Court Records

This unique insider's look at the Supreme Court in session includes transcripts of actual landmark cases, including Miranda v. Arizona (the right to remain silent), Roe v. Wade (abortion rights), Bowers v. Hardwick (gay rights), Regents v. Bakke (reverse discrimination), Loving v. Virginia (interracial marriage), United States v. Richard Nixon (Watergate), and many others. Previously only available through a visit to the National Archive in Washington, these transcripts bring pivotal moments in American legal history to life.

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.

(20110529)

The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, is a first-hand account of Turner's confessions published by a local lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray, in 1831

Scapegoats of the Empire- by George Witton tells the story of court martial of Harry -Breaker- Morant.
Harry Morant was an Anglo-Australian drover, horseman, poet, and soldier whose renowned skill with horses earned him the nickname -The Breaker.- Articulate, intelligent, and well-educated, he was also a published poet.

During service in the Second Boer War - 1899 to 1902,- Morant was responsible for shooting prisoners of war, which he claimed he was ordered to do. Morant and the author George Witton and one other were court-martialed by the British Army.

In the century since his death, Morant has become a folk hero in Australia. His story has been the subject of several books and a major Australian feature film

This book was originally published in 1907 but was suppressed by the Australian government. (There is no right of freedom of the press in Australia - even today). Many copies of the Scapegoats of the Empire were burned and for a long time the book was unavailable. Prior to its reprint in 1982 there were only seven copies of the book which had survived in various Australian libraries and in the possession of Witton's family.

The clergy abuse scandal has posed the greatest threat to the traditional understanding of the Catholic priesthood since the Protestant Reformation. Now, as then, the deadliest attacks are coming from within the Church. In an attempt to improve a syste

We call habeas corpus the Great Writ of Liberty. But it was actually a writ of power. In a work based on an unprecedented study of thousands of cases across more than five hundred years, Paul Halliday provides a sweeping revisionist account of the world's most revered legal device.

In the decades around 1600, English judges used ideas about royal power to empower themselves to protect the king's subjects. The key was not the prisoner's "right" to "liberty"—these are modern idioms—but the possible wrongs committed by a jailer or anyone who ordered a prisoner detained. This focus on wrongs gave the writ the force necessary to protect ideas about rights as they developed outside of law. This judicial power carried the writ across the world, from Quebec to Bengal. Paradoxically, the representative impulse, most often expressed through legislative action, did more to undermine the writ than anything else. And the need to control imperial subjects would increasingly constrain judges. The imperial experience is thus crucial for making sense of the broader sweep of the writ's history and of English law.

Halliday's work informed the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush on prisoners in the Guantánamo detention camps. His eagerly anticipated book is certain to be acclaimed the definitive history of habeas corpus.

(20100417)

Locate the public record information you can't find with Google . . . or any other online search engine. The Sourcebook provides the information the reader needs to efficiently access public records from over 7,000 courthouses nationwide. This comprehensive resource provides detailed court profiles including contact information, access methodology, access restrictions, and when signed releases or notarized statements are required. Also, this is the only directory that provides access, copy and certification fees

The Scopes “Monkey Trial” is widely regarded as the greatest American trial of the Twentieth Century. The issues (evolution versus creation in the public schools), the politics (individual liberty versus populist democracy), the actors (William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow, and H.L. Mencken, among others), and the setting (a small, struggling town in southeastern Tennessee with the ingenuity and confidence to host such a national event), all culminated in twelve remarkable days in the sweltering summer of 1925.

Shortly after the trial, the National Book Company published The World’s Greatest Court Trial© (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1925), careful to use the word “Court” in the title so as not to offend Christian readers who would consider the trials of Jesus Christ to be the “world’s greatest” by any important measure. This electronic version of the Scopes trial transcript is a faithful replication of that volume including the original pagination (with page numbers in brackets), the written testimony of experts who did not testify at the trial but who submitted the statements included herein, and the final speech to the jury by William Jennings Bryan which was never actually delivered but which was published separately after the trial.

The transcript is a fascinating document despite the many typographical errors which plagued the original version (and which are replicated in this electronic version).

In the following pages are some of the most memorable speeches, twists, and turns ever witnessed in American jurisprudential history.