Aim. The purpose of the study was to examine if cognitive distortions of various content presented by sexual offenders against children are related with sexual recidivism risk and actual recidivism. To extend the reliability of the interpretation of its results, differences in the number of cognitive distortions exhibited by sexual offenders against children and controls and relation between cognitive distortions measured explicitly and implicitly are also examined.

Method. 64 sexual offenders against children, 46 sexual offenders against adults, 74 nonsexual violent offenders, and 68 non-offending males participated in the study. Explicit and implicit cognitive distortions were measured by two newly created instruments. Sexual recidivism risk were assessed using Static-99. Data on conviction and actual recidivism were drawn from penitentiary files.

Results. Implicit and explicit cognitive distortions were mostly unrelated. Offenders showed more cognitive distortions than non-offending males. Cognitive distortions were not associated with static sexual recidivism risk. In explicit measurement sexual recidivists showed more cognitive distortions of all types with sexual content than non-recidivists.

Conclusion. Results of the study suggests that cognitive distortions with sexual content are  criminogenic need. Thus, tackling them in treatment shall be contemplated.

To establish the motives for the act is one of the main goals of the psychological evaluation required by judicial process in cases of suicide. In many cases, this makes it possible to prove or falsify the hypothesis that a person’s death is the result of the actions of one or more other people who –in one way or another –have contributed to that person’s decision to take their own life. Sometimes, people who die by suicide leave farewell notes indicating the person or people directly responsible for their deaths. Although notes of this kind offer an important source of information about the emotional states of their authors and their relationships with their social environments, they remain subjective. Indeed, it is often the case that thorough reviews of all of the material in the cases concerned do not support the thesis that a third party directly influenced the deceased’s decision to end their own life. Moreover, in some instances, people who die by suicide have been found to have misled the people in their immediate environment. Nevertheless, where verified suicide notes exist, they remain a valuable source of information for psychologists. The article analyses ninety-three cases in which psychological reports were compiled to determine the motives for fatal suicide attempts. Suicide notes were found in thirty of these cases. The form and content of these notes are examined, and the options for their use in forensic reports are considered.

Psychedelics derived from lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) represent one of the groups of new psychoactive substances (NPS) that have been gaining popularity in recent years. Due to their very high potency, they are taken in small doses and their identification in biological material is problematic. The compounds from this group, which appear in low concentrations in biological material and metabolise rapidly, require sensitive and selective analytical methods if they are to be detected. A method for the detection and determination of LSD and its new derivatives (ALD-52, 1P-LSD, 1cP-LSD, and 1B-LSD) in whole blood using the LC-MS/MS technique was therefore developed and validated. The analytes were isolated from the blood (0.2 mL) by liquid-liquid extraction with ethyl acetate and acetate buffer (pH 5.5). The method developed was linear in the range of 0.5−10 ng/mL. The limit of detection (LOD) was 0.01 ng/mL for each analyte and the lowest point on the calibration curve was taken as the limit of quantification (LOQ). The method developed is sensitive and samples can be prepared for analysis quickly and easily. The procedure can be applied widely in the analysis of LSD derivatives in biological material –for forensic or clinical purposes, for example –and can easily be expanded for use with further LSD derivatives.

In cases requiring determination of the ethanol content of a person involved in a road incident, expert opinions are often based on prospective calculations. Declarations regarding the amount and type of alcoholic drink consumed are used to calculate the concentration of alcohol in the body and to correlate the results obtained with those of sobriety tests. alcohol concentration estimated using a prospective calculation should correspond most accurately with the ethanol content in the body. It is therefore desirable to identify the appropriate model of prospective estimation, which is accomplished here by comparing the most common methods of alcohol calculation used by forensic experts. The study involved five people aged 29–64 (two women and three men) who were given alcohol in an amount leading to a theoretical ethanol concentration of 1‰in their bodies. In this paper, we plotted the alcohol curves and compared the experimental (real) ethanol concentration with the theoretical values calculated by the various methods. The best correlation between the results of prospective calculations and real ethanol concentrations was obtained for the method that assumes an immediate elimination from the beginning of consumption (used routinely by the authors) and for the method that assumes an absorption time of 30 minutes and a 10% alcohol deficit (the difference between the theoretical and actual ethanol concentration).

The possibility of modelling in the PC-Crash program of the motion on curved trajectory of a car whose rear wheel tire got unsealed, which resulted in the pressure drop to the atmospheric pressure, which was followed by the tire bead slipping off the rim, is analysed. The authors, using the results of the road tests they performed, reconstructed in the PC-Crash program the actual movement of the car. Next, they performed a number of simulations applying a bilinear model of a tire of default and modified characteristics as well as a TMeasy model. The effect of the change of wheel-to-road surface friction coefficient was also analysed. To compare the simulation results, the function of quality was employed whose value is the measure of the difference between the vehicle position and orientation obtained in simulation and the real ones. The most favourable results were reached when the TMeasy tire model was applied and the friction coefficient of the deflated tire on the distance between the point of the tire slipping off the rim and stopping was reduced.