Apparel & AccessoriesBooksClassical MusicDVDElectronics & PhotoGourmet Food and GroceriesHealth & Personal CareHome & GardenIndustrial & ScientificKitchen
Popular MusicMusical InstrumentsOutdoor LivingComputer HardwareComputer SoftwareSporting GoodsToolsToys and GamesVHS VideoVideo Games

Search:

Browse by Catagory:

Books

Legal


Devil's Knot : The True Story of the West Memphis Three

Devil's Knot : The True Story of the West Memphis Three List price: $24.00
Lowest new price: $59.99
Lowest used price: $0.01
Author: Mara Leveritt

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.

Similar Products:

Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder

Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder List price: $7.99
Lowest new price: $21.61
Lowest used price: $0.01
Author: Vincent Bugliosi

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?

Similar Products:

Justice: Crimes, Trials, and Punishments

Justice: Crimes, Trials, and Punishments List price: $24.00
Lowest new price: $2.80
Lowest used price: $0.01
Author: Dominick Dunne

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. The pursuit of justice has become his passion — a passion that began during the trial of the man who murdered Dunne's daughter and who was sentenced to six and a half years and released in less than three. Dunne's account of that trial and its shocking result became the first of his many classic essays on justice.

Dominick Dunne's essays do much more than simply describe; his investigations have shed new light on those crimes and their perpetrators — and demonstrated how it is possible for some to skirt, even flout, the law. His persistence and personal involvement in the matter of Martha Moxley's murder was an important catalyst in bringing a dormant case back to life.

Here in one volume are Dominick Dunne's mesmerizing tales of justice denied and justice affirmed. Whether writing of Vicki Morgan's hideous death; Claus von Bülow's romp through two trials; the media frenzy of Los Angeles in the age of O.J. Simpson; the death by fire of multibillionaire banker Edmund Safra in Monaco; or the ominous silence surrounding the death of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut, 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. His courage and his storytelling skills shine from every page.

"In my everyday life over the last fifty years, it has been my curious lot to move among the rich and famous and powerful, always as an outsider, always listening, watching, remembering."

Writing about the crimes of the rich and famous for Vanity Fair with this insider's status, Dominick Dunne has borne witness to the often bizarre personalities who surround high-profile cases and their telling intimacies. Andrea Reynolds, for instance, dressed only in a negligee and jewelry, insists that her jewels are finer than those of the comatose woman in whose apartment she resides and whom her lover, Claus von Bulow, is charged with attempting to murder. The essays in Justice offer a fascinating, disturbing, and wry look at the cast of a half dozen high-profile trials, including Lyle and Erik Menendez, who murdered their affluent parents; Marvin Pancoast, who beat the $18,000-a-month mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale to death with a baseball bat; the multibillionaire banker Edmund Safra, who suffocated in his own bunker-like bathroom in Monaco; and the gossiping members of Los Angeles society during "All O.J., All the Time."

The most moving story by far is the title piece, about the murder of Dunne's daughter, the actress Dominique Dunne, by her ex-boyfriend, who walked away with a pitifully light sentence thanks to the extremes taken by his defense lawyer and the vanity of the judge. While the succeeding stories don't have the same poignancy, Dunne still makes them personal--after all, he knows many of those involved, and justice truly is personal for him. In fact, it is this moral authority that enables him to enter the strange universe of high-society crime and write about it with no pretense of objectivity, but rather with rage toward the short shrift justice is so often given in celebrity cases. The counterpoint to his anger is a delicious irony in the form of fascinating subplots, jet-set gossip, and terrific quotes straight from some of the horses' mouths. Dunne has both a sharp sense of the absurd and a trenchant eye for injustice in any form. --Lesley Reed

Similar Products:

Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist List price: $26.95
Lowest new price: $9.99
Lowest used price: $0.21
Author: Richard Rhodes

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.

In Why They Kill, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes traces the life and career of criminologist Lonnie Athens, a man who took his own sad and squalid life and turned it on its head to make a groundbreaking career as a criminologist. Athens grew up in a violent, angry world. Rather than absorbing the sickness and violence around him, though, he studied it, and eventually developed a theory about how violent criminals are created. Rhodes's critical examination of Athens's work forces readers to consider how violent our society really is, how it became that way, and what might be done to change it. When applied to well-known criminals such as Michael Tyson and Lee Harvey Oswald, Athens's ideas become concrete and take on an urgent tone: it's easy to discuss theories and predictors in the abstract, but these stories are real, and they repeat themselves in our society at an alarming rate. Rhodes's approach to this disturbing subject stands apart from many other crime books in its intelligence, humanity, and empathy. These are not just descriptions of "scumbags" and their brutal crimes, but intensely personal stories that reveal how a culture of violence propagates itself. --Lisa Higgins

Similar Products:

Judicial Process in America

Judicial Process in America List price: $46.95
Lowest new price: $8.00
Lowest used price: $0.01
Author: Robert A. Carp

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.

Similar Products:

Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town

Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town List price: $49.98
Lowest new price: $21.73
Lowest used price: $4.87
Author: Nate Blakeslee

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.


All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated

All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated List price: $25.95
Lowest new price: $9.95
Lowest used price: $3.96
Author: Nell Bernstein

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.

Similar Products:

The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad (Praeger Security International)

The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad (Praeger Security International) List price: $59.95
Lowest new price: $56.42
Lowest used price: $63.36
Author: Robert W. Schaefer

The shocking events of the Moscow airport terrorist attack make it clear that the North Caucasus insurgency is still strong – despite the Kremlin’s announcement in 2008 that the conflict was “over.” For the first time, a military expert on both Russia and insurgency offers the definitive guide on the violence in Southern Russia, explaining why the Russian approach to counterterrorism is failing, why terrorist and insurgent attacks in Russia have sharply increased over the past three years, why civilians continue to disappear, why the situation will only worsen as the 2014 Sochi Olympics approach -- and why there is no end in sight to the morass.

The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad is a comprehensive and award-winning treatment of this 300 year-old conflict. Thematically organized, it cuts through the rhetoric to provide a contextual framework with which readers can truly understand the "why" and "how" of one of the world’s longest-running contemporary insurgencies, despite Russia's best efforts to eradicate it.

A fascinating case study of a counterinsurgency campaign that is in direct contravention of US and Western strategy, the book also examines the differences and linkages between insurgency and terrorism; the origins of conflict in the North Caucasus; and the influences of different strains of Islam, of al-Qaida, and of the War on Terror. A critical examination of never-before-revealed Russian counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns explains why those campaigns have consistently failed and why the region has seen such an upswing in violence since the conflict was officially declared "over" less than two years ago.

The book's features include: information drawn from the North Caucasus Incident Database (NCID), compiling every violent incident in the region over a two-year period; charts showing the complex strategies of the insurgency and the Russian counterinsurgency campaigns; declassified intelligence reports; as well as maps and a bibliography. Presented through the lens of counterinsurgency theory, this incisive analysis explores the historic roots of each issue, the key players, and the farthest-reaching effects. It is the first doctrinal analysis (classified or unclassified) produced on the conflict in over 10 years and is already being used as a textbook at the Program on Terrorism and Security Studies at the Marshall Center.

Similar Products:

Damages

Damages List price: $25.00
Lowest new price: $7.24
Lowest used price: $0.01
Author: Barry Werth

"Damages" is a riveting true story of one negligence suit, pitting doctors against lawyers in the medical malpractice case of a profoundly handicapped child--and exposing the pain and courage of a family swept up in both. A fascinating exploration of what happens when the legal and medical worlds collide.

On April 1, 1984, Donna Sabia went into labor expecting twins. But one of the babies arrived stillborn, while the other--Anthony Jr.--was barely alive, with an Apgar score (rating newborn vitality on a scale of 0 to 10) of 1. In the following years, he suffered from spastic quadriplegia, cerebral palsy, and cortical blindness, and would require lifelong medical attention costing millions of dollars just to survive. The Sabias' lawyers faulted Donna's maternity clinic and the delivering physician for her son's condition, initiating a 7-year lawsuit on the claim that a simple $40 ultrasound could have eliminated incalculable suffering and catastrophic expense.

Damages is a careful analysis of how the fields of law and medicine intersect in the realm of medical malpractice, where lawyers sue not only to redress suffering but to make sure that doctors and hospitals are more vigilant in the future, if only to avoid being sued again. Werth leads readers carefully through the litigation, from the deposing of expert witnesses, through the preparation for trial, to the posturing of settlement negotiations. Always firmly aware that lawyers sue doctors on behalf of human beings, however, he reveals the emotional and psychological consequences of a civil justice system that is often neither civil nor just. Werth explains esoteric legal and medical procedures in understandable terms that laypeople will not find condescending, while describing the human side of the Sabias' case without patronizing attorneys and physicians. Ultimately, Damages is the chronicle of a devoted family braving a medical malpractice industry in which the decision-making process on both sides is governed by a cost-benefit analysis that leads, perhaps inevitably, to the commodification of human life. "Even after a big verdict," Werth quotes one malpractice lawyer, "I'm suffering because all I could get my clients, who've been brutalized by the most appalling malpractice, was money." --Tim Hogan

Similar Products:

v. Goliath: The Trials of David Boies

v. Goliath: The Trials of David Boies List price: $15.95
Author: Karen Donovan

David Boies, the star trial lawyer in a country obsessed with legal drama, proves endlessly fascinating in this compulsively readable account of his extraordinary career.A man of almost superhuman accomplishment, Boies argued a string of headline-making cases before being catapulted to international prominence when he represented Al Gore before the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. Brash, reckless, and prideful, he is also charming, charismatic, unerringly articulate in the courtroom, and supremely comfortable in the public eye. Legal journalist Karen Donovan, herself a lawyer, had unprecedented access to Boies for nearly two years. In v. Goliath she gives us a scintillating chronicle of the legal dramas in which Boies has played a crucial role and a riveting, up-close portrait of a singularly gifted lawyer.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

David Boies, the star trial lawyer in a country obsessed with legal drama, proves endlessly fascinating in this compulsively readable account of his extraordinary career.A man of almost superhuman accomplishment, Boies argued a string of headline-making cases before being catapulted to international prominence when he represented Al Gore before the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. Brash, reckless, and prideful, he is also charming, charismatic, unerringly articulate in the courtroom, and supremely comfortable in the public eye. Legal journalist Karen Donovan, herself a lawyer, had unprecedented access to Boies for nearly two years. In v. Goliath she gives us a scintillating chronicle of the legal dramas in which Boies has played a crucial role and a riveting, up-close portrait of a singularly gifted lawyer.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Similar Products:

Next >>

Page 1 of 5

[Kindle]    [Kindle DX]
  Privacy Policy

CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME.