The Relevance of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and the Criminal Law from Investigation to Sentencing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a permanent form of brain injury, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) cannot be cured but only managed. This paper provides an overview of the issues that arise when someone with FASD encounters the criminal justice system. This article starts with a brief overview of the nature and incidence of FASD, followed by results of a survey of reported case law that was conducted in order to determine how frequently judges make reference to FASD in Canadian criminal law jurisprudence. The remainder of the article will examine the growing jurisprudence about FASD as it affects pre-trial, trial, and sentencing stages of the criminal process. Specifically, the relevance of FASD in determining the admissibility of statements from the accused will be examined, as well as how courts should approach the testimony of witnesses with FASD. This article also exams the growing jurisprudence on whether and when people with FASD will be found unfit to stand trial by reason of mental disorder or eligible for the mental disorder defence. Lastly, this essay exams the potential relevance of FASD to the determination of criminal liability, and how sentencing judges have approached FASD. Unfortunately there is no magic legal solution to the sad problem of FASD.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".