‘’We the Jury has what most legal thrillers lack—total authenticity, which is spellbinding.'’ —James Patterson On the day before his twenty-first wedding anniversary, David Sullinger buried an ax in his wife’s skull. Now, eight jurors must retire to the deliberation room and decide whether David committed premeditated murder—or whether he was a battered spouse who killed his wife in self-defense. Told from the perspective of over a dozen participants in a murder trial, We, the Jury examines how public perception can mask the ghastliest nightmares. As the jurors stagger toward a verdict, they must sift through contradictory testimony from the Sullingers’ children, who disagree on which parent was Satan; sort out conflicting allegations of severe physical abuse, adultery, and incest; and overcome personal animosities and biases that threaten a fair and just verdict. Ultimately, the central figures in We, the Jury must navigate the blurred boundaries between bias and objectivity, fiction and truth.
We, the Jury is the dramatic story of seven jurors, who convicted Scott Peterson of murdering his wife, Laci, and their unborn son, Conner, despite a series of internal battles that brought the first major murder trial of the 21st century to the brink of a mistrial. The Peterson jurors argued and disagreed but eventually bonded to seal the fate of the icy killer who dumped his victims into the bullet-gray waters of San Francisco Bay. The seven jurors of We, the Jury were seven average Americans who never imagined the horrors they would face or the phantoms that would haunt them after they convicted the enigmatic murderer and recommended that he be put to death. This is the story of how the American jury system worked after being battered by critics for the way it functioned in the trials of O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson. Unlike the jurors in those trials, who second-guessed themselves, the Peterson jurors do not question their decisions. It wasn’t one thing that condemned Scott Peterson, it was everything.
This magisterial book explores fascinating cases from American history to show how juries remain the heart of our system of criminal justice - and an essential element of our democracy. No other institution of government rivals the jury in placing power so directly in the hands of citizens. Jeffrey Abramson draws upon his own background as both a lawyer and a political theorist to capture the full democratic drama that is the jury. We, the Jury is a rare work of scholarship that brings the history of the jury alive and shows the origins of many of today's dilemmas surrounding juries and justice.
Before Jack Reacher . . . there was Mike Hammer 'The king of hard-boiled crime fiction' USA TODAY Classic pulp crime fiction from an author who has sold over 200 million copies worldwide. When Jack Williams is discovered shot dead, the investigating cop Pat Chambers calls his acquaintance, and Jack's closest friend, PI Mike Hammer. Back when they fought in the Marines together, Jack took a Japanese bayonet, losing his arm, to save Hammer. Hammer vows to identify the killer ahead of the police, and to exact fatal revenge. His starting point is the list of guests at a party at Jack's apartment the night he died: Jack's fiancée, a recovering dope addict, a beautiful psychiatrist, twin socialite sisters, a college student and a mobster. But as he tracks them down, so too does the killer, and soon it's not only Jack who is dead . . . And now Hammer is firmly in the killer's sights.
Juries have a bad reputation. Often jurors are seen as incompetent, biased and unpredictable, and jury trials are seen as a waste of time and money. In fact, so few criminal and civil cases reach a jury today that trial by jury is on the verge of extinction. Juries are being replaced by mediators, arbitrators and private judges. The wise trial of “Twelve Angry Men” has become a fiction. As a result, a foundation of American democracy is about to vanish. The Jury Crisis: What’s Wrong with Jury Trials and How We Can Save Them addresses the near collapse of the jury trial in America – its causes, consequences, and cures. Drury Sherrod brings his unique perspective as a social psychologist who became a jury consultant to the reader, applying psychological research to real world trials and explaining why juries have become dysfunctional. While this collapse of the jury can be traced to multiple causes, including poor public education, the absence of peers and community standards in a class-stratified, racially divided society, and people’s reluctance to serve on a jury, the focus of this book is on the conduct of trials themselves, from jury selection to evidence presentation to jury deliberations. Judges and lawyers believe – wrongly – that jurors can put aside their biases, sit quietly through hours, days or weeks of conflicting testimony, and not make up their minds until they have heard all the evidence. Unfortunately, the human brain doesn’t work that way. A great deal of psychological research on jurors and other decision-makers shows that our brains intuitively leap to story-telling before we rationally analyze “facts,” or evidence. Weaving details into a narrative is how we make sense of the world, and it’s very hard to suppress this tendency. Consequently, a majority of jurors actually make up their minds before they have heard much of the evidence. Judges, arbitrators and mediators have similar biases. The Jury Crisis deals with an important social problem, namely the near collapse of a thousand year old institution, and proposes how to fix the jury system and restore trial by jury to a more prominent place in American society.
In We the Jury ... veteran jury watcher and historian Godfrey D. Lehman demonstrates the validity of the American constitutional republic, in which the people hold sovereign power and express their will more effectively by delivering verdicts of conscience than by voting. The jury, when it is independent, nullifies unjust laws, topples kings and, as a representative of the governed, holds the governors in thrall to its consent. The jury is Abraham Lincoln's "government of, by, and for the people" in operation.
New York Times Bestseller "John Grisham, move over...A riveting tale of murder, treachery, and skullduggery at the highest levels." -- Seattle Times In a courtroom, David Sloane can grab a jury and make it dance. He can read jurors' expressions, feel their emotions, know their thoughts. With this remarkable ability, Sloane gets juries to believe the unbelievable, excuse the inexcusable, and return the most astonishing verdicts. The only barrier to Sloane's professional success is his conscience -- until he gets a call from a man later found dead, and his life rockets out of control.
In the American judicial system, jurors hold an awesome responsibility. They have the power to grant millions of dollars in damages, to declare someone guilty or not guilty of a crime, and, in some states, to decide if another human being should live or die. The twelve real-life court cases presented here not only offer students a fascinating inside look at the court system, they give them the opportunity to step into the jury box and experience American justice in action. All the key factors of jury trials are discussed: expert witnesses, the allowance of certain kinds of evidence, claims of diminished capacity, and much more. Each case is followed by a series of interactive questions that test readers’ knowledge of the issues involved. And at the end of each chapter students will find out how the real jury decided—and why. As entertaining as it is educational, You’re the Jury offers a hands-on introduction to a unique aspect of the American legal system. Norbert Ehrenfreund has served as a judge for seventeen years in the Superior Court of California. Lawrence Treat is a founder and former president of the Mystery Writers of America, a three-time Edgar Allan Poe Award winner, and the author of the highly successful Crime and Puzzlement series.
