Faculty and Staff

The Sixth Amendment guarantees defendants the right to trial by an impartial jury. Attorneys are expected to obtain information about potential juror biases and then deselect biased jurors. Social networking sites may offer useful information about potential jurors. Although some attorneys and trial consultants have begun searching online sources for information about jurors, the privacy rights of potential jurors’ online content has yet to be defined by case law. Two studies explored the issue of possible intrusion into juror privacy. First, an active jury venire was searched for online content. Information was found for 36% of the jurors; however, 94% of the information was found through simple Google searches. Only 6% of the information we found was unique to other sites. We concluded that searching for potential jurors online is feasible, but that systematically searching sites other than Google is generally not an effective search strategy. In our second study we surveyed attorneys, trial consultants, law students, and undergraduate students about ethical and privacy issues in the use of public domain information for jury selection. Participants evidenced concern about the rights of jurors, the rights of the defendant and accuser, and the role of tradition in court processes.

Prompted by the involvement of psychologists in torturous interrogations at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the American Psychological Association (APA) revised its Ethics Code Standard 1.02 to prohibit psychologists from engaging in activities that would “justify or defend violating human rights.” The revision to Standard 1.02 followed APA policy statements condemning torture and prohibiting psychologists’ involvement in such activities that constitute a violation of human rights (APA, 2010). Cogent questions have subsequently been raised about the involvement of psychologists in other activities that could arguably lead to human rights violations, even if the activity in question is legal. While this language was designed to be expansive in defining psychologists’ ethical responsibilities, it remains difficult to determine whether and how Standard 1.02 might apply to a particular situation.

In the present analysis, we focus on the question of whether psychologists should be involved in death penalty cases. We assert that the APA should not take an ethical stand against psychologists’ participation in death penalty cases. Our position is not intended necessarily to reflect approval or disapproval of the death penalty although we recognize that there are serious flaws in the American legal system with regard to capital punishment. Our perspective is that psychologists have an important role in the administration of due process in capital cases. We oppose a bright-line rule prohibiting psychologists’ involvement in death penalty cases for several reasons. We begin by considering whether the death penalty per se constitutes a human rights violation, move on to describe the basic functioning of the legal system, analyze how the involvement of psychologists actually affects the capital trial process, and end with providing practical advice for psychologists’ provision of ethical services in capital trials.

The ethics of forensic professionalism is often couched in terms of competing individual and societal values. Indeed, the welfare of individuals is often secondary to the requirements of society, especially given the public nature of courts of law, forensic hospitals, jails, and prisons. We explore the weaknesses of this dichotomous approach to forensic ethics, offering an analysis of Psychology's historical narrative especially relevant to the national security and correctional settings. We contend that a richer, more robust ethical analysis is available if practitioners consider the multiple perspectives in the forensic encounter, and acknowledge the multiple influences of personal, professional, and social values. The setting, context, or role is not sufficient to determine the ethics of forensic practice.

Since its debut over a century ago, forensic psychology has matured into a formally recognized specialty area of psychology with its own set of ethical guidelines; however, a consensual definition of forensic psychology remains elusive. After describing the field’s historical and current struggles to define itself, two ethical issues are discussed that are especially applicable to psychology in legal contexts. The first is the critical differences between serving in therapeutic versus forensic roles and the associated ethical obligation to refrain from serving in both roles in the same case. Despite the terminology used in the literature, treatment in forensic contexts can be ethically appropriate. This chapter considers the current state of the literature regarding treatment in forensic contexts and suggests that this is likely to be an area of future growth for the field. The second ethical issue discussed in this chapter is the insidious effect of the adversarial process on psychologists’ objectivity in forensic contexts, termed “forensic identification” or “adversarial allegiance.” The forensic ethical guidelines affirm the primacy of this issue in forensic contexts, as evidenced by addressing it in the first two published guidelines. However, field and experimental evidence suggest psychologists have a challenging (if not impossible) task in avoiding partiality in adversarial forensic contexts. The chapter ends by briefly considering the methods psychologist might use in an effort to reduce partiality and by recognizing more research is needed to identify what else psychologists can do to strive to uphold the ethical guidelines in this regard.

Prisoners sentenced to death must be competent for execution before they can actually be executed (Ford v. Wainwright, 1986). The decision for many mental health professionals whether to conduct competence for execution evaluations may be fraught with complex ethical issues. Mental health professionals who do not personally support capital punishment may have a particularly difficult decision to make in this regard but should seriously consider the consequences of their decisions. This article applies Bush, Connell, and Denney’s (2006) eight-step ethical decision-making model to the ethicality of deciding to or abstaining from conducting competence for execution evaluations. This article does not propose what decisions an individual evaluator should make regarding this work, but rather presents a systematic guide for mental health professionals (particularly those who do not support capital punishment) to consider.

Objective: to explore currently available Open Educational Resources related to Health Sciences programs to increase available options for free, high quality, online educational materials to support Health Sciences faculty, researchers, and students in online, hybrid, and in-person courses at Arizona State University.

Background/Methods: Following the successful Open Access movement, the Open Education movement is expanding free, online access to Open Educational Resources (OERs), beyond research published in scholarly journals. Similar to the Open Access movement, Open Educational resources are of high quality, available for free, online, with minimal or no licensing restrictions. They include, but are not limited to: syllabi and course modules, open textbooks, and massive open online courses (MOOCs). Arizona State University (ASU) has many fully online degree programs from undergraduate to graduate level, as well as supplemental and continuing education certificates. ASU also has many hybrid programs and in-person courses that include online components. Instructors are often searching for online videos or other high quality, online educational materials that they can incorporate in their courses. OERs may provide some useful options. ASU Libraries became involved in Open Education Week in March 2013. To expand on our involvement and increase resource options at ASU, the presenters decided to begin identifying useful OERs for health sciences. To do so, the presenters searched for and evaluated 2-3 sources for OERs each and noted the advantages and/or disadvantages of each, as well as any highly useful specific OERs.

Results: The presenters will discuss the advantages and/or disadvantages of evaluated sources for Open Educational Resources and any highly useful specific OERs identified. We will also provide a brief overview of open source tools related to citation management.

Conclusion: Come to this presentation to explore the Open Education movement: hear about one research university library system's start with Open Education Week, and get an overview of free, online options for high quality Open Educational Resources in the Health Sciences.

Background & Objective:
Over the past several decades, systematic reviews have become a major part of the biomedical research literature landscape. While systematic reviews were originally developed for medicine and its related fields, they are now published in other disciplines. Our initial goal was to broadly investigate and describe the non-health sciences subject areas and disciplines that are publishing systematic reviews. Specifically, our research questions were,“What disciplines outside of the health sciences are adopting systematic reviews as a research method?” and “What implications may this have for health sciences librarianship?” Based on our initial findings, we will propose avenues for future research.

Methods & Discussion:
We conducted a search in the Scopus database to serve as a representative sample of the research literature. We searched for the phrase “systematic review*” in the article title or abstract, and limited the results to review articles from journals. We filtered out articles published in health sciences disciplines using the Scopus subject categories, and examined the articles that remained. The resulting set of titles was screened by two independent reviewers in a stepwise fashion. First we read the titles, then the abstracts, then the full text of remaining articles to determine if each was a systematic review and addressed a topic outside of the health sciences. We reconciled any differences for citations on which there was not initial consensus between reviewers. Lastly, we examined each remaining article to categorize its subject area or discipline. Our initial search included a number of systematic reviews outside the health science disciplines, and will yield data that has implications for librarians in the health sciences and in disciplines outside the health sciences field.