trials (murder)

Documents the experiences of Donald Marshall Jr., a young Mi'kmaq from Nova Scotia, who was framed for the murder of his friend Sandy Seale and spent eleven years in prison before being acquitted of the crime.

From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim's body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt's battle to save Elmore's life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation's ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes.

Based on a true story, in April 1912 in Hampton, Virginia, Charles Mears, a white, eighteen-year-old reporter, covers his first murder case. It is the trial of an uneducated African American girl named Virginia Christian who stands accused of killing her white employer. Virginia died in the electric chair, the only female juvenile executed in Virginia history. The book tells the story of the trial and its aftermath using actual court records, letters, newspaper stories, and personal accounts.

A comprehensive account of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago lynched for a flirtation with a white woman at a country store in the Mississippi Delata.

"Interweaving an insider's account of the true crime saga behind 'Making a Murderer' with other controversial cases from his career, Steven Avery's defense attorney reveals the flaws in America's criminal justice system and puts forth a persuasive call for reform"--OCLC.

While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.

Tony Lord, having left town at the age of seventeen under a cloud of suspicion after his girlfriend was found raped and murdered, finds himself enmeshed in conflicts from the past when he returns over twenty years later to act as lawyer for his old friend Sam Robb who has been accused of killing a female student.

Analyzes eleven high-profile criminal cases including those involving Dr. Samuel Mudd in 1865 and Lizzie Borden in 1892, questioning whether the evidence against them was sufficient enough to convict them.