Unnoticed,Untapped, and Underappreciated: Clients' Perceptions of their Public Defenders

The challenge of providing high-quality public defense services continues to be a concern at federal, state, and local levels. Some scholars have alluded to a potential solution in client-centered representation, but research in this area is sparse at best. Such a lack of understanding leaves in its place speculation, particularly as to the potential importance of client perceptions in shaping broader system legitimacy. To fill this gap and create an empirical platform for future research, an exploratory pilot study was launched with the Hamilton County, Ohio Public Defender's Office, which used mixed methodologies to assess client attitudes toward public defenders as a potential resource for aiding the improvement of indigent representation. Findings from this pilot study suggest that there are five factors a public defense attorney should address that may prove to be very important in obtaining client satisfaction and cooperation: engaging the client for input, listening to the client, examining the prosecutor's evidence, focusing on the client's case during meetings, and informing the client of potential consequences. Implications for practice and future research are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heteronormativity and/as Violence: The “Sexing” of Gwen Araujo

This paper will examine the violence of heteronormativity: the violence that constitutes and regulates bodies according to normative notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. This violence, I will argue, requires more than a focus on gendered or sexualized physical harms of the kinds normally examined when studying violence against sexual minorities or women. Rather, it necessitates focusing on the multiple modalities through which heteronormativity performs its violence on, through, and against bodies and persons, including through the production of certain bodies and persons as inciting violence in their very being. To establish my argument, I explore the killing in 2002 of trans woman Gwen Araujo and the violence of the legal strategy (the trans panic defense) used in the legal trials that followed her killing. Both forms of violence, I suggest, operate in a similar way, albeit through different mechanisms, to maintain and extend the system of binary morphology that itself entails the perpetual violent materialization of sexed bodies.     

Philosophy of Education in a Poor Historical Moment: A Personal Account

Under the post-metaphysical sky “old” humanistic-oriented education is possible solely at the cost of its transformation into its negative, into a power that is determined to diminish human potentials for self-exaltation. Nothing less than total metamorphosis is needed to rescue the core of humanistic genesis: the quest for edifying Life and resistance to the call for “home-returning” into the total harmony that is promised to us within nothingness.     

Checking ID‐cards for the sale of restricted goods: Age decisions bias face decisions

Matching unfamiliar faces is highly error‐prone, and most studies highlight the implications for real‐world ID‐checking. Here we study a particular instance of ID‐checking: proof of age for buying restricted goods such as alcohol. In this case, checkers must establish that an identity document is carried by its legitimate owner (i.e., that the ID photo matches the face of the bearer) and that the ID proves the bearer to be old enough to make the purchase. Across three experiments, using two common forms of photo‐ID (i.e., driving licenses, PASS+ cards) we show that observers produce very high error rates when age requirements are met, but faces mismatch. This bias away from detecting a face mismatch remained evident in experienced cashiers—though to a somewhat attenuated level. We discuss interactions between face matching and other tasks, and the practical consequences of a bias which favours those using photo‐ID with fraudulent intent.     

COVID-19 and Religious Ethics

The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID-19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.