Download or read book Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System written by M. Chris Fabricant and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2023-08-22 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in an expanded paperback edition, Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant presents an insider’s journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo. "Fierce and absorbing . . . Fabricant chronicles the battles he and his colleagues have fought to unravel a century of fraudulent experts and the bad court decisions that allowed them to thrive." —Washington Post From CSI to Forensic Files to the celebrated reputation of the FBI crime lab, forensic scientists have long been mythologized in American popular culture as infallible crime solvers. Juries put their faith in "expert witnesses" and innocent people have been executed as a result. Innocent people are still on death row today, condemned by junk science. In 2012, the Innocence Project began searching for prisoners convicted by junk science, and three men, each convicted of capital murder, became M. Chris Fabricant's clients. Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System chronicles the fights to overturn their wrongful convictions and to end the use of the "science" that destroyed their lives. Weaving together courtroom battles from Mississippi to Texas to New York City and beyond, Fabricant takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role forensic science plays in maintaining the status quo. At turns gripping, enraging, illuminating, and moving, Junk Science is a meticulously researched insider's perspective of the American criminal justice system. Previously untold stories of wrongful executions, corrupt prosecutors, and quackery masquerading as science animate Fabricant’s true crime narrative. The paperback edition features a brand-new index as well as an updated introduction and final chapter chronicling the Innocence Project’s continued fight against junk science in courtrooms across America.
Download or read book The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist written by Radley Balko and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A shocking and deeply reported account of the persistent plague of institutional racism and junk forensic science in our criminal justice system, and its devastating effect on innocent lives After two three-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, law enforcement pursued and convicted two innocent men: Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. Together they spent a combined thirty years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008. Meanwhile, the real killer remained free. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the story of how the criminal justice system allowed this to happen, and of how two men, Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West, built successful careers on the back of that structure. For nearly two decades, Hayne, a medical examiner, performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. But then some of those convictions began to fall apart. Here, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington tell the haunting story of how the courts and Mississippi's death investigation system -- a relic of the Jim Crow era -- failed to deliver justice for its citizens. The authors argue that bad forensics, structural racism, and institutional failures are at fault, raising sobering questions about our ability and willingness to address these crucial issues.
Download or read book Galileo s Revenge written by Peter W. Huber and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 1993-03-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A scathing indictment of the growing role of junk science in our courtrooms. Peter W. Huber shows how time and again lawyers have used—and the courts have accepted—spurious claims by so-called expert witnesses to win astronomical judgments that have bankrupted companies, driven doctors out of practice, and deprived us all of superior technologies and effective, life-saving therapies.
Download or read book Popular Justice written by Samuel Walker and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This popular one-volume analysis of the evolution of American criminal justice places contemporary issues of crime and justice in historical perspective. Walker identifies the major periods in the development of the American system of criminal justice, from the small institutions of the colonial period to the creation of the police, the prison, and the juvenile court in the nineteenth century and the search for professionalism in the twentieth century. He argues that the democratic tradition is responsible for the worst as well as the best in the history of criminal justice in the United States. Offering a challenging perspective on current controversies in the administration of criminal justice in light of historical origins, the author explores the evolving conflict between the advocates of crime control and the advocates of due process. Now in its second edition, Popular Justice has been completely revised to include the most recent scholarship on crime and justice. Walker has updated his analysis of the history of American criminal justice and explores the tension between popular passions and the rule of law. He examines changing patterns in criminal activity, the institutional development of the system of criminal justice, and the major issues concerning the administration of justice. Timely and comprehensive, this text will be useful for courses in criminal justice, legal history, and criminology.
Download or read book Fixing This Broken Thing The American Criminal Justice System written by James B Bolen PhD and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2020-11-07 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What war on drugs? Is our government complicit in the continued proliferation of the illegal drug trade in our nation? This supposed war on drugs has been ongoing for better than one hundred years with no apparent conclusion in sight. Perhaps we should entertain a new strategy to achieve ultimate victory in this never-ending conflict.Our criminal court system provides numerous avenues for offenders to eschew responsibility for their misdeeds. Overburdened criminal courts rely heavily u
Download or read book Convicting the Innocent written by Brandon L. Garrett and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-04 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.
Download or read book Criminal Justice written by Ronald G. Burns and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Provides a comprehensive overview of the Criminal Justice system, including coverage of Law Enforcement, Courts, and the Corrections system"--
Download or read book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice written by William J. Stuntz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rule of law has vanished in America’s criminal justice system. Prosecutors decide whom to punish; most accused never face a jury; policing is inconsistent; plea bargaining is rampant; and draconian sentencing fills prisons with mostly minority defendants. A leading criminal law scholar looks to history for the roots of these problems—and solutions.
Download or read book Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2009-07-29 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scores of talented and dedicated people serve the forensic science community, performing vitally important work. However, they are often constrained by lack of adequate resources, sound policies, and national support. It is clear that change and advancements, both systematic and scientific, are needed in a number of forensic science disciplines to ensure the reliability of work, establish enforceable standards, and promote best practices with consistent application. Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward provides a detailed plan for addressing these needs and suggests the creation of a new government entity, the National Institute of Forensic Science, to establish and enforce standards within the forensic science community. The benefits of improving and regulating the forensic science disciplines are clear: assisting law enforcement officials, enhancing homeland security, and reducing the risk of wrongful conviction and exoneration. Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States gives a full account of what is needed to advance the forensic science disciplines, including upgrading of systems and organizational structures, better training, widespread adoption of uniform and enforceable best practices, and mandatory certification and accreditation programs. While this book provides an essential call-to-action for congress and policy makers, it also serves as a vital tool for law enforcement agencies, criminal prosecutors and attorneys, and forensic science educators.
Download or read book Rethinking Juvenile Justice written by Elizabeth S Scott and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What should we do with teenagers who commit crimes? In this book, two leading scholars in law and adolescent development argue that juvenile justice should be grounded in the best available psychological science, which shows that adolescence is a distinctive state of cognitive and emotional development. Although adolescents are not children, they are also not fully responsible adults.
Download or read book Junk Science written by Dan Agin and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-11-27 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overdue indictment of government, industry, and faith groups that twist science for their own gain.
Download or read book The American Criminal Justice System written by Gerhard Falk and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-03-11 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critical yet honest appraisal of our criminal justice system addresses its strengths and its flaws—and makes recommendations for improvement. The American Criminal Justice System: How It Works, How It Doesn't, and How to Fix It calls attention to a criminal justice system that needs improvement. Author Gerhard Falk shows that the police themselves often violate the law; that prosecutors send innocent citizens to prison and even to death row; that defense attorneys take on cases they are not prepared to handle; that juries vote guilt or innocence on the basis of emotion, not facts; that judges are often failed attorneys or unscrupulous politicians; and that jails and prisons are too frequently warehouses of the poor. As background for his analysis, Falk discusses the history of the police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges, as well as the history of prisons and "the prison industrial complex." He also offers a devastating analysis of the death penalty and its practitioners. The book ends with recommendations for the improvement of our criminal justice system so that America can truly be, as our Supreme Court proclaims, a land of "Equal Justice under Law."
Download or read book American Injustice written by David S. Rudolf and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the fearless defense attorney and civil rights lawyer who rose to fame with Netflix's The Staircase comes an essential examination of America's corrupt and abusive criminal justice system.
Download or read book Media and Criminal Justice written by Dennis Stevens and published by Jones & Bartlett Learning. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The media and the CSI craze -- Motion pictures, popular television dramas, news reports -- Wars on crime and junkies -- Wars on sex offenders and poverty -- Terrorism and the war on immigrants -- Crime scene investigations, forensics, and junk science -- Prosecutors -- Wrongful convictions -- The death penalty -- Methodology and findings -- Recommendations to reduce wrongful convictions and eliminate capital punishment.
Download or read book In Doubt written by Dan Simon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criminal justice is unavoidably human. Detectives, witnesses, suspects, and victims shape investigations; prosecutors, defense attorneys, jurors, and judges affect the outcome of adjudication. Simon shows how flawed investigations produce erroneous evidence and why well-meaning juries send innocent people to prison and set the guilty free.
Download or read book Inside the Cell written by Erin E. Murphy and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: a version less likely to play out on dramatic television shows. In Inside the Cell, Erin Murphy shows how DNA typing can be subject to misuse, mistake, and error, and lead to a police state run amok. Murphy shows the perils of a society in which "stop-and-frisk" becomes "stop-and-spit," or in which police pose undercover to get a DNA sample from your discarded lunch. Already, police can collect DNA when making an arrest, sometimes before charging a person with a crime. The government is building a massive DNA database, stockpiling samples from as much as a third of the male population, and the laws regulating what they can and cannot do with them are weak. Murphy shows how this invites the riskiest kind of genetic surveillance imaginable. Just because DNA testing is good science does not mean that it is foolproof. Faulty forensic science is the number two factor leading to wrongful conviction, and yet we have done little to improve the use of science in criminal justice.
Download or read book In The Name of Justice written by Timothy Lynch and published by Cato Institute. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s criminal codes are so voluminous that they now bewilder not only the average citizen but also the average lawyer. Our courthouses are so clogged that there is no longer adequate time for trials. And our penitentiaries are overflowing with prisoners. In fact, America now has the highest per capita prison population in the world. This situation has many people wondering whether the American criminal justice system has become dysfunctional. A generation ago Harvard Law Professor Henry Hart Jr. published his classic article, “The Aims of the Criminal Law,” which set forth certain fundamental principles concerning criminal justice. In this book, leading scholars, lawyers, and judges critically examine Hart’s ideas, current legal trends, and whether the “first principles” of American criminal law are falling by the wayside. Policymakers, academics, and citizens alike will enjoy this lively discussion on the nature of crime and punishment, and how the choices we make in formulating criminal laws can impact liberty, security, and justice.
