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The 35 most famous trials of the 20th century, as recorded by the people who were there including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Brian Masters, Damon Runyon and other star turns in true crime writing. Among the cases featured: the longest ever US trial, of deadly duo Bianchi and Buono for the Hillside Stranglings of 12 young women; Brady and Hindley - the iconic case of multiple child murder by a couple obsessed with sadism, Nazism and pornography; America's trial of the 1990s - O.J. Simpson; the media frenzy around Bruno Hauptmann's alleged kidnap and murder of the infant son of American hero, Charles Lindbergh; gagged press during the 1968 trial of eleven-year-old Mary Bell, convicted for killing two little boys; Oscar Wilde - one of the earliest trials to earn blanket press coverage; and the nine-month trial of 'one of the most evil, satanic men who ever walked the face of the earth', Charles Manson.
In every decade of the twentieth century, there was one sensational murder trial that riveted public attention and at the time was called "the trial of the century." This book tells the story of each murder case and the dramatic trial—and media coverage—that followed. Starting with the murder of famed architect Stanford White in 1906 and ending with the O.J. Simpson trial of 1994, the authors recount ten compelling tales spanning the century. Each is a story of celebrity and sex, prejudice and heartbreak, and all reveal how often the arc of American justice is pushed out of its trajectory by an insatiable media driven to sell copy. The most noteworthy cases are here--including the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the Sam Sheppard murder trial ("The Fugitive"), the "Helter Skelter" murders of Charles Manson, and the O.J. Simpson murder trial. But some cases that today are lesser known also provide fascinating glimpses into the tenor of the time: the media sensation created by yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst around the murder trial of 1920s movie star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle; the murder of the Scarsdale Diet guru by an elite prep-school headmistress in the 1980s; and more. The authors conclude with an epilogue on the infamous Casey Anthony (“tot mom”)trial, showing that the twenty-first century is as prone to sensationalism as the last century. This is a fascinating history of true crime, justice gone awry, and the media often at its worst.
The FBI could not help but take notice when militant black leaders converged on Oakland, California, from all across the nation in mid-February 1968 to meet with 10,000 local supporters. It was a fund-raising birthday party for Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Defense. For almost a year, the Panther Party's popular biweekly newspaper featured Newton seated on a wicker throne with a rifle in one hand and a shield in the other. Now the empty throne stood in for Newton. The honoree paced back and forth in an isolation cell in the Alameda County Jail just a few miles to the north. Newton was charged with murdering a police officer, wounding another and kidnapping a bystander at gunpoint—all while on parole that prohibited him from even carrying a firearm. Most people gathered in the Oakland Arena on February 17, 1968, expected the twenty-six-year-old, self-proclaimed revolutionary to be convicted and sentenced to death for shooting the officer. Militant Malcolm X disciples joined white radicals and nervous local black community members on common ground—a rally to raise some of the anticipated $100,000 defense costs for the Newton murder trial. His lawyers cultivated grassroots support to prevent the outspoken critic of police brutality from going to the gas chamber. Comrades like Panther spokesman Eldridge Cleaver did not believe the pretrial publicity portraying Newton as a victim, but thought it useful propaganda; while conservative and mainstream newspapers denounced Newton as a cop killer, his militant followers celebrated the shooting death of a racist “pig.” For many of them, his guilt was never in question, but it didn't matter; in fact, some considered the shooting a long-awaited signal from the revolutionary leader. A capacity crowd came to hear SNCC leaders: the incendiary H. Rap Brown, “black power” champion Stokely Carmichael, and organizer James Forman. Though the black separatists mistrusted them, leaders of the white radical Peace and Freedom Party had forged an alliance with the Black Panthers. The theme of the rally was unity; at Forman's insistence, Panther co-founder Bobby Seale had even invited Ron Karenga, the head of the United Slaves (US) gang from Los Angeles, where the Panthers had just opened a second branch. At the gathering, the Panthers and United Slaves held in check their bitter rivalry.The Panthers owed some of their countercultural clout to the fame of ex-felon Eldridge Cleaver, basking in the success of his recently published, best-selling prison essays—Soul on Ice—and his new platform as a journalist for the Leftist political magazine Ramparts. A self-educated Marxist, Cleaver had won parole from prison in December of 1966. By the time Cleaver walked out of Folsom Prison he had committed himself to becoming a professional revolutionary, as he envisioned his idol Che Guevara: “a cold, calculating killing machine, able to slit a throat at the drop of a hat and walk away without looking back.”1 Huey Newton impressed Cleaver at first sight in February of 1967. By daring a San Francisco cop to draw a gun on him in a street confrontation, Newton proved he was no paper Panther. Cleaver dubbed the birthday rally “the biggest line-up of revolutionary leaders that had ever come together under one roof in the history of America.”2 As Air Force veteran James Forman took his turn at the podium near Newton's empty throne, he was similarly inspired. Though Forman had the least militant track record of the SNCC representatives who spoke, he electrified the gathering with his call for retaliation if Newton were executed: “The sky is the limit.”3 This did not sound like empty boasting coming off a year marked by race riots. After two political assassinations that spring and growing unrest over the Viet Nam War, the Newton trial became a cause célèbre for radical groups and anti-war activists. In mid-July, when the proceedings began, one underground newspaper ran a blaring headline proclaiming “Nation's Life at Stake.” The article explained: History has its pivotal points. This trial is one of them. America on Monday placed itself on trial [by prosecuting Huey Newton]. . . The Black Panthers are the most militant black organization in this nation. They are growing rapidly. They are not playing games. And they are but the visible part of a vast, black iceberg. The issue is not the alleged killing of an Oakland cop. The issue is racism. Racism can destroy America in swift flames. Oppression. Revolt. Suppression. Revolution. Determined black and brown and white men are watching what happens to Huey Newton. What they do depends on what the white man's courts do to Huey. Most who watch with the keenest interest are already convinced that he cannot get a fair trial.4 For a full year before the trial began, the FBI's twenty-year-old Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) began to focus on black radical gangs and various ways to eliminate them. By the summer of 1968, COINTELPRO was bent on destroying the Black Panther Party, but the threat of government persecution could not stop the Panthers from ramping up their rhetoric. Taking his cue from the inflammatory rhetoric of both Newton and SNCC leaders, “El Rage” Cleaver challenged the government to instigate a second American revolution. In early July of 1968, the Panther spokesman held a press conference in New York City predicting open warfare in the streets of California if Huey Newton were sentenced to death. Cleaver expected the carnage to spread across country. The day Newton testified on his own behalf, crowds started lining up before dawn and broke the courthouse doors as they pushed against each other, vying for access. Governor Reagan took keen interest in the proceedings from Sacramento, while J. Edgar Hoover elevated the Panthers to the number one internal threat to the country's security. Following Newton's trial, Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale faced conspiracy charges accusing him of a leadership role in the battle between Chicago police and demonstrators that had exploded onto the floor of the 1968 Democratic Convention. Soon far more serious allegations confronted Seale. He was extradited to New Haven, Connecticut, for allegedly ordering the torture and murder of Alex Rackley, a suspected government plant in the local Panther office. By 1969, the FBI was targeting members of the Panther Party in nearly eighty percent of 295 authorized “Black Nationalist” COINTELPRO missions nationwide. Among these raids was a widely condemned, predawn invasion in December of 1969 by plain clothes policemen who stormed the apartment of charismatic young Panther leader Fred Hampton. The police riddled Hampton's front door with bullets and killed the twenty-one-year-old community organizer as he lay in bed. The largely white anarchist Weathermen retaliated by bombing police cars. To far greater political effect, 5,000 people gathered in Chicago from across the nation to attend Hampton's funeral. Reverends Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson led the eulogies. Jackson proclaimed, “When Fred was shot in Chicago, black people in particular, and decent people in general, bled everywhere.”5 Just six months before his death, Hampton had negotiated a truce among the city's rival gangs, the first “rainbow coalition” that Jackson would later popularize in his own 1984 historic campaign for the presidency. As reporters revealed cover-ups and discrepancies in the police account of the Hampton apartment raid, the Panthers and their outraged supporters launched a public relations campaign decrying governmental persecution and demanded a probe into COINTELPRO. In April of 1970, tens of thousands of demonstrators descended on New Haven, Connecticut, from across the country to protest Seale's upcoming trial. The instigators were Youth International Party (“Yippie”) leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, joined by other “Chicago Seven” defendants. They wanted to show solidarity with Seale, who was the eighth co-defendant in their highly publicized Chicago conspiracy trial until Judge Julius Hoffman ordered Seale bound and gagged for backtalk and severed his prosecution from the others. In response to the Yippie-led pilgrimage to New Haven, President Nixon mobilized armed National Guardsmen from as far away as Virginia, who came prepared to spray tear gas on demonstrators and students alike. Yale's President Kingman Brewster sized up the impending confrontation and decided to shut down the Ivy League University for a week to let students and professors who were so inclined to take part in voluntary teach-ins. In comments to the faculty that were quickly leaked to the press, Brewster created a storm of controversy that instantly put the Mayflower Pilgrim descendant on President Nixon's growing “Enemies List.” Angry editorials throughout the nation reinforced Vice President Agnew's demand that Brewster resign for daring to say that “I am appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.”6 Yet Brewster, and those who rallied to his defense, echoed what Yale Law School's dean had noted eight years earlier, “The quality of a civilization is largely determined by the fairness of its criminal trials . . .”7 So was Brewster's skepticism justified? Under intense pressure, an effort by a trial judge, prosecutor, and jury to provide a fair trial to a black revolutionary had in fact been undertaken in the summer of 1968. As Newton's lead lawyer Charles Garry questioned his final witnesses, the feisty Leftist knew that most of the packed courtroom had just seen shocking video footage of Mayor Daley's police force in Chicago cracking heads of both demonstrators and mainstream reporters during the Democratic Convention. Garry referred to the Chicago debacle in his highly emotional closing argument as another exa9781845646202\\Comprised of the papers presented at the eighth, and latest, International Conference Simulation in Risk Analysis and Hazard Mitigation, this book covers a topic of increasing importance. Scientific knowledge is essential to our better understanding of risk. Natural hazards such as floods, earthquakes, landslides, fires and others, have always affected human societies. Man-made hazards, however, played a comparatively small role until the industrial revolution when the risk of catastrophic events started to increase due to the rapid growth of new technologies and the urbanisation of populations. The interaction of natural and anthropogenic risks adds to the complexity of the problem.
"A Civic Biology, Presented in Problems" is a reprint of an early 20th-century biology text reflecting the main assumptions of the eugenics movement, which was on the rise at the time of publishing. The book is famous for starting the Scopes trial, commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, an American legal case in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of teaching human evolution. The teacher was called to court for reading his students certain passages from "Civic Biology".
Summoned to the Roman Courts is the first work by Detlef Liebs, an internationally recognized expert on ancient Roman law, to be made available in English. Originally presented as a series of popular lectures, this book brings to life a thousand years of Roman history through sixteen studies of famous court cases—from the legendary trial of Horatius for the killing of his sister, to the trial of Jesus Christ, to that of the Christian leader Priscillian for heresy. Drawing on a wide variety of ancient sources, the author not only paints a vivid picture of ancient Roman society, but also illuminates how ancient legal practices still profoundly affect how the law is implemented today.
Discusses the famous espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, covering both the prosecution and defense, the government's pursuit of this couple, and the aftermath of the trial.
"People out of Place reshapes our understanding of the 1960s by telling a previously unknown story about often overlooked criminal laws prohibiting vagrancy. As Beats, hippies, war protesters, Communists, racial minorities, civil rights activists, prostitutes, single women, poor people, and sexual minorities challenged vagrancy laws, the laws became a shared constitutional target for clashes over radically different visions of the nation's future"--
For as long as accuser and accused have faced each other in public, criminal trials have been establishing far more than who did what to whom–and in this fascinating book, Sadakat Kadri surveys four thousand years of courtroom drama. A brilliantly engaging writer, Kadri journeys from the silence of ancient Egypt’s Hall of the Dead to the clamor of twenty-first-century Hollywood to show how emotion and fear have inspired Western notions of justice–and the extent to which they still riddle its trials today. He explains, for example, how the jury emerged in medieval England from trials by fire and water, in which validations of vengeance were presumed to be divinely supervised, and how delusions identical to those that once sent witches to the stake were revived as accusations of Satanic child abuse during the 1980s. Lifting the lid on a particularly bizarre niche of legal history, Kadri tells how European lawyers once prosecuted animals, objects, and corpses–and argues that the same instinctive urge to punish is still apparent when a child or mentally ill defendant is accused of sufficiently heinous crimes. But Kadri’s history is about aspiration as well as ignorance. He shows how principles such as the right to silence and the right to confront witnesses, hallmarks of due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, were derived from the Bible by twelfth-century monks. He tells of show trials from Tudor England to Stalin’s Soviet Union, but contends that “no-trials,” in Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, are just as repugnant to Western traditions of justice and fairness. With governments everywhere eroding legal protections in the name of an indefinite war on terror, Kadri’s analysis could hardly be timelier. At once encyclopedic and entertaining, comprehensive and colorful, The Trial rewards curiosity and an appreciation of the absurd but tackles as well questions that are profound. Who has the right to judge, and why? What did past civilizations hope to achieve through scapegoats and sacrifices–and to what extent are defendants still made to bear the sins of society at large? Kadri addresses such themes through scores of meticulously researched stories, all told with the verve and wit that won him one of Britain’s most prestigious travel-writing awards–and in doing so, he has created a masterpiece of popular history.
In unraveling the long-hidden issues of the most famous free speech case of all time, noted author I.F. Stone ranges far and wide over Roman as well as Greek history to present an engaging and rewarding introduction to classical antiquity and its relevance to society today. The New York Times called this national best-seller an "intellectual thriller."