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.
In compelling narrative, the authors probe the sensational cases of Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., and Richard A. Loeb, the Scottsboro "boys," Bruno Richard Hauptmann, Alger Hiss, and O.J. Simpson, highlighting significant lessons about criminal behavior and the administration of criminal justice. Each case study details the crime, the police investigation, and the court proceedings, profiles the major players, and examines the outcome and aftermath of the trial. The authors untangle the perplexities surrounding the cases and illuminate the many mysteries that remain unsolved today. These celebrated trials reveal issues of overzealous prosecution, sloppy police work, judicial bias, race, class, and ethnic struggles, and the role of wealth in securing a competent defense. They also show how the temper of the times and frenzied media coverage heightened the intensity of drama in the cases.
This comprehensive set of essays documents the most important criminal, civil, and political trials in the United States from colonial times to the present, examining their impact on both legal history and popular culture. Crime and punishment are of perennial interest across the human species. Trials of the Century: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture and the Law examines some of the most important (and infamous) cases in American history, placing them in both historical and legal context. Among the landmark cases considered in these two volumes are the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, the Scopes "Monkey" Trial, and the O.J. Simpson murder trial. A number of civil lawsuits and political trials are also included, such as the impeachment trials of Presidents Andrew Johnson and William Jefferson Clinton. Entries in the encyclopedia detail the events leading to each trial and introduce the key players, with a focus on judges, lawyers, witnesses, defendants, victims, media, and the public. In addition, the aftermath of the trial and its impact are analyzed from a scholarly, yet straightforward, perspective, emphasizing how the trial affected the law and society at large.
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.
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.
With murder, court battles, and sensational newspaper headlines, the story of Lizzie Borden is compulsively readable and perfect for the Common Core. Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. In a compelling, linear narrative, Miller takes readers along as she investigates a brutal crime: the August 4, 1892, murders of wealthy and prominent Andrew and Abby Borden. The accused? Mild-mannered and highly respected Lizzie Borden, daughter of Andrew and stepdaughter of Abby. Most of what is known about Lizzie’s arrest and subsequent trial (and acquittal) comes from sensationalized newspaper reports; as Miller sorts fact from fiction, and as a legal battle gets under way, a gripping portrait of a woman and a town emerges. With inserts featuring period photos and newspaper clippings—and, yes, images from the murder scene—readers will devour this nonfiction book that reads like fiction. A School Library Journal Best Best Book of the Year "Sure to be a hit with true crime fans everywhere." —School Library Journal, Starred
Turkey’s bid to join the European Union has lent new urgency to the issue of the Armenian Genocide as differing interpretations of the genocide are proving to be a major reason for the delay of the its accession. This book provides vital background information and is a prime source of legal evidence and authentic Turkish eyewitness testimony of the intent and the crime of genocide against the Armenians. After a long and painstaking effort, the authors, one an Armenian, the other a Turk, generally recognized as the foremost experts on the Armenian Genocide, have prepared a new, authoritative translation and detailed analysis of the Takvim-i Vekâyi, the official Ottoman Government record of the Turkish Military Tribunals concerning the crimes committed against the Armenians during World War I. The authors have compiled the documentation of the trial proceedings for the first time in English and situated them within their historical and legal context. These documents show that Wartime Cabinet ministers, Young Turk party leaders, and a number of others inculpated in these crimes were court-martialed by the Turkish Military Tribunals in the years immediately following World War I. Most were found guilty and received sentences ranging from prison with hard labor to death. In remarkable contrast to Nuremberg, the Turkish Military Tribunals were conducted solely on the basis of existing Ottoman domestic penal codes. This substitution of a national for an international criminal court stands in history as a unique initiative of national self-condemnation. This compilation is significantly enhanced by an extensive analysis of the historical background, political nature and legal implications of the criminal prosecution of the twentieth century’s first state-sponsored crime of genocide.
The book describes how the courts dealt with murder, beginning with the coroner's inquest and ending with the conviction and hanging of the murderer. Between these two points the exquisite, almost balletic, procedure, of the courts and their officers is described, the Crown's case against the prisoner is analyzed, and the prisoner's defense is discussed. Magistrates, policemen, crown solicitors, witnesses, jurors, judges, and hangmen make their appearances. The prisoners, whose silence before and during their trials was their most notable characteristic in the nineteenth-century courts, make their apperances too, but not as prominently as their judicial custodians, until they finally and briefly come into the limelight on the gallows. An implicit theme of the book is the apparent contradiction between the apparent simplicity of the courts' procedures and the complexity of the rules that determined their operation. The book relies on a range of printed primary sources, such as newspapers, parliamentary papers, law reports, and legal textbooks, and on MS sources in the National Archives such as the Convict Reference Files. (Series: Irish Legal History Society)
A journey into the heart of dark passions and the crimes they impel. When passion is in the picture, what is criminal, what is sane, what is mad or simply bad? Through court and asylum records, letters and newspaper accounts, this book brings to life some sensational trials between 1870 and 1914, a period when the psychiatric professions were consolidating their hold on our understanding of what is human. Outside fiction, individual emotions and the inner life had rarely been publicly discussed: now, in an increasingly popular press and its courtroom reports, people avidly consumed accounts of transgressive sexuality, savage jealousy and forbidden desires. These stood revealed as aspects not only of those labelled mad, but potentially, of everyone. With great story-telling flair and a wealth of historical detail, Lisa Appignanesi teases out the vagaries of passion and the clashes between the law and the clinic as they stumble towards a (sometimes reviled) collaboration. Sexual etiquette and class roles, attitudes to love, madness and gender, notions of respectability and honor, insanity and lunacy, all are at play in that vital forum in which public opinion is shaped—the theater of the courtroom.
The millenium-inspired fascination with 20th-century studies cannot be fully satisfied without a comprehensive and scholarly look at popular culture. With its emphasis on ideas, people, events and products that symbolize America, the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture is a cross-curriculum resource that will find use among a wide variety of users. Major topics include: television, movies, theater, art, books, magazines, radio, music, sports, fashion, health, politics, trends, community life and advertising.
