Law : Criminal Procedure

This book is a study of the social transformation of criminal justice, its institutions, its method of case disposition and the source of its legitimacy. Focused upon the apprehension, investigation and adjudication of indicted cases in New York City’s main trial tribunal in the nineteenth century - the Court of General Sessions - it traces the historical underpinnings of a lawyering culture which, in the first half of the nineteenth century, celebrated trial by jury as the fairest and most reliable method of case disposition and then at the middle of the century dramatically gave birth to plea bargaining, which thereafter became the dominant method of case disposition in the United States. The book demonstrates that the nature of criminal prosecutions in everyday indicted cases was transformed, from disputes between private parties resolved through a public determination of the facts and law to a private determination of the issues between the state and the individual, marked by greater police involvement in the processing of defendants and public prosecutorial discretion. As this occurred, the structural purpose of criminal courts changed - from individual to aggregate justice - as did the method and manner of their dispositions - from trials to guilty pleas. Contemporaneously, a new criminology emerged, with its origins in European jurisprudence, which was to transform the way in which crime was viewed as a social and political problem. The book, therefore, sheds light on the relationship of the method of case disposition to the means of securing social control of an underclass, in the context of the legitimation of a new social order in which the local state sought to define groups of people as well as actual offending in criminogenic terms. 'At a moment when France is poised to adopt plea bargaining, McConville and Mirsky offer the best historical account of its emergence in mid-nineteenth century America, based upon exhaustive analysis of archival data. Their more...

Price: $84.00

Getting tough on crime has been one of the favorite rallying cries of American politicians in the last two decades, and "getting tough" on repeat offenders has been particularly popular. "Three strikes and you're out" laws, which effectively impose a 25-years-to-life sentence at the moment of a third felony conviction, have been passed in 26 states. California's version of the "three strikes" law, enacted in 1994, was broader and more severe than measures considered or passed in any other state. Punishment and Democracy is the first examination of the actual impact this law has had. Franklin Zimring, Sam Kamin, and Gordon Hawkins look at the origins of the law in California, compare it to other crackdown laws, and analyze the data collected on crime rates in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco in the year before and the two years after the law went into effect. They show that the "three strikes" law was a significant development in criminal justice policy making, not only at the state level, but also at the national level. They conclude with an examination of the trend toward populist initiatives driving penal policy. The importance of the subject and the stature of the authors make this book required reading for policy analysts, criminal justice scholars, elected officials, and indeed any American seeking to know more about "get-tough" criminal sentencing.  more...

Price: $60.00

This book is set against the background of the 'justice gap' in sexual assault cases - the dramatic gap between the number of offences recorded by the police and the number of convictions. It seeks to examine the attitudinal problems which bedevil this area of law and possible strategies for addressing them. Written by a professor of law and a professor of psychology, it reviews evidence from socio-legal and social cognition research and presents new data drawn both from interviews with judges and barristers and from studies with prospective lawyers and members of the public. In the final part, it considers different ways in which rape trials could be improved and suggests steps that could be taken to change public attitudes about sexual assault. more...

Price: $67.50

Beginning with the premise that the principal function of a criminal trial is to find out the truth, Laudan examines the rules of evidence and procedure that would be appropriate if the discovery of the truth were, as higher courts routinely claim, the overriding aim of the criminal justice system. more...

Price: $64.00