Pete Koerner, author of The Belief Formula
Criminal Law – What Happens After a Guilty Verdict Or Plea?
July 2, 2012 By
Criminal Law – What Happens After a Guilty Verdict Or Plea?
A typical felony statute delineates the maximum sentence for the underlying offense. For example, under DC criminal law, an aggravated assault charge carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison, in addition to a $10,000 fine. But, just because there is a maximum sentence, all is not lost after a conviction. There are methods to help minimize the prison term, or even reduce it to time already served. Criminal attorneys will want to research which of the below procedures are available in their respective jurisdictions.
Pre-Sentence Investigation:
Often times, when the court sets a sentencing date, it will also order a pre-sentence investigation (PSI), ordinarily to be conducted by a probation officer. The main purpose of the PSI is to help the court determine an appropriate sentence for the criminal defendant. Increasingly, the report will also help frame the issues for the court to consider at the sentencing hearing.
The investigator usually obtains information by interviewing relevant third parties and the defendant, and reviewing documents. Typical third parties include the victim, the defendant’s family and friends, employers, school personnel, doctors and therapists. Sometimes the probation officer will speak with the defendant’s criminal attorney, the police officers or the investigators. Documents may include the court file, any plea agreement, criminal history, academic records, medical records and anything else the investigator may deem relevant.
The PSI offers various opportunities for the defendant. It is important for the defendant and the criminal lawyer to fully cooperate during the course of the PSI, as often times the court will place great weight on the report generated.
Sentencing Guidelines:
Most jurisdictions employ some form of guidelines for the purpose of alleviating sentencing disparities in criminal cases. While guidelines generally determine sentences based primarily on the conduct associated with the offense and the defendant’s criminal history, departures from the guidelines may be allowed in cases involving extenuating circumstances. The most notable basis for departure is when the defendant offers substantial assistance to the authorities; however, there are many others. The criminal lawyer should explore any good faith arguments for a departure below the guideline sentence.
Third-Party Statements:
Sworn statements, letters or even testimony of third parties at the sentencing hearing may be helpful to the defendant. Usually family members and close friends provide the best third party statements, because they both know the defendant best and are most likely to make beneficial assertions.
Allocution:
Everything comes together during the sentencing hearing, at which time the defendant and his criminal lawyer will have the opportunity for allocution. Some jurisdictions hold this as an absolute right, and a sentence may be overturned in its absence. Allocution is occasionally used when a defendant pleads guilty to a crime in exchange for a reduced sentence. Literally meaning “to speak out formally,” this is the opportunity to employ the PSI report, the sentencing guidelines and any third party statements, to craft an argument for a lesser sentence.
Conclusion:
While the above are mostly utilized in felony cases, there are circumstances where the same will apply to a misdemeanor charge (think repeat DUI, for example). Ideally, the lawyer will have spoken to the defendant about all of these procedures before trial. Therefore, if the jury returns a guilty verdict, the defendant acts accordingly and doesn’t dig a deeper hole out of which to climb.
Criminal Law – What Happens After a Guilty Verdict Or Plea?
Interested in reading more? Check out comments from a traffic attorney, all about being in traffic court.
Content About : Criminal Law – What Happens After a Guilty Verdict Or Plea? Article
What Happens After Cervical Cancer Treatment?
June 30, 2012 By
What Happens After Cervical Cancer Treatment?
Regular follow-up exams; including a pelvic exam, a pap test, and other laboratory tests, are very important for any woman who has been treated for changes to the cervix or for cervical cancer. The woman should have frequent tests and exams for several years so that the doctor can check for any signs that the condition has returned.
Cancer treatment can cause side effects many years later. For this reason, patients should continue to have regular checkups and should report any health problems that appear.
Living with a serious disease is not easy. Cancer patients and those who care about them face many problems and challenges. Coping with these problems is often easier when people have helpful information and support services.
Some worries that cancer patients may face can include holding their job, caring for their family, or keeping up with daily activities. Worries about tests, treatments, hospital stays, and medical bills are common. Doctors, nurses, and other members of the health care team can answer questions about treatment, working, or other activities. Also, meeting with a social worker, counselor, or a member of the clergy can be helpful to patients who want to talk about their feelings or discuss their concerns.
Friends and relatives can be very supportive. Also, it helps many patients to discuss their concerns with others who have cancer. Cancer patients often get together in support groups, where they can share what they have learned about coping with cancer and the effects of treatment. It is important to keep in mind, however, that each patient is different. Treatments and ways of dealing with cancer that work for one person may not be right for another, even if they both have the same kind of cancer. It is a good idea to discuss the advice of friends and family members with the doctor.
Often, a social worker at the hospital or clinic can suggest groups that can help with rehabilitation, emotional support, financial aid, transportation, or home care.
What Happens After Cervical Cancer Treatment?
Laura Guthrie is a former cancer patient who successfully recovered. She now shares her best of the best information to give back.
She’s put together a website simply to give back to people just like you with tons of free information, you can get free instant access at [http://www.savemefromcancer.com]
We hope you got lots of value from this article, good luck in your journey.
Content About : What Happens After Cervical Cancer Treatment? Article
Career Advice – Nothing Happens Until You Sell Yourself! How To Promote Your Career
June 8, 2012 By
Career Advice – Nothing Happens Until You Sell Yourself! How To Promote Your Career
A well-known adage advises that you have only to invent a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door, bearing recognition and riches. Believe me that’s poor career advice!
If you are content to accept that bit of career counseling, you are likely to end up with a shelf full of unsold traps.
Common sense says that inventing a better mousetrap is only the first step toward a successful career. Until potential buyers (i.e. employers) are aware of your mousetrap (i.e. your accomplishments and potential) and decide to choose you as a supplier you will be left waiting for success.
Few people are comfortable with promoting themselves. The idea generates a knee-jerk reaction: “I’d be too embarrassed to brag about myself. Besides, my work speaks for itself.” Wrong! Nothing happens until you sell yourself.
Sometimes peer pressure says, “Don’t raise your flag too high above the rest of us. We’ll all be put on the spot so we have to perform up to a higher standard.”
This is a counterproductive attitude except for those who are willing to lag behind in the comfort of the herd.
Overt braggarts are pains in the neck. Braggadocio will usually backfire. On the other hand, doing a good job, consistently, and letting the world know about it is an essential to success.
Five Ways To Promote Your Career
Here are five suggestions to help you promote your career.
1. Be sure your performance deserves recognition. You are programmed for failure if you try to take credit for more than you do.
2. Be sure your boss and the organization know what you are accomplishing. They may be taking you for granted.
Seek opportunities to work with other departments. Make contacts and friends. Let them know what you do.
3. If your organization maintains a public relations office, get to know the people who work there. If they recognize you as a knowledgeable source, they are more likely to publicize your work.
4. Be active in trade associations, civic clubs and public service activities. With your employer’s permission, make speeches and write articles for the trade press and general news media. Everybody wins when you do. Your employer basks in the sunlight of your achievements. You gain visibility and contacts. You polish your skills and your image.
5. If you have done a job alone, don’t hesitate to accept the credit. Be just as quick to share the accolades when there has been a team effort.
Who Is Served By Your Reluctance?
If you are reluctant to promote your wares, ask yourself these questions:
If I can provide something of benefit, shouldn’t I let the rest of the world know about it? Am I on an ego trip if I sit back and expect the world to beat a path to my door? Whose interests are being served by my reluctance to make known what I can do?
How many mice will I have helped to eliminate if I have built a better mousetrap, but nobody buys one because they don’t know about its value?
Career Advice – Nothing Happens Until You Sell Yourself! How To Promote Your Career
For more advice on how to accelerate your career during tough times participate in Ramon Greenwood’s widely read Common Sense At Work Blog click http://www.commonsenseatwork.com. He coaches from a successful career as Senior VP at American Express, author of career-related books, successful entrepreneur, and a senior executive/consultant in Fortune 500 companies. For more free career coaching visit http://commonsenseatwork.com/job-advice-principles
Content About : Career Advice – Nothing Happens Until You Sell Yourself! How To Promote Your Career Article
What Happens Inside the Atom – Electrons and the Quantum World
April 26, 2012 By
What Happens Inside the Atom – Electrons and the Quantum World
Our conception of the atom has undergone many changes since the day the idea that matter consisted of indivisible particles was first floated by the Indians and Greeks. However it is only in this century that we have come to know something of what truly goes on inside the atom. We are all by now familiar with the iconic picture of an atom – a circle with a couple of little circles whizzing around it, rather like the moon orbits the earth. In the case of the atom, the ‘earth’ is called the nucleus and the ‘moons’ are called electrons.
What keeps the electrons hanging around the nucleus? Well, if you remember the old adage ‘like charges repel, unlike attract’: electrons have a negative charge, and the nucleus has a positive charge. The flipside of this is that the electrons need energy if they are to avoid spiralling into the nucleus. This was one of the main questions at the beginning of the century: where does this energy come from? The answer turns out to be very counterintuitive: very tiny objects, like atoms, don’t behave like we would expect them to, and instead follow the rules of the quantum world. The word ‘quantum’ implies separateness, and in the case of the atom we find that electrons are actually restricted to be at certain separate energies – an electron could have an amount of energy X, or an amount of energy Y, but it can’t have an energy between X and Y. This rules out the electron from spiralling, because in order to spiral, the electron would have to go through the whole gamut of energies all the way down to zero, and that’s just not allowed.
That’s not all. For each separate energy level, there’s only a certain amount of electrons that are allowed to be at that energy. Suppose we give each of the energy levels a number, n, starting from the one with the least energy (and hence closest to the nucleus) n=1. It turns out that n is one of four quantum numbers that, between them, say everything there is to say about an electron. The others are called l, m, and s, and as we shall see, the values that these numbers can have are limited by the first number n. These four numbers determine why there can only be a certain amount of electrons at each energy level n: another major law of the quantum world is that no two electrons can exist in the same atom if they have the same four numbers. It’s a little like two ladies turning up at a high society ball with the identical same outfit; you just know somebody’s going to have to go home and change.
What do the other three numbers mean? The l and m numbers are ‘rotational’ quantum numbers and they determine how the electron moves around the nucleus. Before we explain further, we have to interject with another major law of the quantum world, or rather an admission: we can’t actually know where exactly the electron is. This is to do with the famous ‘uncertainty principle’ which I am sure you have heard about, even if you don’t know what it means. In fact, the best we can do is say ‘Well, there’s an x-percent chance it’s here, a y-percent chance it’s there, a z-percent chance it’s somewhere else, and so on…’. That’s all. When showing the location of an electron, a common method is to draw an electron ‘cloud’, shading the cloud thickly in the areas where the electron is more likely to be, and thinly in the areas where it is less likely to be.
The l quantum number tells us a lot about the shape of the cloud for a particular electron. An electron on energy level n can have any value of l from 0 to n-1. We find that the cloud is split into n-l concentric bands around the nucleus, and the shape of these bands is more complex the higher l is (it basically looks like it has been run through with a pizza slicer l times). For l=0 the cloud is just n spherical shells around the nucleus.
We can say that l gives the rotation strength and m gives the angle at which the rotation axis is tilted. m can have any value between -l and l, and the cloud for each value of m (keeping n and l the same) differs only in that it is rotated a little bit around the nucleus. The last number, s, is called spin – as well as going around the nucleus, the electrons also rotate on their own axis! However electrons can only spin like this in two ways (again another quantum law) and so there are only two possible values for the s number.
Now that we know about the four numbers we can now calculate how many electrons can stay at each energy level n. Well if n=1, l has to be 0 and so m has to be zero. The only number left is s and that means only 2 electrons are allowed. However if n=2, then l can be either 0 or 1. If l=0, then we have 2 electrons just like the n=1 case; if l=1 then m can be -1,0 or 1 and so we will have 6 electrons when we take s into account. That leaves 8 in total. In this way we can calculate the number of electrons at every energy level.
In order to save energy, the lower energy levels usually get filled up first – i.e. helium has its two electrons in the n=1 level whereas lithium, with three electrons, fills the n=1 level first and then puts the spare electron in the n=2 level. However as n gets bigger, things get a bit more complicated and you will see electrons being added to energy levels before the level below is completely full.
What Happens Inside the Atom – Electrons and the Quantum World
The author has a Ph.D in particle physics. This is the first in a series of articles exploring the concepts, structure and history of the atom. He is a member of the Sri Chinmoy Centre and is especially interested in the dialogue between the scientific and spiritual perspectives on life.
Content About : What Happens Inside the Atom – Electrons and the Quantum World Article
What exactly is an affirmation? It is simply a statement we make to help ourselves improve our life. Although the use of affirmations includes repeating them often so that our subconscious will take over, there is nothing “other worldly” about them. We are simply training ourselves to think positive.
Do affirmations help? Yes. Most definitely! Here is how to choose affirmations that will help you make your life better.
Make your affirmation believable
If you don’t believe your affirmation is possible, you won’t be able to put the effort into seeing it happen. For example, “I will marry a millionaire”, is so far from our current life that we can’t find it believable. It is a dream, not an affirmation. (Another note here: We recommend affirmations be in the present tense – but that’s another lesson. For now, affirmations can be future tense when we are setting goals.)
An affirmation should state what you want without being too much of an exaggeration. A much better affirmation would be: “I will marry someone whom I love and who makes a comfortable living.” This affirmation is one that you can believe and can take steps to achieve.
Repeat your affirmation often
In order for your subconscious to pick it up and make it automatic, it has to be repeated often. Basically, you are programming your mind to remember what you want so that you subconsciously make decisions that will help you achieve your goal.
One way to repeat affirmations is to put them on post-its that you place around your house (on the fridge, on the bathroom mirror, on the cupboard, and other places you’ll see them). This can be effective on its own, or can be used with other affirmation techniques.
Don’t try to control what happens
While you should take steps to achieve your affirmation, don’t try to control what happens in your life. If your affirmation was to marry someone who makes a comfortable living, and someone comes into your life who makes minimum wage, the decision is yours. You can choose to let go of your affirmation or to continue looking.
Creating Your Affirmation
Affirmations work best when they are stated in the present tense.”I will be a better parent” is a good affirmation, but it allows you to wait for it to happen.”I am an excellent parent” is better because it implants itself in your subconscious as current. You are doing it now. Your subconscious will help you do it.
March 10, 2012 By
Keep your affirmation as short as possible. It will work much better and faster than a wordy affirmation. (And it is easier to say.)
Repeat it often. Basically, you are programming your mind to remember what you want so that you subconsciously make decisions that will help you attain your goal.
Don’t use negative affirmations. “I will not bully my child” is not a good affirmation. It will work faster if you use the positive approach. “I am a calm parent” is positive and will reinforce your objective.
Make your affirmation feel right for you. The more you believe in the affirmation, the sooner you will achieve your goal.
Time your affirmations. Find a time to reinforce your affirmations. First thing in the morning as you brush your teeth is an excellent time to reinforce your affirmations. As you get ready for bed is also a great time. If you reaffirm your affirmations as you get ready for bed, your subconscious will continue your affirmation while you sleep.
You also want to repeat your affirmations several times throughout the day to help embed it in your subconscious.
You can create a better “you”. Create your affirmation, repeat your affirmation. Trust your affirmation. These tips will help you set and achieve your goals.
Focus On Kids offers online parenting classes with guaranteed certificates of completion. Not only do you learn new techniques to make your relationship with your children much more enjoyable, you will complete your court requirements in your own time and in the privacy of your own home. Available 24/7, you control your time. Not sure? Check out the testimonials page to see what past students have to say.
Visit TheBusySaver Parenting Section to get more free parenting tips.
