 aged 18-24 year olds; 2 groups of 15 aged over 40) allocated appropriate sentences to offenders depicted in ten short vignettes, half were offences against the person and the remaining five were crimes against property. One younger and one older group of participants received vignettes depicting the bare facts of the offence and offender; the other two groups (one young, one older) had additional information on background of the offender. While there were no main effects of age or task, both groups viewed crimes against the person more seriously than those against property. Without additional information older participants were more punitive than younger participants as predicted by the theory of own-group bias. However, younger participants were less swayed by mitigating information than their older counterparts, with the latter awarding more lenient when such information was provided. Mitigating information about a youth offender did affect sentencing options but not with the younger participants. This has implications for the composition of juries in youth offender trials.

Automatic generation system of multiple-choice cloze questions and its evaluation

Since English expressions vary according to the genres, it is important for students to study questions that are generated from sentences of the target genre. Although various questions are prepared, it is still not enough to satisfy various genres which students want to learn. On the other hand, when producing English questions, sufficient grammatical knowledge and vocabulary are needed, so it is difficult for non-expert to prepare English questions by themselves. In this paper, we propose an automatic generation system of multiple-choice cloze questions from English texts. Empirical knowledge is necessary to produce appropriate questions, so machine learning is introduced to acquire knowledge from existing questions. To generate the questions from texts automatically, the system (1) extracts appropriate sentences for questions from texts based on Preference Learning, (2) estimates a blank part based on Conditional Random Field, and (3) generates distracters based on statistical patterns of existing questions. Experimental results show our method is workable for selecting appropriate sentences and blank part. Moreover, our method is appropriate to generate the available distracters, especially for the sentence that does not contain the proper noun.