Moral and ethical aspects

In 1956 Darrel Parker was convicted of murdering his wife, with no evidence of his guilt except his own confession. Like Parker, some individuals confess to crimes which they did not commit. These confessions are generally made with a lawyer present when police us deception or coercion. While deception is constitutional, and a permitted police tactic, coercion is not. THis paper distinguished between the two and provides a philosophical framework for determining when deception becomes coercive. While non-coercive deception can lead to false confessions, I do not argue that deception should be banned, as it is a useful tool for police in catching criminals. Instead, I argue that police may deceive suspects, but prosecutors and judges should provide a check by using a three-pronged test to ensure that individuals are not convicted of crimes they did not commit.

A generally illegal form of short selling in United States equity markets, called "naked shorting," occurs when a seller of stock sells shares that do not exist. This type of short selling has negative consequences that result from the tactic's ability to be used as a tool to artificially inflate an issuer's stock supply, which introduces significant harm to the integrity of the market's natural forces of supply and demand. Newly adopted amendments to the Securities and Exchange Commission's short sale governance regulation, called Regulation SHO, required the mandatory purchasing of shares by certain market participants in order for those participants to close-out previously excused delivery failures, called "grandfathered" failures. This study examines the consequences of this new regulation, in terms of share price and volume, for those few securities that had the most persistent delivery failure problems. Because the regulation mandates the purchase of shares by certain influential market participants, I examine if the stock markets of these securities exhibited unusual volatility which may be indicative of the market maker trying to cover at low cost. Using technical analysis techniques, such as volume surge detection (using moving volume averages), the performance of the target securities will be compared with appropriate benchmark indices for the purpose of detecting unusual activity. Unusual activity may be consistent with my hypothesis that market makers may encourage additional volatility to cause liquidity problems for marginal investors which forces them to sell part or all of their position. As discussed in great detail, the extra marginal shares injected into the market by the action of forced selling by these marginal investors may be used by the market makers to lower their cost of regulation compliance.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was approved by Congress on November 16, 1990 after years of American Indian lobbying due to the unfair treatment of American Indian remains. Since the enactment of NAGPRA there have been multiple complaints from the archaeological community that the way in which they conduct their jobs has been severely limited by the implementation of NAGPRA. In this study I compare data from the Secretary's Report to Congress questionnaire, conducted by the National Park Service's Federal Archaeology Program, to determine whether NAGPRA has caused an increase or decrease in the amount of archaeological administrative, laboratory, and fieldwork completed between 1985 and 2005. The comparison shows that there was a significant increase in specific archaeological practices in the years following the implementation of NAGPRA. Looking at the changes in work patterns of archaeologists allows us to assess the success of NAGPRA and it provides empirical evidence to evaluate the claims made by parties affected by the act.