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.

Murder and the Reasonable Man

Murder and the Reasonable Man PDF Author: Cynthia Lee
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814751156
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Demonstrates how social norms and beliefs influence the outcomes in certain criminal cases.

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.

Reasonable Doubts

Reasonable Doubts PDF Author: Alan M. Dershowitz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 068483264X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
One of America's leading appeal lawyers, Alan Dershowitz was the man chosen to prepare the appeal should O.J. Simpson have been convicted. Now Professor Dershowitz uses this case to examine the larger issues and to identify the social forces - media, money, gender, and race - that shape the criminal-justice system in America today. How could one of the longest trials in the history of America's judicial system produce a verdict after only hours of jury deliberation? Was this really a case of circumstantial evidence?

Anatomy of Injustice

Anatomy of Injustice PDF Author: Raymond Bonner
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307948544
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim's body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt's battle to save Elmore's life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation's ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

Murder and the Reasonable Man

Murder and the Reasonable Man PDF Author: Cynthia Lee
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814751164
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.

Felony Murder

Felony Murder PDF Author: Guyora Binder
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804781702
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
The felony murder doctrine is one of the most widely criticized features of American criminal law. Legal scholars almost unanimously condemn it as irrational, concluding that it imposes punishment without fault and presumes guilt without proof. Despite this, the law persists in almost every U.S. jurisdiction. Felony Murder is the first book on this controversial legal doctrine. It shows that felony murder liability rests on a simple and powerful idea: that the guilt incurred in attacking or endangering others depends on one's reasons for doing so. Inflicting harm is wrong, and doing so for a bad motive—such as robbery, rape, or arson—aggravates that wrong. In presenting this idea, Guyora Binder criticizes prevailing academic theories of criminal intent for trying to purge criminal law of moral judgment. Ultimately, Binder shows that felony murder law has been and should remain limited by its justifying aims.

Blackstone's Criminal Practice 2012

Blackstone's Criminal Practice 2012 PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199694427
Category : Criminal law
Languages : en
Pages : 589

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Book Description


Murder in Brentwood

Murder in Brentwood PDF Author: Mark Fuhrman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1621573222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
For audiences of the popular FX television series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, based on Jeffrey Toobin's The Run of His Life and starring Cuba Gooding, Jr., John Travolta, David Schwimmer, and Courtney B. Vance. Named on Vogue Magazine's "American Crime Story Reading List" as one of the "eight definitive books on the trial of the century." Twenty years ago, America was captivated by the awful drama of the O.J. Simpson trial. The Simpson "Dream Team" legal defense had a seemingly impossible task: convincing a jury that their client was innocent of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. In order for O.J. Simpson to get away with murder, the defense attorneys had to destroy the reputation of Mark Fuhrman, a brilliant Los Angeles detective who was the lead on the murder scene and had collected overwhelming physical evidence against Simpson. Now Fuhrman tells his side of the story in the #1 New York Times bestseller Murder in Brentwood, a damning exposé that reveals why and how Simpson's prosecution was bungled. Fuhrman offers a sincere mea culpa for allowing his personal mistakes to become a focal point of the defense's strategy but also stands by the evidence he collected, writing: "One thing I will not apologize for is my policework on the O.J. Simpson case." With Fuhrman's own hand-drawn maps of the crime scene, his reconstruction of the murders, and interrogation transcripts, Murder in Brentwood is the book that sets the record straight about what really happened on June 12, 1994—and reveals why the O.J. Simpson trial was such a catastrophe.

Blackstone's Criminal Practice 2012

Blackstone's Criminal Practice 2012 PDF Author: Anthony Hooper
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199694419
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description