2011 SUPPLEMENT TO THE CALIFORNIA STATE PRISONERS HANDBOOK NOW AVAILABLE
March 1, 2011 -- The 2011 Supplement to The California State Prisoners Handbook (4th Ed. 2008) has just been released! The 125-page Supplement discusses the numerous legal developments in prison and parole law since October 2007, plus updated forms and appendices. See the Order Form @ the jump for details.
April 15, 2011
March 24, 2011
On Order: Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong
Harvard University Press: Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong Brandon L. Garrett
"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.
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The Amazon.com Excerpted Reviews:
"For six years now I have worked diligently within the innocence movement, and I often hear the question: 'How do wrongful convictions happen?' Convicting the Innocent gives all the answers. It is a fascinating study of what goes wrong, and it clearly shows that virtually all wrongful convictions could have been avoided."
--John Grisham
"DNA testing is revolutionizing our system of criminal justice: this book shows why. By digging deep into the case files of exonerees, Brandon Garrett uncovers what went wrong in those cases and probably in many more we simply can't know about. Garrett makes a powerful case for how to improve criminal justice so that we dramatically reduce the number of wrongly convicted."
--Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, The Innocence Project
"This is an invaluable book, a comprehensive, highly readable but well-researched work examining the hows and whys of the law's ultimate nightmare--convicting the innocent."
--Scott Turow, author of Innocent
"How can we stop sending innocent people to our prisons? As you turn the pages of this important and startling book, you will come to realize that wrongful convictions are not accidents. They are the tragic result of a criminal justice system in deep need of reform."
--Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking
"It's common to say that DNA exonerations of innocent defendants provide a unique window on the weaknesses in our system of criminal investigation and trial. But what exactly do we see when we look through that window? Until now the answer has been pretty sketchy. Brandon Garrett has produced a far more detailed and complete picture of the lessons of DNA exonerations than anything else to date. This is an indispensable book for anyone wanting to understand or improve American criminal justice."
--Samuel R. Gross, Thomas and Mabel Long Professor of Law, University of Michigan
March 09, 2011
Sustaining Scholarly Publishing
"... Within the scholarly communications ecosystem, scholarly publishers are a keystone species. University presses—as well as academic societies, research institutions, and other scholarly publishers—strive to fulfill the mission of making public the fruits of scholarly research as effectively as possible within that ecosystem. While that mission has remained constant, in recent years the landscape in which it is carried out has altered dramatically....."
March 05, 2011
Top 10 Jailbird Books: From Michel Foucoult To Piper Kerman [Huffpost Books]
"People end up in prison for a variety of reasons; some for political crimes, others for robbery, murder, or rape, and even more for drug-related offenses. Then there are those who find themselves working at prisons, and they've been able to tell different, but no less compelling, tales. Whatever the reason, the following list of ten authors have written thought-provoking, disturbing, and even hilarious books about the prison system in the US and abroad.
February 28, 2011
160-year-old poetry book covered in human skin of murderer George Cudmore | Mail Online
The book that is bound to horrify: 160-year-old poetry volume is covered in skin of hanged murderer...
It contains the works of Paradise Lost poet John Milton and to the naked eye appears to be like any other book from the 19th century.But a closer inspection of this 1852 edition of The Poetical Works will reveal a macabre discovery - it is bound with human skin .Executed murderer George Cudmore's body was stripped of its flesh shortly after he was hanged for killing his lover.
Cudmore, a rat catcher by trade, poisoned Sarah Dunn with a potion of roasted apple and milk, laced with arsenic.He was tried and sentenced to death in March 1830, in front of a thousand-strong crowd in Exeter, Devon. More...Victorian bad girls: Police mugshots of 19th Century women criminals revealed (along with the harsh sentences the no-nonsense justice judges handed down)
November 30, 2010
On the Death Sentence by John Paul Stevens | The New York Review of Books
David Garland is a well-respected sociologist and legal scholar who taught courses on crime and punishment at the University of Edinburgh before relocating to the United States over a decade ago. His recent Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition is the product of his attempt to learn “why the United States is such an outlier in the severity of its criminal sentencing.” Thus, while the book primarily concerns the death penalty, it also illuminates the broader, dramatic differences between American and Western European prison sentences.
Describing his study, Garland explains:
In fact, despite its ostensible amorality, his work makes a powerful argument that will persuade many readers that the death penalty is unwise and unjustified.
via www.nybooks.com
