As I write this, the nation is still reeling from multiple shocks in July 2016. First, as the month began, came yet two more videotaped incidents of police shooting to death black arrestees after many other such widely-publicized incidents over the previous several years. The day after the Fourth of July holiday, disturbing footage went viral of Baton Rouge police outside a convenience store firing repeatedly at 37-year-old Alton Sterling while two white policemen already had Sterling pinned...
Lise Pearlman’s With Justice for Some: Politically Charged Criminal Trials in the Early 20th Century that Helped Shape Today’s America takes a fascinating look back at headline-grabbing criminal trials from the early 1900s as a cultural backdrop for contentious issues we face as a nation today. In her first book The Sky’s The Limit: People v. Newton, The REAL Trial of the 20th Century? these early trials were compared to the 1968 death penalty trial of Black Panther leader Huey Newton, which the...
Who was Fay Abrahams Stender? A giant among Movement lawyers from the McCarthy Era to the 1970s intent on forcing society to change. Friends could easily picture her as the heroine of a grand opera. A child prodigy, she abandoned the concert piano to become a zealous advocate for society’s most scorned and vilified criminal defendants: from the Rosenberg espionage case during the Cold War to militant black clients, Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton and revolutionary prisoner George Jackson...
In the depths of the Depression, millions worldwide followed every twist and turn of the Lindbergh baby kidnap/murder. Yet what was reported was largely fake news. Nearly a century after undocumented immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed for the dastardly crime, questions still linger. If the wrong man was convicted, who did it? When? Why? Where? How? The shocking answers this book suggests have eluded all prior authors. Extensive research into dusty archives yielded crucial forensic...
