Most murderers and rapists escape justice, a horrifying fact that has gone largely unexamined until now. This groundbreaking book tours nearly the entire criminal justice system, examining the rules and practices that regularly produce failures of justice in serious criminal cases. Each chapter outlines the nature and extent of justice failures in present practice, describing the interests at stake, and providing real-world examples. Finally, each chapter reviews proposed and implemented reforms that could balance the competing interests in a less justice-frustrating manner and recommends one—sometimes completely original—reform to improve the system. A systematic study of justice failures is long overdue. As this book discusses, regular failures of justice in serious criminal cases undermine deterrence and the criminal justice system’s credibility with the community as a moral authority. The damage caused by unpunished crime is immense and, even worse, falls primarily on vulnerable minority communities. Now for the first time, students, researchers, policymakers, and citizens have a resource that explains why justice failures occur and what can be done about them. Confronting Failures of Justice is accessible for use by college freshman through graduate students and law students and is designed to be main text for a course on justice failures, but it could be used in conjunction with other texts in a broad range of courses touching on criminal justice. It presents arguments in a highly-organized fashion and provides dozens of case studies, many with photographs, to gain student interest and to bring the academic discussions to life.

`This is a very impressive piece of thorough scholarship. It is an important book that highlights the need to consider gender when developing policies to respond to interpersonal violence. It is written in a clear and accessible style and should be required reading for all criminal justice students.′ - Dr Malcolm Cowburn, Sheffield Hallam University This comprehensive text provides an overview of the relationship between violence, gender, crime and justice. It brings together theory with contemporary cases to enable the reader to understand the key concepts, issues and connections involved. Enlightening and accessible, the book examines the experiences and treatment of men and women as victims and criminals. It explores whether and how offending patterns differ according to gender, and investigates the connections between gender, offending and victimisation. The book covers different types of inter-personal violence including sexual violence, ′domestic′ violence, ′domestic′ murder, male-on-male violence and child abuse. It explores how sexual and ′domestic′ violence have been represented in the media, in the law and in criminal justice processes. Not only does the book present a comprehensive introduction to the field, it also offers reflective questions at the end of each chapter to enable the reader to integrate and interrogate the material covered. Chapter summaries and annotated bibliographies enhance the learning process by helping students to consolidate and further investigate key points. This book is essential for students and academics in criminology, criminal justice, sociology and gender studies.

Plea negotiation is rife with due process concerns, including a heightened risk of coerced pleas, ignoring mens rea, serious questions about assistance of counsel, limited discovery and little litigation of the evidence, the conviction of innocent defendants and significant questions about fairness and equity. Plea negotiation is also the fast track to criminal conviction, tough punishment, and mass incarceration. From the perspective of public policy, plea negotiation perpetuates a harm based, retribution focused system of crime and punishment. Because of the failures of public health, the justice system has become a dumping ground for hundreds of thousands of mentally ill, substance addicted and abusing, and neurocognitively impaired offenders. And because of a tough on crime mentality and lack of information and options, the justice system routinely prosecutes and punishes these offenders. The evidence is quite clear that punishment does nothing to improve these circumstances and often exacerbates them. The result, as one would predict, is extraordinarily high rates of reoffending, propelling the revolving door of the justice system. Confronting Underground Justice takes a close look at plea negotiation, criminal prosecution, public defense, and pretrial justice systems and identifies a wide variety of problems and concerns with each. William R. Kelly and Robert Pitman provide key decision makers with the tools to make better, more informed decisions regarding pre-trial detention, prosecution and plea deals, criminal defense, and diversion to treatment. Critical to this effort is redefining roles, responsibilities and the culture of criminal justice by prosecutors, judges and defense counsel accepting responsibility for reducing recidivism and embracing problem solving as a primary decision making strategy. Kelly and Pitman combine decades of academic research and policy expertise, with real world experience in the court system, as a judge and prosecutor to develop innovative and comprehensive reform. Confronting Underground Justice provides a prescriptive roadmap for how to fundamentally reinvent plea negotiation, pre-trial decision making, criminal prosecution and public defense to effectively reduce recidivism and save money.

Bringing together leading scholars and practitioners from the worlds of leadership, followership, transitional justice, and international law, this research provides a blueprint of how people-led, bottom-up, grassroots efforts can foster reconciliation and a more peaceful world.

It is not possible to read Heidegger's text without the image of his arm raised in the Nazi salute haunting it. The image compels us to examine Heidegger's philosophy in terms of its susceptibility to Nazi ideology. Heidegger's philosophy was inscribed at the end of the history of philosophy, a time when Nazism was on the rise and on its way to the renewal of German destiny. In paragraph six of Being and Time Heidegger outlined his agenda for the renewal of philosophy. The renewal necessitated the destruction of the errant history of ontology in order to retrieve the pure primordial experiences. The parallels between the forms of two agendas are coincidental. However, my work shows where they overlapped. I explore the consequence of this overlap by soliciting the 'first' text of philosophy, The Anaximander Fragment, that speaks about justice and injustice. Justice is also at issue in the text of Jacques Derrida. Derrida's primary resource is paragraph six of Heidegger's Being and Time, a fact that caused some of his readers to assimilate him to Heidegger. Derrida has tried to distance himself from Heidegger and in a late text he has offered us the prescriptive phrase, "Deconstruction is justice," to guide our reading of his text. The phrase invites us to examine Derrida's work in light of its saying. This is what I try to do. I show that a separation cannot be accomplished without a price, because whether an author intends it or not, justice is something ghostly and it keeps its own account. Heidegger's arm and Derrida's hand caught in the trap of paragraph six tell another story, different from the stories the authors tell. The limbs tell the story about the ghosts of justice.

"We were excited with the prospect of writing the second edition of this book, but as we embarked on this journey our hearts became heavy and deeply saddened as we witnessed multiple social injustices in our community, the nation, and the world. We have rewritten this Introductory Chapter a number of times as these injustices occurred, aware that these events impacted ours and others personal and professional lives, and subsequently our writing. Astoundingly, each violation of human rights and social and racial justice was as profoundly devastating, disturbing, and shocking as the one that proceeded the injustice one month, one week, one day, or even one hour before"--

"Justice for Deborah Thornton is complete, " Richard Thornton said after the execution of her killer, Karla Faye Tucker, in Texas. "I want to say to every victim in the world, demand this." But which form of justice is this victim demanding-retribution or restoration? Taking seriously the claims of death penalty supporters, Lloyd Steffen constructs a theory of just execution. For every acknowledged killer on death row there are dozens who maintain their innocence. Supporters of the death penalty -- along with its opponents -- must demand fairness so that innocent persons are not subjected to the terror of an unjust execution. Reminding us that Jesus likewise faced the terror of unjust execution, Steffen asks Christians to reacquaint themselves with the symbol of the cross as an instrument of state terror rather than a divine decoration.

In the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, Associate Justice Charles Evans Whittaker (1957-1962) merited several distinctions. He was the only Missourian and the first native Kansan appointed to the Court. He was one of only two justices to have served at both the federal district and appeals court levels before ascending to the Supreme Court. And Court historians have routinely rated him a failure as a justice. This book is a reconsideration of Justice Whittaker, with the twin goals of giving him his due and correcting past misrepresentations of the man and his career. Based on primary sources and information from the Whittaker family, it demonstrates that Whittaker's life record is definitely not one of inadequacy or failure, but rather one of illness and difficulty overcome with great determination. Nine appendices document all aspects of Whittaker's career. Copious notes, a selected bibliography, and two indexes complete a work that challenges the historical assessment of this public servant from Missouri.

This volume comprehensively examines how metropolitan Britons spoke and wrote about the British Empire during the short eighteenth century, from about 1730 to 1790. The work argues that following several decades of largely uncritical celebration of the empire as a vibrant commercial entity that had made Britain prosperous and powerful, a growing familiarity with the character of overseas territories and their inhabitants during and after the Seven Years' War produced a substantial critique of empire. This critique evolved out of a widespread revulsion against the behaviours exhibited by Britons overseas and built on a language of 'otherness' that metropolitans had used since the beginning of overseas expansion to describe its participants, the societies and polities that Britons abroad constructed in their new habitats. It used the languages of humanity and justice as standards to evaluate and condemn the behaviours of both overseas Britons and subaltern people in the British Empire, whether in India, the Americas, Africa or Ireland.

An empowerment approach is the organizing framework for this text which examines the nature of oppression, who does it and why, from the standpoint of biological and social psychological aspects. The impact on victim/survivors is explored through the inclusion of brief personal narratives recording grueling consciousness-raising experiences. This book is appropriate for courses in oppression, racism, and policy analysis. A small paperback, it can be used as a supplement to a course such as human behavior and the social environment. Divided into two parts, the first of which focuses on oppression and the second on the twin concept of injustice, Confronting Oppression and Restoring Justice, has as its major task the addressing of the age-old question for social workers, How can we avoid participating in the oppression? Or, working from the outside, How can we help the casualties of economic restructuring or the victims of structural or interpersonal violence? Examples of exemplary programs and actions to confront oppression and injustice are provided.