Legal

On the evening of May 5, 1993, in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas, three eight-year-old boys disappeared. The next afternoon, the naked bodies of Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore were found submerged in a nearby stream. The boys had been bound from ankle to wrist with their own shoelaces and severely beaten. Christopher had been castrated.

The crime scene had yielded few clues, and despite Christopher's castration, there was a remarkable absence of blood. The police were stymied, and citizens' alarm mounted as weeks passed without an arrest. Finally, a month after the murders, detectives announced three arrests -- and a startling theory of the crime: that the children had been killed by members of a satanic cult.

Detectives attributed their break in the case to a former special education student, seventeen-year-old Jessie Misskelley Jr. Although Jessie insisted he knew nothing of the crime, after eight hours of questioning, police announced that he had implicated himself and accused two other teenagers, eighteen-year-old Damien Echols and sixteen-year-old Jason Baldwin. Damien and Jason both denied Jessie's account, and Jessie himself recanted it within hours, but by then all three had been charged with the murders.

With no physical evidence connecting anyone to the crime, prosecutors contended that the murders bore signs of "the occult" and that the three accused teenagers possessed a "state of mind" that pointed to them as the killers. As proof of the defendants' mental states, they introduced items taken from their rooms -- such as books by Anne Rice and album posters for the rock group Metallica. Jurors found all three teenagers guilty.Jessie and Jason were sentenced to life in prison. Damien was sentenced to death.

While the verdicts were popular in Arkansas, an HBO documentary raised questions about the lack of evidence in the case, and a Web site was formed to support the inmates, now known as "The West Memphis Three." When the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed the verdicts, state officials insisted that anyone who questioned the trials simply did not know "the facts."

Now, for the first time, an award-winning investigative reporter examines that official stand. In riveting narrative, "Devil's Knot" draws readers into the drama of a modern-day courtroom dominated by references to Satan. In laying out "the facts" of this still-unfolding case, it offers a frightening look into America's system of justice.

Here at last is the account of the O.J. Simpson case that no one else has dared to write, that no one else could write. In Outrage, the famed prosecutor of Charles Manson and bestselling author of Helter Skelter goes to the heart of the trial that divided the country and made a mockery of justice.  Vincent Bugliosi, who never lost a murder case, brilliantly outlines the five reasons why O.J. Simpson got away with murder: the worst possible jury, a sloppy and incomplete prosecution, a fatal change of venue, judicial error that allowed the defense to play the race card, and a weak summation and rebuttal that barely addressed the defense's frame-up and conspiracy theories. He reveals:

--The offer Marcia Clark and Bill Hodgman should never have refused.
--The bluff that saved the defense's cardboard case.
--What Deputy Sheriff Jeff Stuart overheard when Rosey Grier visited Simpson in jail.
--The 17 words Johnnie Cochran used to cover his argument that could have been his undoing if caught.
--Why the jurors never heard Simpson's first police interview-- filled with self-incriminating statements that alone could have convicted him of murder.

1.  What mistake in jury selection could have cost Marcia Clark the trial--even before she argued the case?

2. What did Simpson do to make sure the gloves wouldn't fit?

3. How did Judge Ito's behavior towards Marcia Clark prejudice the jury?

4. Why did the prosecutors suppress Simpson's "smoking gun"?

5. How did Johnnie Cochran con the jury?

6. Who might really have suggested that Simpson try on the evidence gloves?

A thorough revision of a tried and true classic, the seventh edition of Judicial Process in America offers a comprehensive study of the American judicial system that integrates new scholarship and original research. Including analysis of the courts at all levels, the authors cover judges, lawyers, and litigants, as well as the powerful variables that influence judicial decision making, effectively linking the courts to public policy. In response to feedback from adopters, the authors have increased their coverage of state courts and further explore the impact of race, gender, and socio-economic factors on the judiciary. Discussion of the ideological impact of George W. Bush's judicial appointments, including two new Supreme Court justices, and inclusion of recent cases on end-of-life issues, property rights, and gay and lesbian rights bring the book fully up to date.

For more than two decades, Vanity Fair has published Dominick Dunne’s brilliant, revelatory chronicles of the most famous crimes, trials, and punishments of our time. Here, in one volume, are Dominick Dunne’s mesmerizing tales of justice denied and justice affirmed. Whether writing of Claus von Bülow’s romp through two trials; the Los Angeles media frenzy surrounding O.J. Simpson; the death by fire of multibillionaire banker Edmond Safra; or the Greenwich, Connecticut, murder of Martha Moxley and the indictment—decades later—of Michael Skakel, Dominick Dunne tells it honestly and tells it from his unique perspective. His search for the truth is relentless.

With new essay, “Mourning In New York,” about September 11, 2001.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

A modern-day American classic, the non-fiction equivalent to TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. A story about how easily good people are led astray; how carelessly injustice is rationalized, but finally, of due process and justice being served.


Early one morning in the summer of 1999 authorities in the tiny west Texas town of Tulia began a roundup of suspected drug dealers. By the time the sweep was done, over forty people had been arrested and one of every five black adults in town was behind bars. All were accused of dealing cocaine to the same undercover officer, Tom Coleman, the son of a well-known Texas Ranger who was named Officer of the Year in Texas.


Not until after the trials-in which Coleman's uncorroborated testimony secured sentences as long as 361 years-did it become apparent that Tom Coleman was not the man he claimed to be.


TULIA is the story of this town, the bust, the trials, and the heroic legal battle to reverse the convictions that caught the attention of the nation in the spring of 2003. With a sure sense of history and of place, a great feel for the characters involved, and showdowns inside the courtroom and out.


Blakeslee's TULIA is contemporary journalism at its finest, and a thrilling listen. The scandal changed the way narcotics enforcement is done in Texas, and has put the national drug war on trial at a time when incarceration rates in this country have never been higher. However, the story is much bigger than the tale of just one bust. As TULIA makes clear, these events are the latest chapter in a story with themes as old as the country itself. It is a marvelously well-told tale about injustice, race, poverty, hysteria, desperation, and doing the right thing in America.

Why do some men, women and even children assault, batter, rape, mutilate and murder? In his stunning new book, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes provides a startling and persuasive answer.

Why They Killexplores the discoveries of a maverick American criminologist, Dr. Lonnie Athens -- himself the child of a violent family -- which challenge conventional theories about violent behavior. By interviewing violent criminals in prison, Dr. Athens has identified a pattern of social development common to all seriously violent people -- a four-stage process he calls "violentization":
-- First, brutalization: A young person is forced by violence or the threat of violence to submit to an aggressive authority figure; he witnesses the violent subjugation of intimates, and the authority figure coaches him to use violence to settle disputes.
-- Second, belligerency: The dispirited subject, determined to prevent his further violent subjugation, heeds his coach and resolves to resort to violence.
-- Third, violent performances: His violent response to provocation succeeds, and he reads respect and fear in the eyes of others.
-- Fourth, virulency: Exultant, he determines from now on to utilize serious violence as a means of dealing with people -- and he bonds with others who believe as he does.

Since all four stages must be fully experienced in sequence and completed to produce a violent individual, we see how intervening to interrupt the process can prevent a tragic outcome.

Rhodes supports Athens's theory with historical evidence and shows how it explains such violent careers as those of Perry Smith (the killer central to Truman Capote's narrative In Cold Blood), Mike Tyson, "preppy rapist" Alex Kelly, and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Why They Kill challenges with devastating evidence the theory that violent behavior is impulsive, unconsciously motivated and predetermined. It offers compelling insights into the terrible, ongoing dilemma of criminal violence that plagues families, neighborhoods, cities and schools.

An intimate and heartwrenching investigation into the lives of children of imprisoned parents, by an award-winning journalist.

"I think they shouldn't have took my mama to jail….Give her the opportunity to make up for what she did. Using drugs, she's hurting herself. You take her away from me, now you're hurting me."—Terrence, a fifteen-year-old boy left to fend for himself after his mother was imprisoned for nonviolent drug possession

One in ten American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision—incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. One in thirty-three American children—and one in eight African American children—goes to sleep without access to a parent because that parent is in jail. Despite these staggering numbers, the children of prisoners remain largely invisible to society.

Following in the tradition of the bestseller Random Family, journalist Nell Bernstein shows, through the deeply moving stories of real families, how the children of the incarcerated are routinely punished for their parents' status: ignored, neglected, stigmatized, and endangered, with minimal effort made to help them cope.

Topics range from children's experiences at the time of their parent's arrest, to laws and policies that force even low-level offenders to forfeit their parental rights, to alternative sanctions that take into account prisoners' status as mothers and fathers.
All Alone in the World defines a crucial aspect of criminal justice and, in doing so, illuminates a critical new realm of human rights.

The Supreme Court of the United States is the most powerful court in the world.  It is also the branch of our government most shrouded in mystery, misunderstanding, and myth..  Isolated in a marble temple, supposedly insulated from the pressures of politics, nine unelected Justices are charged with protecting our most cherished rights and shaping our fundamental laws.  They are assisted by roughly thirty-six law clerks each year, the best and brightest  of the nation's young lawyers, who routinely  go on to fill the highest ranks of our government, courts, law schools, and law firms.

Never before has one of these clerks stepped forward to reveal how the Court really works--and why it often fails the country and the cause of justice. In this groundbreaking book, award-winning historian Edward Lazarus, a former clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun, guides the reader through the Court's inner sanctum, explaining as only an eyewitness can the collisions of law, politics, and personality as the Justices wrestle with the most fiercely disputed issues of our time.  Part memoir, past history, and all spellbinding narrative, Closed Chambers provides an intimate portrait and devastating  critique--Justice by Justice--of a court at war with itself and in neglect of its constitutional  duties.

From the conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist's apparent attempt to influence the 1992 election by delaying a crucial abortion case to liberal champion Justice William Brennan's ill-conceived and ultimately self-defeating campaign to sabotage the death penalty, Lazarus's riveting account shows us a Court broken into scheming factions whose members resort to crass political calculations and transparently hypocritical arguments as they discard legal principles for bottomline results.  The Justices further compound this cliquish antagonism by granting excessive power to immature, ideologically driven clerks, who then use that power to manipulate their bosses and the institution they ostensibly serve.

Edward Lazarus took part in the Court's internal battles over the death penalty, affirmative action, abortion, and other momentous issues.  Here, he weaves together past and present to show us in astonishing detail not only the tragic failings of the modern Court, but also what led to them, and why they are so devastating for the nation.  Unprecedented in its revelations and unparalleled in the brilliance of its analysis, Closed Chambers is the most important book on the Supreme Court in a generation.

The Holocaust was not only the greatest murder in history; it was also the greatest theft. Historians estimate that the Nazis stole roughly $230 billion to $320 billion in assets (figured in today's dollars), from the Jews of Europe. Since the revelations concerning the wartime activities of the Swiss banks first broke in the late 1990s, an ever-widening circle of complicity and wrongdoing against Jews and other victims has emerged in the course of lawsuits waged by American lawyers. These suits involved German corporations, French and Austrian banks, European insurance companies, and double thefts of art—first by the Nazis, and then by museums and private collectors refusing to give them up. All of these injustices have come to light thanks to the American legal system.

Holocaust Justice is the first book to tell the complete story of the legal campaign, conducted mainly on American soil, to address these injustices. Michael Bazyler, a legal scholar specializing in human rights and international law, takes an in-depth look at the series of lawsuits that gave rise to a coherent campaign to right historical wrongs. Diplomacy, individual pleas for justice by Holocaust survivors and various Jewish organizations for the last fifty years, and even suits in foreign courts, had not worked. It was only with the intervention of the American courts that elderly Holocaust survivors and millions of other wartime victims throughout the world were awarded compensation, and equally important, acknowledgment of the crimes committed against them.

The unique features of the American system of justice—which allowed it to handle claims that originated over fifty years ago and in another part of the world—made it the only forum in the world where Holocaust claims could be heard. Without the lawsuits brought by American lawyers, Bazyler asserts, the claims of the elderly survivors and their heirs would continue to be ignored.

For the first time in history, European and even American corporations are now being forced to pay restitution for war crimes totaling billions of dollars to Holocaust survivors and other victims. Bazyler deftly tells the unfolding stories: the Swiss banks' attempt to hide dormant bank accounts belonging to Holocaust survivors or heirs of those who perished in the war; German private companies that used slave laborers during World War II—including American subsidiaries in Germany; Italian, Swiss and German insurance companies that refused to pay on prewar policies; and the legal wrangle going on today in American courts over art looted by the Nazis in wartime Europe. He describes both the human and legal dramas involved in the struggle for restitution, bringing the often-forgotten voices of Holocaust survivors to the forefront. He also addresses the controversial legal and moral issues over Holocaust restitution and the ethical debates over the distribution of funds.

With an eye to the future, Bazyler discusses the enduring legacy of Holocaust restitution litigation, which is already being used as a model for obtaining justice for historical wrongs on both the domestic and international stage.