Deadly Injustice


Book Description

"Uses the Trayvon Martin case as a springboard to examine race, crime, and justice in our criminal justice system. Contributors explores how race and racism inform how Americans think about criminality; how crimes are investigated and prosecuted; and how highly publicized criminal cases go on to shape public views about offenders and the criminal process"--




Deadly Injustice


Book Description

A Nick Zuliani Mystery set in Kubilai Khan’s court - Cathay, 1268. Nick Zuliani, Venetian adventurer and newly appointed Investigator to the Mongol Emperor, is sent to investigate a murder in a remote town. But Nick soon realizes that he has been sent on an impossible mission by a deadly rival – for a girl has confessed to the crime and is due to be beheaded. If Nick uncovers the truth, and saves her life, he risks undermining the local Mongol governor, with terrible diplomatic consequences. He will have to use all his wiles if he is to escape the trap laid for him.




Deadly Justice


Book Description

Forty years and 1,400 executions after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty constitutional, eminent political scientist Frank Baumgartner and a team of younger scholars have collaborated to assess the empirical record and provide a definitive account of how the death penalty has been implemented. A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty shows that all the flaws that caused the Supreme Court to invalidate the death penalty in 1972 remain and indeed that new problems have arisen. Far from "perfecting the mechanism" of death, the modern system has failed.




Deadly Justice


Book Description

In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain specific provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the 'worst of the worst.' The same court had rejected the death penalty just four years before in the Furman decision because it found that the penalty had been applied in a capricious and arbitrary manner. The 1976 decision ushered in the 'modern' period of the US death penalty, setting the country on a course to execute over 1,400 inmates in the ensuing years, with over 8,000 individuals currently sentenced to die. Now, forty years after the decision, the eminent political scientist Frank Baumgartner along with a team of younger scholars (Marty Davidson, Kaneesha Johnson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Colin Wilson) have collaborated to assess the empirical record and provide a definitive account of how the death penalty has been implemented. Each chapter addresses a precise empirical question and provides evidence, not opinion, about whether how the modern death penalty has functioned. They decided to write the book after Justice Breyer issued a dissent in a 2015 death penalty case in which he asked for a full briefing on the constitutionality of the death penalty. In particular, they assess the extent to which the modern death penalty has met the aspirations of Gregg or continues to suffer from the flaws that caused its rejection in Furman. To answer this question, they provide the most comprehensive statistical account yet of the workings of the capital punishment system. Authoritative and pithy, the book is intended for both students in a wide variety of fields, researchers studying the topic, and--not least--the Supreme Court itself.




Unfair


Book Description

A legal scholar exposes the psychological forces that undermine the American criminal justice system, arguing that unless hidden biases are addressed, social inequality will widen, and proposes reforms to prevent injustice and help achieve true equality before the law.




Disability Injustice


Book Description

Ableism is embedded in Canadian criminal justice institutions, policies, and practices, making incarceration and institutionalization dangerous – even deadly – for disabled people. Disability Injustice brings together highly original work by a range of scholars and activists who explore disability in the historical and contemporary Canadian criminal justice system. The contributors confront challenging topics such as eugenics and crime control; the pathologizing of difference as deviance; processes of criminalization based on discretionary, biased approaches to physical and mental health; and the role of disability justice activism in contesting longstanding discrimination and exclusion. Weaving together disability and sociolegal studies, criminology, and law, Disability Injustice examines disability in contexts that include policing and surveillance, sentencing and the courts, prisons and other carceral spaces, and alternatives to confinement. This provocative collection highlights how, with deeper understanding of disability, we can and should challenge the practices of crime control and the processes of criminalization.




U.S. Latinos and Criminal Injustice


Book Description

Latinos in the United States encompass a broad range of racial, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical identities. Originating from the Caribbean, Spain, Central and South America, and Mexico, they have unique justice concerns. The ethnic group includes U.S. citizens, authorized resident aliens, and undocumented aliens, a group that has been a constant partner in the Latino legal landscape for over a century. This book addresses the development and rapid growth of the Latino population in the United States and how race-based discrimination, hate crimes, and other prejudicial attitudes, some of which have been codified via public policy, have grown in response. Salinas explores the degrading practice of racial profiling, an approach used by both federal and state law enforcement agents; the abuse in immigration enforcement; and the use of deadly force against immigrants. The author also discusses the barriers Latinos encounter as they wend their way through the court system. While all minorities face the barrier of racially based jury strikes, bilingual Latinos deal with additional concerns, since limited-English-proficient defendants depend on interpreters to understand the trial process. As a nation rich in ethnic and racial backgrounds, the United States, Salinas argues, should better strive to serve its principles of justice.




Injustice Gang and the Deadly Nightshade


Book Description

While thwarting an Injustice Gang heist, Batman accidentally destroys the Shade's cane. As a veil of darkness blankets the world, the Justice League enacts a bold plan to prevent a global ice age. Can the world's greatest team of super heroes reset time to bring light back to the world? Or will the Injustice Gang gain the upper hand on a planet that's seen its last sunrise?




Big Dirty Money


Book Description

“Blood-boiling…with quippy analysis…Taub proposes straightforward fixes and ways everyday people can get involved in taking white-collar criminals to task.”—San Francisco Chronicle How ordinary Americans suffer when the rich and powerful use tax dodges or break the law to get richer and more powerful—and how we can stop it. There is an elite crime spree happening in America, and the privileged perps are getting away with it. Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top 1%. But if you're rich and commit mail, wire, or bank fraud, embezzle pension funds, lie in court, obstruct justice, bribe a public official, launder money, or cheat on your taxes, you're likely to get off scot-free (or even win an election). When caught and convicted, such as for bribing their kids' way into college, high-class criminals make brief stops in minimum security "Club Fed" camps. Operate the scam from the executive suite of a giant corporation, and you can prosper with impunity. Consider Wells Fargo & Co. Pressured by management, employees at the bank opened more than three million bank and credit card accounts without customer consent, and charged late fees and penalties to account holders. When CEO John Stumpf resigned in "shame," the board of directors granted him a $134 million golden parachute. This is not victimless crime. Big Dirty Money details the scandalously common and concrete ways that ordinary Americans suffer when the well-heeled use white collar crime to gain and sustain wealth, social status, and political influence. Profiteers caused the mortgage meltdown and the prescription opioid crisis, they've evaded taxes and deprived communities of public funds for education, public health, and infrastructure. Taub goes beyond the headlines (of which there is no shortage) to track how we got here (essentially a post-Enron failure of prosecutorial muscle, the growth of "too big to jail" syndrome, and a developing implicit immunity of the upper class) and pose solutions that can help catch and convict offenders.




Stand Your Ground


Book Description

A history of America’s Stand Your Ground gun laws, from Reconstruction to Trayvon Martin After a young, white gunman killed twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, conservative legislators lamented that the tragedy could have been avoided if the schoolteachers had been armed and the classrooms equipped with guns. Similar claims were repeated in the aftermath of other recent shootings—after nine were killed in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and in the aftermath of the massacre in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Despite inevitable questions about gun control, there is a sharp increase in firearm sales in the wake of every mass shooting. Yet, this kind of DIY-security activism predates the contemporary gun rights movement—and even the stand-your-ground self-defense laws adopted in thirty-three states, or the thirteen million civilians currently licensed to carry concealed firearms. As scholar Caroline Light proves, support for “good guys with guns” relies on the entrenched belief that certain “bad guys with guns” threaten us all. Stand Your Ground explores the development of the American right to self-defense and reveals how the original “duty to retreat” from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill. In her rigorous genealogy, Light traces white America’s attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense by unearthing its complex legal and social histories—from the original “castle laws” of the 1600s, which gave white men the right to protect their homes, to the brutal lynching of “criminal” Black bodies during the Jim Crow era and the radicalization of the NRA as it transitioned from a sporting organization to one of our country’s most powerful lobbying forces. In this convincing treatise on the United States’ unprecedented ascension as the world’s foremost stand-your-ground nation, Light exposes a history hidden in plain sight, showing how violent self-defense has been legalized for the most privileged and used as a weapon against the most vulnerable.