Illustrates how the power of narrative influences how police, prosecutors, juries, and judges construct legal reality Wrongful convictions have been studied primarily through the lenses of law, psychology, and the social sciences. Though scholarship has established canonical factors that help explain why the innocent are convicted, a very simple question has not been answered: How is it possible that prosecutors can convince juries and themselves of the guilt of an innocent defendant, often even against strong exculpatory evidence? Narratives of Guilt and Innocence seeks to address this crucial question by highlighting the narrative blueprint of a given criminal justice system and then how the power of narrative influences how police, prosecutors, juries, and judges construct legal reality and the evidence for it. That law and storytelling are connected is a common trope, but we know surprisingly little about the intricate role storytelling plays in criminal cases and wrongful convictions in particular. This book questions the effectiveness of the adversarial contest between prosecutor and defense as a means to arrive at the truth and argues that narrative is an important a factor in the construction of legal reality. Wrongful convictions exemplify that narrative and truth have an uncomfortable relationship. Ralph Grunewald provides a retelling and reading of well-known miscarriages of justice, including the best-known wrongful conviction in Germany. Applying a comparative perspective shows that the narrative desire as a human trait has a universal power with a persistence that transcends the regulatory and procedural setup of a given system. Narratives of Guilt and Innocence puts wrongful convictions into an interdisciplinary and comparative context and vividly demonstrates just how much the process of storytelling affects legal reality.

From the trials of Oscar Pistorius to O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson, this innovative book provides a critical review of 11 high profile criminal cases. These case studies examine how ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ are constructed in the courts and in wider society, using the themes of evidence and narratives; credibility; rhetoric and oratory in the court room; social status; vulnerability and false confessions; diminished responsibility and the media and social judgments. Written for criminology, sociology, law, and criminal justice students, the book includes: • exercises to extend thinking on each case; • recommended readings for studying the cases and concepts discussed in each chapter; • an extensive specialist reference list including web links to videos and transcripts pertaining to many of the cases discussed in the book. The book delivers an accessible examination of the criminological, sociological, psychological and legal processes underpinning the outcome of criminal cases, and their representation in the media and wider society.

On a sweltering day in August, a small town drunkenly celebrates its six-hundredth anniversary with a funfair when an anonymous tip leads police to find a young woman brutally beaten, raped, and thrown under the floorboards of the very stage on which her attackers had just played a polka. An eight-member brass band composed of respectable family men with respectable day jobs is charged with the crime. A neophyte defense lawyer, still wet behind the ears and breaking in his attaché case, takes on the trial, only to lose his innocence in the process. So begins Guilt, Ferdinand von Schirach’s tense, riveting collection of stories based on real crimes he has known. In these brief, succinct tales, von Schirach calls into question the nature of guilt and the toll it takes—or fails to take—on ordinary people. In “The Illuminati,” the popular mean crowd at an all-boys’ boarding school wages a vicious attack against an outsider schoolmate, and ends up accidentally killing the boy’s beloved teacher. Attempting to hurdle through a midlife crisis, a housewife begins to steal trivial things no one will miss, an act that gives her a rush and staves off depression in “Desire.” And in “Snow,” an old man whose home is used as a way station for a heroin ring agrees to protect the identity of the lead drug runner, who receives his comeuppance in due course. Compassionate and seen with the same cool, controlled eye that propelled Ferdinand von Schirach’s debut collection, Crime, onto best-seller lists, Guilt is a stunning follow-up from one of Germany’s finest new writers.

James Lynn Avery, a seer, as described in the book of 1 Samuel, Chapter 3, Verse 7 (King James Version), is in a calling to serve God and offer His truth about a criminal trial that has affected America continuously. The truth offered in Called to See, Called to Say; Narrative of a Seer, confirms the power of God, without argument, in every aspect of our existence

"Style has often been understood both too broadly and too narrowly. In consequence, it has not defined a psychologically coherent area of study. In the opening chapter, Hogan first defines style so as to make possible a consistent and systematic theoretical account of the topic in relation to cognitive and affective science. Hogan illustrates the main points of the first, theoretical chapter by reference to several works, prominently Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Subsequent chapters in Part I focus on some under-researched aspects of literary style. Specifically, the second chapter explores the level of story construction for the scope of an authorial canon, treating Shakespeare. The third chapter turns to verbal narration in a single work, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Part II, on film style, begins with a theoretical chapter on film style. It turns, in chapter 5, to the perceptual interface in the genre of "painterly" films (films that draw on stylistic features of other visual arts), examining works by Rodriguez, Mehta, Rohmer, and Husain. The sixth chapter treats the level of plot in the postwar films of Ozu. The remaining film chapter turns to visual narration in a single work, Lu's Nanjing! Nanjing! The third part comprises a single chapter. It addresses theoretical and interpretive issues bearing on style in graphic fiction, with a focus on Spiegelman's Maus. An Afterword touches briefly on some possible implications of stylistic analysis for political critique"--

The Narrative Reader provides a comprehensive survey of theories of narrative from Plato to Post-Structuralism. The broad selection of texts demonstrate the extent to which narrative permeates the entire field of literature & culture

Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the conflicted attitude of the Victorian novel to sacrifice, and the act of substitution on which it depends. The Christian idea of redemption celebrated the suffering of the innocent: to embrace a life of metaphorical self-sacrifice was to follow in the footsteps of Christ's literal Passion. Moreover, the ethical agenda of fiction relied on the expansion of sympathy which imaginative substitution was seen to encourage. But Victorian criminal law sought to calibrate punishment and culpability as it repudiated archaic models of sacrifice that scapegoated the innocent. The tension between these models is registered creatively in the fiction of novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot, at a time when acts of Chartist protest, national sacrifices made during the Crimean War, and the extension of the franchise combined to call into question what it means for one man to 'stand for', and perhaps even 'die for', another.

Forensic linguistics is the study of language and the law, covering topics from legal language and courtroom discourse to plagiarism. This book deals with the ideas, debates, topics, approaches and methodologies in forensic linguistics. It is suitable for undergraduates and postgraduates

Identity, Narrative and Politics argues that political theory has barely begun to develop a notion of narrative identity; instead the book explores the sophisticated ideas which emerge from novels as alternative expressions of political understanding. This title uses a broad international selection of Twentieth Century English language works, by writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Thomas Pynchon. The book considers each novel as a source of political ideas in terms of content, structure, form and technique. The book assumes no prior knowledge of the literature discussed, and will be fascinating reading for students of literature, politics and cultural studies.