Download or read book The Missing American Jury written by Suja A. Thomas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criminal, civil, and grand juries have disappeared from the American legal system. Over time, despite their significant presence in the Constitution, juries have been robbed of their power by the federal government and the states. For example, leveraging harsher criminal penalties, executive officials have forced criminal defendants into plea bargains, eliminating juries. Capping money awards, legislatures have stripped juries of their power to fix damages. Ordering summary judgment, judges dispose of civil cases without sending them to a jury. This is not what the founders intended. Examining the Constitution's text and historical sources, the book explores how the jury's authority has been taken and how it can be restored to its rightful, co-equal position as a 'branch' of government. Discussing the value of juries beyond the Constitution's requirements, the book also discusses the significance of juries world-wide and argues jury decision-making should be preferred over determinations by other governmental bodies.
Download or read book The American Jury System written by Randolph N. Jonakait and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are juries selected in the United States? What forces influence juries in making their decisions? Are some cases simply beyond the ability of juries to decide? How useful is the entire jury system? In this important and accessible book, a prominent expert on constitutional law examines these and other issues concerning the American jury system. Randolph N. Jonakait describes the historical and social pressures that have driven the development of the jury system; contrasts the American jury system to the legal process in other countries; reveals subtle changes in the popular view of juries; examines how the news media, movies, and books portray and even affect the system; and discusses the empirical data that show how juries actually operate and what influences their decisions. Jonakait endorses the jury system in both civil and criminal cases, spelling out the important social role juries play in legitimizing and affirming the American justice system.
Download or read book The Missing American written by Kwei Quartey and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2021 Edgar Nominee for Best Novel Accra private investigator Emma Djan's first missing persons case will lead her to the darkest depths of the email scams and fetish priests in Ghana, the world's Internet capital. When her dreams of rising through the Accra police ranks like her late father crash around her, 26-year-old Emma Djan is unsure what will become of her career. Through a sympathetic former colleague, Emma gets an interview with a private detective agency that takes on cases of missing persons, theft, and infidelity. It’s not the future she imagined, but it’s her best option. Meanwhile, Gordon Tilson, a middle-aged widower in Washington, DC, has found solace in an online community after his wife’s passing. Through the support group, he’s even met a young Ghanaian widow he’s come to care about. When her sister gets into a car accident, he sends her thousands of dollars to cover the hospital bill—to the horror of his only son, Derek. Then Gordon decides to surprise his new love by paying her a visit—and disappears. Fearing for his father’s life, Derek follows him across the world to Ghana, Internet capital of the world, where he and Emma will find themselves deep in a world of sakawa scams, fetish priests, and those willing to kill to protect their secrets.
Download or read book We the Jury written by Jeffrey B. Abramson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Jury in America written by Dennis Hale and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The jury trial is one of the formative elements of American government, vitally important even when Americans were still colonial subjects of Great Britain. When the founding generation enshrined the jury in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, they were not inventing something new, but protecting something old: one of the traditional and essential rights of all free men. Judgment by an “impartial jury” would henceforth put citizen panels at the very heart of the American legal order. And yet at the dawn of the 21st century, juries resolve just two percent of the nation’s legal cases and critics warn that the jury is “vanishing” from both the criminal and civil courts. The jury’s critics point to sensational jury trials like those in the O. J. Simpson and Menendez cases, and conclude that the disappearance of the jury is no great loss. The jury’s defenders, from journeyman trial lawyers to members of the Supreme Court, take a different view, warning that the disappearance of the jury trial would be a profound loss. In The Jury in America, a work that deftly combines legal history, political analysis, and storytelling, Dennis Hale takes us to the very heart of this debate to show us what the American jury system was, what it has become, and what the changes in the jury system tell us about our common political and civic life. Because the jury is so old, continuously present in the life of the American republic, it can act as a mirror, reflecting the changes going on around it. And yet because the jury is embedded in the Constitution, it has held on to its original shape more stubbornly than almost any other element in the American regime. Looking back to juries at the time of America's founding, and forward to the fraught and diminished juries of our day, Hale traces a transformation in our understanding of ideas about sedition, race relations, negligence, expertise, the responsibilities of citizenship, and what it means to be a citizen who is “good and true” and therefore suited to the difficult tasks of judgment. Criminal and civil trials and the jury decisions that result from them involve the most fundamental questions of right, and so go to the core of what makes the nation what it is. In this light, in conclusion, Hale considers four controversial modern trials for what they can tell us about what a jury is, and about the fate of republican government in America today.
Download or read book Why Jury Duty Matters written by Andrew G. Ferguson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Places the idea of jury duty into perspective, noting its importance as a constitutional responsibility, and describes ways in which the experience may be enriched.
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 The Jury Under Fire written by Brian H. Bornstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[This book] reviews a number of controversial beliefs about juries as well as the implications of these views for jury reform. It reviews up-to-date research on both criminal and civil juries that uses a variety of research methodologies: simulations, archival analyses, field studies, and juror interviews. Each chapter focuses on a mistaken assumption or myth about jurors or juries, critiques these myths, and then uses social science research findings to suggest appropriate reforms. Chapters discuss the experience of serving as a juror; jury selection and jury size; and the impact of evidence from eyewitnesses, experts, confessions, and juvenile offenders. The book also covers the process of deciding damages and punishment and the role of emotions in jurors' decision making, and it compares jurors' and judges' decisions. Finally, it reviews a broad range of efforts to reform the jury, including the most promising reforms that have a solid backing in research. " -- Publisher's website.
Download or read book The 13th Juror written by John Lescroart and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-08-02 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He is obsessed with her innocence. He will be destroyed by her guilt. The walls were champagne. The house was immaculate. A prosperous doctor lived there with his son and his beautiful wife. But the elegant walls hid a family's secret, a wife's shame. And one day shots rang out in the doctor's house. Suddenly Jennifer Witt was in jail, facing the death penalty. Jennifer insisted that she had not killed her abusive husband -- and she could never have killed her own son. Dismas Hardy believed her. But Hardy was only part of the defense team, and the only lawyer who continued to believe her...even as her story was torn to pieces, even as her lies came out, even as she was found guilty of murder. Now there's only one thing Jennifer can do to save her life...and she refuses to do it. So Hardy must do it for her. And in a shocking case of violence, betrayal, and lies, his only weapon is the truth... The 13th Juror...When innocence is not enough.
Download or read book The Jury Crisis written by Drury R. Sherrod and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-02-08 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting readers with intellectual and moral dilemmas faced by real jurors, The Jury Crisis explores the near collapse of jury trials in America, examines alternative paths to justice and proposes how to restore trial by jury as the trusted foundation of American democracy.
Download or read book The Lost Indictment of Robert E Lee written by John Reeves and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-07-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History has been kind to Robert E. Lee. Woodrow Wilson believed General Lee was a “model to men who would be morally great.” Douglas Southall Freeman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his four-volume biography of Lee, described his subject as “one of a small company of great men in whom there is no inconsistency to be explained, no enigma to be solved.” Winston Churchill called him “one of the noblest Americans who ever lived.” Until recently, there was even a stained glass window devoted to Lee's life at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Immediately after the Civil War, however, many northerners believed Lee should be hanged for treason and war crimes. Americans will be surprised to learn that in June of 1865 Robert E. Lee was indicted for treason by a Norfolk, Virginia grand jury. In his instructions to the grand jury, Judge John C. Underwood described treason as “wholesale murder,” and declared that the instigators of the rebellion had “hands dripping with the blood of slaughtered innocents.” In early 1866, Lee decided against visiting friends while in Washington, D.C. for a congressional hearing, because he was conscious of being perceived as a “monster” by citizens of the nation’s capital. Yet somehow, roughly fifty years after his trip to Washington, Lee had been transformed into a venerable American hero, who was highly regarded by southerners and northerners alike. Almost a century after Appomattox, Dwight D. Eisenhower had Lee’s portrait on the wall of his White House office. The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee tells the story of the forgotten legal and moral case that was made against the Confederate general after the Civil War. The actual indictment went missing for 72 years. Over the past 150 years, the indictment against Lee after the war has both literally and figuratively disappeared from our national consciousness. In this book, Civil War historian John Reeves illuminates the incredible turnaround in attitudes towards the defeated general by examining the evolving case against him from 1865 to 1870 and beyond.
Download or read book Unequal written by Sandra F. Sperino and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is no secret that since the 1980s, American workers have lost power vis-à-vis employers through the well-chronicled steep decline in private sector unionization. American workers have also lost power in other ways. Those alleging employment discrimination have fared increasingly poorly in the courts. In recent years, judges have dismissed scores of cases in which workers presented evidence that supervisors referred to them using racial or gender slurs. In one federal district court, judges dismissed more than 80 percent of the race discrimination cases filed over a year. And when juries return verdicts in favor of employees, judges often second guess those verdicts, finding ways to nullify the jury's verdict and rule in favor of the employer. Most Americans assume that that an employee alleging workplace discrimination faces the same legal system as other litigants. After all, we do not usually think that legal rules vary depending upon the type of claim brought. The employment law scholars Sandra A. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas show in Unequal that our assumptions are wrong. Over the course of the last half century, employment discrimination claims have come to operate in a fundamentally different legal system than other claims. It is in many respects a parallel universe, one in which the legal system systematically favors employers over employees. A host of procedural, evidentiary, and substantive mechanisms serve as barriers for employees, making it extremely difficult for them to access the courts. Moreover, these mechanisms make it fairly easy for judges to dismiss a case prior to trial. Americans are unaware of how the system operates partly because they think that race and gender discrimination are in the process of fading away. But such discrimination still happens in the workplace, and workers now have little recourse to fight it legally. By tracing the modern history of employment discrimination, Sperino and Thomas provide an authoritative account of how our legal system evolved into an institution that is inherently biased against workers making rights claims.
Download or read book Jurors Stories of Death written by Benjamin Fleury-Steiner and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary study of the people directly involved in death-penalty decisions
Download or read book The American Jury written by Harry Kalven and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Twenty Million Angry Men written by James M. Binnall and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, all but one U.S. jurisdiction restricts a convicted felon’s eligibility for jury service. Are there valid, legal reasons for banishing millions of Americans from the jury process? How do felon-juror exclusion statutes impact convicted felons, jury systems, and jurisdictions that impose them? Twenty Million Angry Men provides the first full account of this pervasive yet invisible form of civic marginalization. Drawing on extensive research, James M. Binnall challenges the professed rationales for felon-juror exclusion and highlights the benefits of inclusion as they relate to criminal desistance at the individual and community levels. Ultimately, this forward-looking book argues that when it comes to serving as a juror, a history of involvement in the criminal justice system is an asset, not a liability.
Download or read book I the Jury written by Mickey Spillane and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1982-02-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel in Mickey Spillane's classic detective series starring hard-boiled private eye Mike Hammer. I, the Jury is a double-strength shot of sex, violence, and action that is vintage Spillane all the way. It's a tough-guy mystery to please even the most bloodthirsty of fans.
Download or read book You re the Jury written by Norbert Ehrenfreund and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 1992-07-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
