Killing Justice in the Lone Star State

Killing Justice in the Lone Star State PDF Author: Michael O’Brien
Publisher: Waterside Press
ISBN: 190997692X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Killing Justice in the Lone Star State is a reality check on active Death Row cases (and some post-execution ones). The book offers a fresh perspective for campaigners and reformers which ranges across theory, policy and practice. It also explains the much criticised Texas ‘law of parties.’ ‘A must read, an excellent new book by Mike O’Brien... A powerful critique... a critical comparative analysis of USA/UK human rights standards. Packed with cases. A compelling case for abolition.’-- Dr Michael Naughton, Bristol University, Empowering the Innocent Project. Many organizations are engaged in a race to prevent the execution of death sentenced prisoners in Texas (and elsewhere in the USA). Some men and women on Death Row claim to be completely innocent as described in this book. Michael O’Brien — who was himself wrongly convicted of murder — dissects cases with the eye of someone who has spent years watching how miscarriages of justice happen and why. He explains how practitioners and others are in denial and tunnel vision helps to sustain politicians, livelihoods and profits that depend on a conveyor belt from the courts to the execution chamber. He describes a killing process aided by bias, discrimination, prejudice, unfair trials, supposed expert evidence and closed minds. This is just one hallmark of a country obsessed with guns, violence and the ultimate penalty. Texas is the most punitive place within one of the harshest penal systems in the world. But no legal system should take away human lives, especially one tarnished by defects of the kind the author sets out in this book. Extract ‘Can you just imagine being an individual who is innocent but facing execution, whether in Texas or elsewhere? Or you were on Death Row but you did not take part in any killings, just got caught up in the hysteria? Can you picture the pressure and abject loneliness of serving 15 years or more, and then the State setting a date to kill you?’

Killing Justice in the Lone Star State

Killing Justice in the Lone Star State PDF Author: Michael O’Brien
Publisher: Waterside Press
ISBN: 190997692X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description
Killing Justice in the Lone Star State is a reality check on active Death Row cases (and some post-execution ones). The book offers a fresh perspective for campaigners and reformers which ranges across theory, policy and practice. It also explains the much criticised Texas ‘law of parties.’ ‘A must read, an excellent new book by Mike O’Brien... A powerful critique... a critical comparative analysis of USA/UK human rights standards. Packed with cases. A compelling case for abolition.’-- Dr Michael Naughton, Bristol University, Empowering the Innocent Project. Many organizations are engaged in a race to prevent the execution of death sentenced prisoners in Texas (and elsewhere in the USA). Some men and women on Death Row claim to be completely innocent as described in this book. Michael O’Brien — who was himself wrongly convicted of murder — dissects cases with the eye of someone who has spent years watching how miscarriages of justice happen and why. He explains how practitioners and others are in denial and tunnel vision helps to sustain politicians, livelihoods and profits that depend on a conveyor belt from the courts to the execution chamber. He describes a killing process aided by bias, discrimination, prejudice, unfair trials, supposed expert evidence and closed minds. This is just one hallmark of a country obsessed with guns, violence and the ultimate penalty. Texas is the most punitive place within one of the harshest penal systems in the world. But no legal system should take away human lives, especially one tarnished by defects of the kind the author sets out in this book. Extract ‘Can you just imagine being an individual who is innocent but facing execution, whether in Texas or elsewhere? Or you were on Death Row but you did not take part in any killings, just got caught up in the hysteria? Can you picture the pressure and abject loneliness of serving 15 years or more, and then the State setting a date to kill you?’

The Trials of Eroy Brown

The Trials of Eroy Brown PDF Author: Michael Berryhill
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292726945
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In April 1981, two white Texas prison officials died at the hands of a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville. Warden Wallace Pack and farm manager Billy Moore were the highest-ranking Texas prison officials ever to die in the line of duty. The warden was drowned face down in a ditch. The farm manager was shot once in the head with the warden's gun. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered meekly, claiming self-defense. In any other era of Texas prison history, Brown's fate would have seemed certain: execution. But in 1980, federal judge William Wayne Justice had issued a sweeping civil rights ruling in which he found that prison officials had systematically and often brutally violated the rights of Texas inmates. In the light of that landmark prison civil rights case, Ruiz v. Estelle, Brown had a chance of being believed. The Trials of Eroy Brown, the first book devoted to Brown's astonishing defense, is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown's three trials, which ended in his acquittal. Michael Berryhill presents Brown's story in his own words, set against the backdrop of the chilling plantation mentality of Texas prisons. Brown's attorneys—Craig Washington, Bill Habern, and Tim Sloan—undertook heroic strategies to defend him, even when the state refused to pay their fees. The Trials of Eroy Brown tells a landmark story of prison civil rights and the collapse of Jim Crow justice in Texas.

Murder Most Texan

Murder Most Texan PDF Author: Bartee Haile
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1625852622
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
A chronicle of sixteen ruthless killings from Lone Star history and the dirty details that have shocked and bewildered Texans for decades. Texas has long boasted of its iron fist and strict treatment of criminals. Nevertheless, a number of homicidal scoundrels and fiends have slipped through the state’s justice system despite even the best efforts of the legendary Texas Rangers. In 1877, Texas saw its first high-profile murder case with the slaying of a woman in Jefferson and the subsequent “Diamond Bessie” trial. More than a century later, state legislator Price Daniel Jr., was shot in cold blood by his wife at their home in Liberty, TX. True crime writer and historian Bartee Haile unburies these and other stories from Texas’s murderous past. With these stories and more—from senseless roadside murders to political assassinations—discover the seedy underbelly of the Lone Star State’s murderous past.

American Evil

American Evil PDF Author: Eric Cullen
Publisher: Waterside Press
ISBN: 1909976792
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
American Evil deals with the ‘sordid’ world of serial killers, their calculating methods and distorted thinking, based around the author’s ground-breaking work as a prison psychologist, government advisor and consultant to three TV series including Voice of a Serial Killer. Based on clinical experience of killers. Includes a selection of USA/UK serial killer studies. Exposes police and other failings and shortcomings and the perversity of ‘defences’, ‘excuses’, etc. Strongly critical of USA gun laws and attitudes or perspectives making for an unhealthy environment, moral vacuum and lack of official/individual awareness and responsibility. The book describes how the author was ‘so profoundly moved’ by his inescapable conclusions about how serial killers are ‘made’ that he was compelled to set out his findings. Bemoaning the serial killer ‘growth industry’, ‘unhealthy interest’ and ill-informed comment he sets the record straight. Serial killers are made not born. But his central polemic is that serial killers are one of several malign human by-products of a dysfunctional modern permissive society, overwhelmingly American, brought about by modern-day culture in the USA, lax moral standards as also reflected in other countries to the extent that they pursue a comparable way of life.

Lone Star Daybreak

Lone Star Daybreak PDF Author: Erik L. Larson
Publisher: Tate Publishing
ISBN: 1622950631
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Texas announces it will leave the United States and form a new country. Families, friends, and professionals across the United States see old loyalties broken and new loyalties forged in the fires of personal ambition and necessity. Unknown, average young people find themselves on the tip of the spear of the upstart Texas Defense Force, formed to protect the new country. In a night that will forever change his destiny, going-nowhere sales clerk Michael Minze discovers he has a talent for killing, and bright but underachieving student Ann Militzer is offered a graduation present she can't refuse as a reward for her loyalty: the keys to a supersonic warplane. The leadership of the United States vows to stop Texas from seceding. And war ravages the nation.

Counterfeit Justice

Counterfeit Justice PDF Author: Dale Baum
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807134054
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
For many of the forty years of her life as a slave, Azeline Hearne cohabitated with her wealthy, unmarried master, Samuel R. Hearne. She bore him four children, only one of whom survived past early childhood. When Sam died shortly after the Civil War ended, he publicly acknowledged his relationship with Azeline and bequeathed his entire estate to their twenty-year-old mulatto son, with the provision that he take care of his mother. When their son died early in 1868, Azeline inherited one of the most profitable cotton plantations in Texas and became one of the wealthiest ex-slaves in the former Confederacy. In Counterfeit Justice, Dale Baum traces Azeline's remarkable story, detailing her ongoing legal battles to claim and maintain her legacy. As Baum shows, Azeline's inheritance quickly made her a target for predatory whites determined to strip her of her land. A familiar figure at the Robertson County District Court from the late 1860s to the early 1880s, Azeline faced numerous lawsuits -- including one filed against her by her own lawyer. Samuel Hearne's family took steps to dispossess her, and other unscrupulous white men challenged the title to her plantation, using claims based on old Spanish land grants. Azeline's prolonged and courageous defense of her rightful title brought her a certain notoriety: the first freedwoman to be a party to three separate civil lawsuits appealed all the way to the Texas Supreme Court and the first former slave in Robertson County indicted on criminal charges of perjury. Although repeatedly blocked and frustrated by the convolutions of the legal system, she evolved from a bewildered defendant to a determined plaintiff who, in one extraordinary lawsuit, came tantalizingly close to achieving revenge against those who defrauded her for over a decade. Due to gaps in the available historical record and the unreliability of secondary accounts based on local Reconstruction folklore, many of the details of Azeline's story are lost to history. But Baum grounds his speculation about her life in recent scholarship on the Reconstruction era, and he puts his findings in context in the history of Robertson County. Although history has not credited Azeline Hearne with influencing the course of the law, the story of her uniquely difficult position after the Civil War gives an unprecedented view of the era and of one solitary woman's attempt to negotiate its social and legal complexities in her struggle to find justice. Baum's meticulously researched narrative will be of keen interest to legal scholars and to all those interested in the plight of freed slaves during this era.

Rough Justice

Rough Justice PDF Author: Lauran Paine
Publisher: Blackstone Audio Inc.
ISBN: 1504725727
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
Sheriff Doyle Bannion tries to keep the peace in Perdition Wells, Texas, when a shooting claims the life of an innocent bystander. When a shooting takes place at the Union Eagle Saloon, Dale McAfee, foreman of John Rockland’s mighty Texas Star Ranch, kills a range rider working for Clell Durham, a free-graze cowman. It’s a fair fight, but it’s marked by a tragic accident: the bullet that killed Durham’s rider went through his body and also killed an aged swamper. Several eyewitnesses tell Sheriff Doyle Bannion that the old man had ignored warning calls and continued sweeping, so Bannion rules the involuntary shooting death by misadventure. But the King brothers see things differently—and they’re bent on avenging their father’s death.

Lone Star Justice

Lone Star Justice PDF Author: Robert M. Utley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198029322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
From The Lone Ranger to Lonesome Dove, the Texas Rangers have been celebrated in fact and fiction for their daring exploits in bringing justice to the Old West. In Lone Star Justice, best-selling author Robert M. Utley captures the first hundred years of Ranger history, in a narrative packed with adventures worthy of Zane Grey or Larry McMurtry. The Rangers began in the 1820s as loose groups of citizen soldiers, banding together to chase Indians and Mexicans on the raw Texas frontier. Utley shows how, under the leadership of men like Jack Hays and Ben McCulloch, these fiercely independent fighters were transformed into a well-trained, cohesive team. Armed with a revolutionary new weapon, Samuel Colt's repeating revolver, they became a deadly fighting force, whether battling Comanches on the plains or storming the city of Monterey in the Mexican-American War. As the Rangers evolved from part-time warriors to full-time lawmen by 1874, they learned to face new dangers, including homicidal feuds, labor strikes, and vigilantes turned mobs. They battled train robbers, cattle thieves and other outlaws--it was Rangers, for example, who captured John Wesley Hardin, the most feared gunman in the West. Based on exhaustive research in Texas archives, this is the most authoritative history of the Texas Rangers in over half a century. It will stand alongside other classics of Western history by Robert M. Utley--a vivid portrait of the Old West and of the legendary men who kept the law on the lawless frontier.

Lone Star America

Lone Star America PDF Author: Mark Davis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1621572315
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Throughout America and around the world, the United States has been known as a beacon of hope and opportunity, the land of the free and the home of the brave. Sadly, from the crumbling urban ghetto of Detroit to the cash-strapped shores of California to the rust belt of the Midwest, America is not living up to that promise. Except in Texas. While unemployment soars elsewhere, Texans are hard at work. While small businesses across the country are going under, Texas entrepreneurs are thriving. While large companies are being squeezed by taxes, regulations and unions, more and more corporations are moving to Texas to grow and expand. While people of faith are ridiculed and marginalized in most cities on both coasts, in Texas churches and synagogues are bursting at the seams. How did Texas embrace what the rest of America seems to have forgotten? In Lonestar America, popular talk radio show host Mark Davis presents a powerful case for economic prosperity, individual freedom, strong families, and even stronger pride of place – alive and kicking in Texas, and easily exportable to the rest of America. Davis shows how Texas has done it, how some “honorary Texans” in other states (governors and even local communities) have adopted some of the same policies and approaches, and how states across the country can reclaim the promise of the American dream.

DeathQuest

DeathQuest PDF Author: Robert M. Bohm
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317522907
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
This fourth edition of the first true textbook on the death penalty engages the reader with a full account of the arguments and issues surrounding capital punishment. The book begins with the history of the death penalty from colonial to modern times, and then examines the moral and legal arguments for and against capital punishment. It also provides an overview of major Supreme Court decisions and describes the legal process behind the death penalty. In addressing these issues, the author reviews recent developments in death penalty law and procedure, including ramifications of newer case law, such as that regarding using lethal injection as a method of execution. The author’s motivation has been to understand what motivates the "deathquest" of the American people, leading a large percentage of the public to support the death penalty. The book will educate readers so that whatever their death penalty opinions are, they are informed ones.