Featuring five famous trials, this book examines the way our right to a fair trial can be threatened, when people are tempted to abandon their principles in the name of safety. Trials included are the Salem Witch Trials, the Haymarket Affair Trial, the Scopes "Monkey" Trial, the trial of Alger Hiss, and the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui--the latter not yet covered extensively in any book.
The American legal profession and judicial system bear a unique responsibility to set and maintain the balance between defending homeland security and protecting the civil liberties outlined in the Bill of Rights. These competing interests will continue to collide as the threats to our safety grow. Exploring the most significant terrorist cases of
Terrorists on Trial offers an unexpected--and productive--new perspective on terrorism trials, viewing them as a form of theater, in which the "show" that a trial offers can develop its own unexpected dynamics, aspects that occasionally inconvenience the prosecuting government and interfere with its aims. As a political construct, the crime of terrorism is an essentially contested act, and interpreting trials through this lens enables us to see their performative aspects more clearly than ever. With close analyses of trials in the United States, Spain, Russia, Germany, and the Netherlands, Terrorists on Trial breaks new ground for our understanding of a crucial contemporary problem.
Terrorism has become one of the major threats facing both states and the international community, in particular after the terrorist attacks in the United States, Madrid and London, which revealed a whole new scale and dimension of the phenomenon. An effective response is absolutely necessary; this response, however, cannot undermine democracy, human rights, the rule of law or the supreme values inherent to these principles.There is no universally agreed definition of "terrorism", nor is there an international Jurisdiction before which the perpetrators of terrorist crimes can be brought to account. The European Court of Human Rights is the first international Jurisdiction to deal with such a phenomenon. For many decades and through more than four hundred cases, it has elaborated a clear, integrated and articulated body of case law on responses to terrorism from a human rights and rule of law perspective. Thus, this is a handbook on counter-terrorism with a special focus on due respect for human rights and rule of law.This book compiles the doctrine laid down by the European Court of Human Rights in this field with a view to facilitating the task of adjudicators, legal officers, lawyers, international IGOs, NGOs, policy makers, researchers, victims and all those committed to fighting this scourge. The book presents a careful analysis of this body of case law and the general principles applicable to the fight against terrorism resulting from each particular case. It also includes a compendium of the main cases dealt with by the Strasbourg Court in this field and will prove to be a most useful guiding tool in the sensitive area of counter-terrorism and human rights.
Soon after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States captured hundreds of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and around the world. By the following January the first of these prisoners arrived at the U.S. military's prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were subject to President George W. Bush's executive order authorizing their trial by military commissions. Jess Bravin, the "Wall Street Journal"'s Supreme Court correspondent, was there within days of the prison's opening, and has continued ever since to cover the U.S. effort to create a parallel justice system for enemy aliens. A maze of legal, political, and moral issues has stood in the way of justice--issues often raised by military prosecutors who found themselves torn between duty to the chain of command and their commitment to fundamental American values.While much has been written about Guantanamo and brutal detention practices following 9/11, Bravin is the first to go inside the Pentagon's prosecution team to expose the real-world legal consequences of those policies. Bravin describes cases undermined by inadmissible evidence obtained through torture, clashes between military lawyers and administration appointees, and political interference in criminal prosecutions that would be shocking within the traditional civilian and military justice systems. With the Obama administration planning to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators at Guantanamo--and vindicate the legal experiment the Bush administration could barely get off the ground--"The Terror Courts" could not be more timely.
This is a print on demand edition of a hard to find publication. Examines terrorists¿ involvement in a variety of crimes ranging from motor vehicle violations, immigration fraud, and mfg. illegal firearms to counterfeiting, armed bank robbery, and smuggling weapons of mass destruction. There are 3 parts: (1) Compares the criminality of internat. jihad groups with domestic right-wing groups. (2) Six case studies of crimes includes trial transcripts, official reports, previous scholarship, and interviews with law enforce. officials and former terrorists are used to explore skills that made crimes possible; or events and lack of skill that the prevented crimes. Includes brief bio. of the terrorists along with descriptions of their org., strategies, and plots. (3) Analysis of the themes in closing arguments of the transcripts in Part 2. Illus.
A landmark sociological examination of terrorism prosecution in United States courts Rather than functioning as a final arbiter of justice, U.S. domestic courts are increasingly seen as counterterrorism tools that can incapacitate terrorists, maintain national security operations domestically, and produce certain narratives of conflict. Terrorism on Trial examines the contemporary role that these courts play in the global war on terror and their use as a weapon of war: hunting, criminalizing, and punishing entire communities in the name of national security. Nicole Nguyen advocates for a rethinking of popular understandings of political violence and its root causes, encouraging readers to consider anti-imperial abolitionist alternatives to the criminalization, prosecution, and incarceration of individuals marked as real or perceived terrorists. She exposes how dominant academic discourses, geographical imaginations, and social processes have shaped terrorism prosecutions, as well as how our fundamental misunderstanding of terrorism has led to punitive responses that do little to address the true sources of violence, such as military interventions, colonial occupations, and tyrannical regimes. Nguyen also explores how these criminal proceedings bear on the lives of defendants and families, seeking to understand how legal processes unevenly criminalize and disempower communities of color. A retheorization of terrorism as political violence, Terrorism on Trial invites readers to carefully consider the role of power and politics in the making of armed resistance, addressing the root causes of political violence, with a goal of building toward a less violent and more liberatory world.
Terrorism has become an everyday reality in most contemporary societies. In a context of heightened fear can juries be trusted to remain impartial when confronted by defendants charged with terrorism? Do they scrutinize prosecution cases carefully, or does emotion trump reason once the spectre of terrorism is invoked? This book examines these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The authors look at the how jurors in terrorism trials are likely to respond to gruesome evidence, including beheading videos. The 'CSI effect' is examined as a possible response to forensic evidence, and jurors with different learning preferences are compared. Virtual interactive environments, built like computer games, may be created to provide animated reconstructions of the prosecution or defence case. This book reports on how to create such presentations, culminating in the analysis of a live simulated trial using interactive visual displays followed by jury deliberations. divThe team of international, transdisciplinary experts draw conclusions of global legal and political significance, and contribute to the growing scholarship on comparative counter-terrorism law. The book will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners of law, criminal justice, forensic science and psychology.
The U.S. government's power to categorize individuals as terrorist suspects and therefore ineligible for certain long-standing constitutional protections has expanded exponentially since 9/11, all the while remaining resistant to oversight. Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions provides a comprehensive and uniquely up-to-date dissection of the government's advantages over suspects in criminal prosecutions of terrorism, which are driven by a preventive mindset that purports to stop plots before they can come to fruition. It establishes the background for these controversial policies and practices and then demonstrates how they have impeded the normal goals of criminal prosecution, even in light of a competing military tribunal model. Proceeding in a linear manner from the investigatory stage of a prosecution on through to sentencing, the book documents the emergence of a "terrorist exceptionalism" to normal rules of criminal law and procedure and questions whether the government has overstated the threat posed by the individuals it charges with these crimes. Included is a discussion of the large-scale spying and use of informants rooted in the questionable "radicalization" theory; the material support statute--the government's chief legal tool in bringing criminal prosecutions; the new rules regarding generation of evidence and the broad construction of that evidence as relevant at trial; and a look at the special sentencing and confinement regimes for those convicted of terrorist crimes. In this critical examination of terrorism prosecutions in federal court, Professor Said reveals a phenomenon at odds with basic constitutional protections for criminal defendants.
