An examination of how youth understand their rights during the criminal process

In order for young people to meaningfully participate in the criminal justice system they must possess an understanding of their rights and legal procedures. To examine their understanding, 50 young people between the ages of 13-17 who received an extrajudicial sanction or were sentenced to probation, were recruited from the Finch Courthouse in Toronto, Ontario. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants regarding their understanding of their due process rights and their rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Youth who indicated involvement in plea bargaining were also asked about their experiences during this procedure. In addition, the present study examined youths' perceptions of power differences in their interactions with criminal justice officials working within an institution that has tremendous control over offenders' lives. The results indicate that while youth seem to have some understanding oftheir rights and legal procedures, they nevertheless feel ill-equipped to invoke their rights in an adult-led criminal justice system. Furthermore, while past literature has often conceptualized youth understanding based on age (e.g., Crawford & Bull, 2006) the findings of the present study demonstrate that while age plays some role, the lack of power experienced by youth vis-a-vis adults, and specifically criminal justice professionals, has the most bearing on the inability of youth to exercise their rights.

Managerial Risk-Taking and CEO Excess Compensation

This paper examines risk taking and CEO excess compensation problems in U.S firms to determine their impact on shareholders wealth. Literature suggests a positive effect of CEO incentive risk and strong corporate governance on CEO risk taking. Furthermore, the strong governance mitigates excess compensation problem. Controlling for governance quality and incentive risk, I provide empirical evidence of a significant association between risk taking and CEO excess compensation. When I also control for pay-performance sensitivity (delta) and feedback effects of incentive compensation on CEO risk taking, I find that higher use of incentive pay encourages risk taking, and due to a high exposure to risk CEOs draws excess compensation. Furthermore, I find that the excess compensation problem is more serious with CEOs taking high risk than with those taking low risk. Finally, I find that CEO risk taking also has structural impacts on CEO compensation

Perceived Deservingness and the Toleration of Human Rights Violations: The Problem and a Possible Solution

Despite general endorsement of universal human rights, people continue to tolerate specific human rights violations. I conducted a two-part study to investigate this issue. For Part I, I examined whether people tolerated torture (a human rights violation) based on the morality and deservingness of the target. Participants tolerated torture more when the target had committed a highly morally reprehensible transgression. This effect was mediated by the target’s perceived deservingness for harsh treatment, and held over and above participants’ abstract support for the right to humane treatment. For Part II, hypocrisy induction was used in an attempt to reduce participants’ toleration of the torture. Participants were assigned to either the hypocrisy induction or control condition. Unexpectedly, participants who tolerated the torture more in Part I reduced their toleration the most in the control condition, possibly because of consistency and floor effects. Limitations and implications of the findings are discussed.