Murder and the Reasonable Man

Murder and the Reasonable Man
Author: Cynthia Lee
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2003-07
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0814751156

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

Murder and the Reasonable Man

Murder and the Reasonable Man
Author: Cynthia Lee
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2007-10-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0814765149

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
Author: Peter Manso
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2011-07-05
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1439187444

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.

Anatomy of Injustice

Anatomy of Injustice
Author: Raymond Bonner
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2013-01-08
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0307948544

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.

Reasonable Doubts

Reasonable Doubts
Author: Alan M. Dershowitz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1997-02-19
Genre: Law
ISBN: 068483264X

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?

Beyond Reasonable Doubt?

Beyond Reasonable Doubt?
Author: David Yallop
Publisher: Constable
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2014-10-23
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1472116577

On 17th June, 1970, in a small farming district, south of Auckland, New Zealand, Harvey and Jeanette Crewe were shot and killed in the lounge of their home. Five months later, a neighbour, Arthur Allan Thomas, was arrested, charged and found guilty of their murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. A retrial in 1972 ended with another guilty verdict. David Yallop, author of To Encourage the Others and The Day the Laughter Stopped, two already celebrated books which dealt with miscarriages of justice, spent over a year in New Zealand investigating the case and became convinced of Thomas' innocence. in an open letter to New Zealand's Prime Minister, he demanded Thomas' release on the grounds that he 'has not been found guilty beyond reasonable doubt. He has in fact been found innocent beyond reasonable doubt.' In 1978, as a direct result of Yallop's intercession and the publication of this book, Thomas was granted a royal pardon and, in 1980, awarded nearly 1 million dollars in compensation for the nine years he had served behind bards. Beyond Reasonable Doubt? is both a riveting work of high drama and a compelling insight into the machinery of criminal justice. A Number One bestseller in hgardcover and the subject of a widely-acclaimed film, it is a lasting testimony to David Yallop's reputation as the world's greatest investigative author.

Felony Murder

Felony Murder
Author: Guyora Binder
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2012-05-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0804781702

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.

Reconstructing Jury Instructions in Homicide Offenses

Reconstructing Jury Instructions in Homicide Offenses
Author: Hisham M. Ramadan
Publisher: University Press of America
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2004
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780761828532

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.

Engendering Law

Engendering Law
Author: Amita Dhanda
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007
Genre: Administrative law
ISBN: 9788170129547

Lotika Sarkar, b. 1923, feminist legal scholar; contributed articles