Author: Benjamin Rachlin
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN: 9780316311502
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
One of the Best Books of 2017: National Public Radio, San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, Shelf Awareness "Remarkable . . . Captivating . . . Rachlin is a skilled storyteller." --New York Times Book Review "A gripping legal-thriller mystery . . . Profoundly elevates good-cause advocacy to greater heights--to where innocent lives are saved." --USA Today "A crisply written page turner." --NPR A gripping account of one man's long road to freedom that will forever change how we understand our criminal justice system During the last three decades, more than two thousand American citizens have been wrongfully convicted. Ghost of the Innocent Man brings us one of the most dramatic of those cases and provides the clearest picture yet of the national scourge of wrongful conviction and of the opportunity for meaningful reform. When the final gavel clapped in a rural southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. Here is the story of this everyman and his extraordinary quarter-century-long journey to freedom, told in breathtaking and sympathetic detail, from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his incarceration to the tireless efforts to prove his innocence and the identity of the true perpetrator. These were spearheaded by his relentless champion, Christine Mumma, a cofounder of North Carolina's Innocence Inquiry Commission. That commission--unprecedented at its inception in 2006--remains a model organization unlike any other in the country, and one now responsible for a growing number of exonerations. With meticulous, prismatic research and pulse-quickening prose, Benjamin Rachlin presents one man's tragedy and triumph. The jarring and unsettling truth is that the story of Willie J. Grimes, for all its outrage, dignity, and grace, is not a unique travesty. But through the harrowing and suspenseful account of one life, told from the inside, we experience the full horror of wrongful conviction on a national scale. Ghost of the Innocent Man is both rare and essential, a masterwork of empathy. The book offers a profound reckoning not only with the shortcomings of our criminal justice system but also with its possibilities for redemption.
Author: Brandon L. Garrett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674060989
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.
Author: Peter Gardella
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190609427
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Though they disagree on virtually everything else, evangelicals and gays, Catholics and agnostics all agree that sex should be innocent and ecstatic. For most of Western history people have not had such expectations. Innocent Ecstasy shows how Christianity led Americans to hope for so much from sex. The book explains how the sexual revolution could have occurred in a nation so deeply imbued with Christian ethical values. Tracing our strange journey from the hands of Jonathan Edward's angry Puritan God to the loving embrace of Marabel Morgan's Total Woman, Gardella draws his surprising evidence from widely disparate sources, ranging from Catholic confessionals to methodist revival meetings, from evangelical romances to The Song of Bernadette. He reveals the sexual messages of mainstream Protestant theology and the religious aspirations of medical texts found at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. He sheds new light on such well-known figures as Henry Adams, Margaret Sanger, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and introduces us to such fascinating, lesser-known characters as Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and Sylvester Graham, inventors of corn flakes and Graham crackers, who devised their products as anti-aphrodisiacs. While detailing the development of moral obligations to pursue sexual pleasure and to follow certain patterns of sexual practice, Gardella incidentally provides one of the few books to bring together the liberal Protestant, Roman Catholic, and evangelical perspectives on any aspect of American culture. Gardella attributes the American ethic of sexual pleasure to the eagerness of Americans to overcome original sin. This led to a quest for perfection, or complete freedom from guilt, combined with a quest for ecstatic experience. The result, he maintains, is an attitude that looks to sex for what was once expected from religion. In this new edition, a new conclusion explores how popular music, gay liberation, and recovery from sexual abuse have substantially expanded innocent ecstasy during the past thirty years while continuing the Christian themes of redemption and mission. A new afterword deals with contemporary developments in popular culture and offers thoughts about the future
Author: Jennifer Thompson-Cannino
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429962151
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
The New York Times best selling true story of an unlikely friendship forged between a woman and the man she incorrectly identified as her rapist and sent to prison for 11 years. Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken-- but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released, after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed. Two years later, Jennifer and Ronald met face to face-- and forged an unlikely friendship that changed both of their lives. With Picking Cotton, Jennifer and Ronald tell in their own words the harrowing details of their tragedy, and challenge our ideas of memory and judgment while demonstrating the profound nature of human grace and the healing power of forgiveness.
Author: Peter Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351882015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
The Seventh Crusade, led by King Louis IX of France, was the last major expedition for the recovery of the Holy Land actually to reach the Near East. The failure of his invasion of Egypt (1249-50), followed by his four-year stay in Palestine in order to retrieve the disaster, had a profound impact on the Latin West. In addition, Louis's operations in the Nile delta indirectly precipitated the Mamluk coup d'état, which ended the rule of the Ayyubids, Saladin's dynasty, in Egypt and began the transfer of power there to a military elite that would prove to be a far more formidable enemy to the Franks of Syria and Palestine. This volume comprises translations of the principal documents and of extracts from narrative sources - both Muslim and Christian - relating to the crusade, and includes many texts, notably the account of Ibn Wasil, not previously available in English. The themes covered include: the preparations and search for allies; the campaign in the Nile delta; the impact on recruitment of the simultaneous crusade against the emperor Frederick II; the Mamluk coup and its immediate consequences in the Near East; Western reactions to the failure in Egypt; and the popular 'crusade' of the Pastoureaux in France (1251), which aimed originally to help the absent king, but which degenerated into violence against the clergy and the Jews and had to be suppressed by force.
Author: Michael Lower
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812202678
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
In December 1235, Pope Gregory IX altered the mission of a crusade he had begun to preach the year before. Instead of calling for Christian magnates to go on to fight the infidel in Jerusalem, he now urged them to combat the spread of Christian heresy in Latin Greece and to defend the Latin empire of Constantinople. The Barons' Crusade, as it was named by a fourteenth-century chronicler impressed by the great number of barons who participated, would last until 1241 and would represent in many ways the high point of papal efforts to make crusading a universal Christian undertaking. This book, the first full-length treatment of the Barons' Crusade, examines the call for holy war and its consequences in Hungary, France, England, Constantinople, and the Holy Land. In the end, Michael Lower reveals, the pope's call for unified action resulted in a range of locally determined initiatives and accommodations. In some places in Europe, the crusade unleashed violence against Jews that the pope had not sought; in others, it unleashed no violence at all. In the Levant, it even ended in peaceful negotiation between Christian and Muslim forces. Virtually everywhere, but in different ways, it altered the relations between Christians and non-Christians. By emphasizing comparative local history, The Barons' Crusade: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences brings into question the idea that crusading embodies the religious unity of medieval society and demonstrates how thoroughly crusading had been affected by the new strategic and political demands of the papacy.
Author: John Ensor
Publisher: Cruciform Press
ISBN: 1936760312
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 81
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Book Description
The gospel of Christ is the gospel of life, and the Christian's defining reality. Yet the shedding of innocent blood, primarily through abortion, has now marked an entire generation. Innocent Blood explores a series of questions so as to reveal vital connections between the gospel and the call to defend the unborn. These questions include: What does the Bible mean when it says that "life is in the blood"? What does the Bible say about blood-guilt? How is it that we are all stained by it and accountable for it even though few of us have taken a human life? What remedy does God provide for the guilt of shedding innocent blood? What are we to do when confronted with the shedding of innocent blood, and where does our courage to take action come from? What is the link between protecting the innocent and proclaiming good news to the guilty? Not a book on social issues per se, nor a book on missions, Innocent Blood integrates the two and calls us to courageously challenge the powers of death with the gospel of life.
Author: Jackie Ashenden
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 0369707664
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
In this intense marriage-of-convenience romance from Jackie Ashenden, the Greek is about to rewrite the rules of the virgin’s bargain! The virgin’s request… …is even more outrageous than the billionaire! Stepping into Castor Xenakis’s mansion, Glory Albright is completely out of her depth. Yet if she’s to fund her sister’s urgent medical treatment, she can’t fail. Glory must make a bargain with the gorgeous playboy whose name is synonymous with scandal… After everything cynical Castor has witnessed, there’s almost nothing he’s surprised by. But naive Glory’s offer to sell him her virginity floors him! Of course, her offer is out of the question. Instead, he makes a counterproposal: become his convenient bride! From Harlequin Presents: Escape to exotic locations where passion knows no bounds. Read all The Xenakis Reunion books: Book 1: The Innocent's One-Night Proposal Book 2: The Maid the Greek Married
Author: California. Supreme Court
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law reports, digests, etc
Languages : en
Pages : 850
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Book Description
Author: Reed Farrel Coleman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1440531021
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
When his estranged daughter Sarah comes to him with a request he cannot refuse, Moe Prager takes a deep breath and plunges back into the icy, opaque waters of secrets and lies.
