Murder and the Reasonable Man

Murder and the Reasonable Man PDF Author: Cynthia Lee
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814765149
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
A man murders his wife after she has admitted her infidelity; another man kills an openly gay teammate after receiving a massage; a third man, white, goes for a jog in a “bad” neighborhood, carrying a pistol, and shoots an African American teenager who had his hands in his pockets. When brought before the criminal justice system, all three men argue that they should be found “not guilty”; the first two use the defense of provocation, while the third argues he used his gun in self-defense. Drawing upon these and similar cases, Cynthia Lee shows how two well-established, traditional criminal law defenses—the doctrines of provocation and self-defense—enable majority-culture defendants to justify their acts of violence. While the reasonableness requirement, inherent in both defenses, is designed to allow community input and provide greater flexibility in legal decision-making, the requirement also allows majority-culture defendants to rely on dominant social norms, such as masculinity, heterosexuality, and race (i.e., racial stereotypes), to bolster their claims of reasonableness. At the same time, Lee examines other cases that demonstrate that the reasonableness requirement tends to exclude the perspectives of minorities, such as heterosexual women, gays and lesbians, and persons of color. Murder and the Reasonable Man not only shows how largely invisible social norms and beliefs influence the outcomes of certain criminal cases, but goes further, suggesting three tentative legal reforms to address problems of bias and undue leniency. Ultimately, Lee cautions that the true solution lies in a change in social attitudes.

Murder and the Reasonable Man

Murder and the Reasonable Man PDF Author: Cynthia Lee
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814765149
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Get Book Here

Book Description
A man murders his wife after she has admitted her infidelity; another man kills an openly gay teammate after receiving a massage; a third man, white, goes for a jog in a “bad” neighborhood, carrying a pistol, and shoots an African American teenager who had his hands in his pockets. When brought before the criminal justice system, all three men argue that they should be found “not guilty”; the first two use the defense of provocation, while the third argues he used his gun in self-defense. Drawing upon these and similar cases, Cynthia Lee shows how two well-established, traditional criminal law defenses—the doctrines of provocation and self-defense—enable majority-culture defendants to justify their acts of violence. While the reasonableness requirement, inherent in both defenses, is designed to allow community input and provide greater flexibility in legal decision-making, the requirement also allows majority-culture defendants to rely on dominant social norms, such as masculinity, heterosexuality, and race (i.e., racial stereotypes), to bolster their claims of reasonableness. At the same time, Lee examines other cases that demonstrate that the reasonableness requirement tends to exclude the perspectives of minorities, such as heterosexual women, gays and lesbians, and persons of color. Murder and the Reasonable Man not only shows how largely invisible social norms and beliefs influence the outcomes of certain criminal cases, but goes further, suggesting three tentative legal reforms to address problems of bias and undue leniency. Ultimately, Lee cautions that the true solution lies in a change in social attitudes.

Reasonable Doubt

Reasonable Doubt PDF Author: Peter Manso
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439187444
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
In January 2002, forty-six-year-old Christa Worthington was found stabbed to death in the kitchen of her Truro, Cape Cod, cottage, her curly-haired toddler clutching her body. A former Vassar girl and scion of a prominent local family, Christa had abandoned a glamorous career as a fashion writer for a simpler life on the Cape, where she had an affair with a married fisherman and had his child. After her murder, evidence pointed toward several local men who had known her. Yet in 2005, investigators arrested Christopher McCowen, a thirty-four-year-old African-American garbage collector with an IQ of 76. The local headlines screamed, “Black Trash Hauler Ruins Beautiful White Family” and “Black Murderer Apprehended in Fashion Writer Slaying,” while the sole evidence against McCowen was a DNA match showing that he’d had sex with Worthington prior to her murder. There were no fingerprints, no witnesses, and although the state medical examiner acknowledged there was no evidence of rape, the defendant was convicted after a five-week trial replete with conflicting testimony, accusations of crime scene contamination, and police misconduct—and was condemned to three lifetime sentences in prison with no parole. Rarely has a homicide trial been refracted so clearly through the prism of those who engineered it, and in Reasonable Doubt, bestselling author and biographer Peter Manso is determined to rectify what has become one of the most grossly unjust verdicts in modern trial history. In his riveting new book he bares the anatomy of a horrific murder—as well as the political corruption and racism that appear to be endemic in one of America’s most privileged playgrounds, Cape Cod. Exhaustively researched and vividly accessible, Reasonable Doubt is a no-holds-barred account of not only Christa Worthington’s murder but also of a botched investigation and a trial that was rife with bias. Manso dug deep into the case, and the results were explosive. The Cape DA indicted the author, threatening him with fifty years in prison. The trial and conviction of Christopher McCowen for rape and murder should worry American citizens, and should prompt us to truly examine the lip service we pay to the presumption of innocence . . . and to reasonable doubt. With this explosive and challenging book Manso does just that.

Reconstructing Jury Instructions in Homicide Offenses

Reconstructing Jury Instructions in Homicide Offenses PDF Author: Hisham M. Ramadan
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761828532
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
This book offers critical analysis for jury instructions in the United States. Supported by court decisions, careful interpretation of the United States Constitution, and jurist's arguments, Hisham M. Ramadan thoroughly examines the mental elements in crime, the burden of proof in criminal trials, and the doctrine of reasonableness.

Criminal Law

Criminal Law PDF Author: David C. Brody
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Learning
ISBN: 9780834210837
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 674

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Book Description
Criminal Justice / Law Enforcement

Murder

Murder PDF Author: Shani D'Cruze
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134018061
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
This book seeks to unravel the issues associated with the crime of murder, providing a highly accessible account of the subject for people coming to it for the first time. It uses detailed case studies as a way of exemplifying and exploring more general questions of socio-cultural responses to murder and their explanation. It incorporates a historical perspective which both provides some fascinating examples from the past and enables readers to gain a vision of what has changed and what has remained the same within those socio-cultural responses to murder. The book also embraces questions of race and gender, in particular cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity on the one hand, and the social processes of 'forgetting and remembering' in the context of particular crimes on the other. Particular murders analysed included those of Myra Hindley, Harold Shipman and the Bulger murder.

Learning Criminal Law as Advocacy Argument

Learning Criminal Law as Advocacy Argument PDF Author: John Delaney
Publisher: John Delaney Publications
ISBN: 0960851461
Category : Criminal law
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
More than most other books about the criminal law, this presentation focuses on "Learning Criminal Law as Advocacy Argument." In each criminal-law topic, it presents in building-block form the limited repertoire of core issues and related arguments so that you can concentrate on learning and practicing those that your professor has stressed in class, in her materials, and on her old exams. You can know the issues on the exam before you go into the exam room.In each criminal-law topic there is a limited repertoire of core issues that must be identified and then resolved with advocacy argument. This pattern of issues and arguments arises from embedded and recurring factual patterns and the resulting criminal law performance of prosecutors, defense lawyers, and trial and appellate judges over decades and even centuries. Your professor presents only some of the core issues and related arguments from these repertoires in her course and on her criminal-law exam. Thus, you can systematically learn the set of core issues and arguments in each topic presented by your and know the issues before you go into the exam room. The exam then presents no surprises.What do you mean by resolving the core issues "with advocacy argument?"Identifying the core issues from your professor?s course is the first critical task. The second critical task is resolving these issues with advocacy argument. Advocacy argument is the lawyer?s single-minded marshalling of the relevant facts and doctrine that are necessary to resolve the identified issues in favor of either the prosecution or defense. This book helps you with both tasks: identifying the exam issues and resolving them.

Military Justice Handbook

Military Justice Handbook PDF Author: United States. Department of the Army
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Courts-martial and courts of inquiry
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description


Philosophy of Law

Philosophy of Law PDF Author: Mark Tebbit
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415334411
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
"Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada."

The Psychiatrist in the Courtroom

The Psychiatrist in the Courtroom PDF Author: Jacques M. Quen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134888376
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Over the course of an illustrious career, the late Bernard Diamond established himself as the preeminent forensic psychiatrist of the century. The Psychiatrist in the Courtroom brings together in a single volume Diamond's pivotal contributions to a variety of important issues, including the nature of diminished capacity, the fallacy of the impartial expert, the predictability of dangerousness, and the unacceptability of hypnotically facilitated memory in courtroom proceedings. Ably introduced and edited by Jacques M. Quen, M.D., a close colleague of Diamond's and leading historian of forensic psychiatry, these writings enable experts and neophytes alike to track Diamond's evolving positions while clarifying where current legal and psychiatric opinion converge -- and diverge -- on a host of critical topics. For the forensic specialist, The Psychiatrist in the Courtroom is not only an invaluable reference work but a compassionate reminder of the clinician's obligation to protect patients in legal proceedings. And in an age when clinicians are increasingly called into court, the book will be no less valuable to psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals eager for an introduction to the intricacies of judicial reasoning. Then, too, owing to Diamond's clinical acumen, the book is a compelling human document. With great erudition and deep compassion, Diamond tackles these and other knotty questions, always with an eye to clarifying the legal and clinical implications of the answers. By combining superb clinical gifts with an incisive understanding of legal principle, Diamond produced a seminal corpus whose relevance to discussions of therapeutic ethics and to legal debates will continue well into the next century.

The Murderer Next Door

The Murderer Next Door PDF Author: David M. Buss
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101117699
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
As acclaimed psychological researcher and author David Buss writes, "People are mesmerized by murder. It commands our attention like no other human phenomenon, and those touched by its ugly tendrils never forget." Though we may like to believe that murderers are pathological misfits and hardened criminals, the vast majority of murders are committed by people who, until the day they kill, would seem to be perfectly normal. David Buss's pioneering work has made major national news in the past, and this provocative book is sure to generate a storm of attention. The Murderer Next Door is a riveting look into the dark underworld of the human psyche—an astonishing exploration of when and why we kill and what might push any one of us over the edge. A leader in the innovative field of evolutionary psychology, Buss conducted an unprecedented set of studies investigating the underlying motives and circumstances of murders, from the bizarre outlier cases of serial killers to those of the friendly next-door neighbor who one day kills his wife. Reporting on findings that are often startling and counterintuitive—the younger woman involved in a love triangle is at a high risk of being killed—he puts forth a bold new general theory of homicide, arguing that the human psyche has evolved specialized adaptations whose function is to kill. Taking readers through the surprising twists and turns of the evolutionary logic of murder, he explains exactly when each of us is most at risk, both of being murdered and of becoming a murderer. His findings about the high-risk situations alone will be news making. Featuring gripping storytelling about specific murder cases—including a never used FBI file of more than 400,000 murders and a highly detailed study of 400 murders conducted by Buss in collaboration with a forensic psychiatrist, and a pioneering investigation of homicidal fantasies in which Buss found that 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have had at least one such vivid fantasy—The Murderer Next Door will be necessary reading for those who have been fascinated by books on profiling, lovers of true crime and murder mysteries, as well as readers intrigued by the inner workings of the human mind.