Crime and Guilt

Author: Ferdinand von Schirach
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0307740935
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
From Ferdinand von Schirach, one of Germany’s most prominent defense attorneys, comes a jolting debut collection of short stories that daringly brings to light the motivations stirring within the criminal mind. By turns witty and sorrowful, unflinchingly brutal and heartbreaking, the deeply affecting, quietly unnerving cases presented in Crime urge a closer examination of guilt and innocence. In “Fähner,” a small-town physician and avid gardener betrays little emotion when he takes an ax to his wife’s head, an act that shocks the locals but provides a long-awaited reprieve for the good doctor. Abbas, a Palestinian refugee who is cornered into a life of crime, finds true love and seemingly a saving grace with a beautiful student named Stefanie in “Summertime.” But when she is viciously murdered in a hotel room after having been paid to sleep with one of the country’s wealthiest men, is Abbas to blame or is it the man who seems to have it all? And in the startling story “Love,” a young man’s infatuation with his girlfriend takes a grisly turn as he comes to grips with his unconventional—and uncontrollable—impulses to truly know a woman. “Guilt,” writes von Schirach, “always presents a bit of a problem.” In this beautifully nuanced and telling collection, guilt is indeed never as clear-cut as the crime, and justice is more nebulous still.

Crime

Author: Ferdinand von Schirach
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307595536
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Crime, Guilt, and Punishment

Author: C. L. Ten
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198750819
Category : Criminal justice, Administration of.
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
Considering philosophical theories of punishment in light of both abstract arguments and factual evidence about the effects of punishing offenders, this book links the moral justification of punishment by the state to more general issues concerning the nature of moral disagreements and our obligations to obey the law. Ten applies his discussion to problems in the punishment of a variety of offenders--the dangerously mentally ill, Nazi war criminals, "negligent" drivers, rapists, and others--and considers several related questions about crime and punishment.

Guilt

Author: Ferdinand von Schirach
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307957675
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
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.

The Presumption of Guilt

Author: Charles Ogletree
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0230110134
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
Shortly after noon on Tuesday, July 16, 2009, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., MacArthur Fellow and Harvard professor, was mistakenly arrested by Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley for attempting to break into his own home. The ensuing media firestorm ignited debate across the country. The Crowley-Gates incident was a clash of absolutes, underscoring the tension between black and white, police and civilians, and the privileged and less privileged in modern America. Charles Ogletree, one of the country's foremost experts on civil rights, uses this incident as a lens through which to explore issues of race, class, and crime, with the goal of creating a more just legal system for all. Working from years of research and based on his own classes and experiences with law enforcement, the author illuminates the steps needed to embark on the long journey toward racial and legal equality for all Americans.

Crime and Guilt

Author: Ferdinand von Schirach
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099549271
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
Meet Fahner, the retired small-town doctor who resorts to the garden axe when his patience with his cruel wife runs out. Meet Patrick, so entranced by the sight of his sleeping girlfriend that he cuts a small piece out of her back, just to see what she tastes like. Meet the silent assassin who calmly despatches two Neo-Nazi thugs on a railway platform. A nameless lawyer invites us to read an extraordinary dossier of violent and unspeakable acts. All the crimes have one thing in common: the guilty have never been convicted in a court of law. But however heinous the crime, the narrator shows how the human circumstances behind events can tell a different story.

Guilty People

Author: Abbe Smith
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978803400
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
Criminal defense attorneys protect the innocent and guilty alike, but, the majority of criminal defendants are guilty. This is as it should be in a free society. Yet there are many different types of crime and degrees of guilt, and the defense must navigate through a complex criminal justice system that is not always equipped to recognize nuances. In Guilty People, law professor and longtime criminal defense attorney Abbe Smith gives us a thoughtful and honest look at guilty individuals on trial. Each chapter tells compelling stories about real cases she handled; some of her clients were guilty of only petty crimes and misdemeanors, while others committed offenses as grave as rape and murder. In the process, she answers the question that every defense attorney is routinely asked: How can you represent these people? Smith’s answer also tackles seldom-addressed but equally important questions such as: Who are the people filling our nation’s jails and prisons? Are they as dangerous and depraved as they are usually portrayed? How did they get caught up in the system? And what happens to them there? This book challenges the assumption that the guilty are a separate species, unworthy of humane treatment. It is dedicated to guilty people—every single one of us.

Confessions of Guilt

Author: George C. Thomas III
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199939063
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
How did the United States, a nation known for protecting the “right to remain silent” become notorious for condoning and using controversial tactics like water boarding and extraordinary rendition to extract information? What forces determine the laws that define acceptable interrogation techniques and how do they shift so quickly from one extreme to another? In Confessions of Guilt, esteemed scholars George C. Thomas III and Richard A. Leo tell the story of how, over the centuries, the law of interrogation has moved from indifference about extreme force to concern over the slightest pressure, and back again. The history of interrogation in the Anglo-American world, they reveal, has been a swinging pendulum rather than a gradual continuum of violence. Exploring a realist explanation of this pattern, Thomas and Leo demonstrate that the law of interrogation and the process of its enforcement are both inherently unstable and highly dependent on the perceived levels of threat felt by a society. Laws react to fear, they argue, and none more so than those that govern the treatment of suspected criminals. From England of the late eighteenth century to America at the dawn of the twenty-first, Confessions of Guilt traces the disturbing yet fascinating history of interrogation practices, new and old, and the laws that govern them. Thomas and Leo expertly explain the social dynamics that underpin the continual transformation of interrogation law and practice and look critically forward to what their future might hold.

Guilt

Author: Jonathan Kellerman
Publisher:
ISBN: 0345505735
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
When he is consulted on a cold case involving the discovery of infant remains at a neglected Tudor mansion, psychologist Alex Delaware, tracing the long history of past residents, is led down a bloody path littered with unspeakable cruelty.

Portraits of Guilt

Author: Jeanne Boylan
Publisher: Atria Books
ISBN: 9781476725604
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Inside the investigations of the deadly crimes that have shocked our nation -- the Polly Klaas kidnapping, Susan Smith's drownings of her own children, the Oklahoma City bombing -- one woman is the investigative world's secret weapon. You've seen her work: it was her composite sketch that revealed the face of the Unabomber, her hand that put a profile on Oklahoma City's John Doe II, her "dead ringers" that led to resolutions of those and other cases. Now Jeanne Boylan, the gifted forensic artist, whose beauty and compassion make her one of the most fascinating crusaders in the war against crime, tells her own riveting and deeply personal story. In thousands of national cases, Jeanne Boylan has pieced together portraits of crime suspects from the pained and fragmented descriptions drawn out from crime victims and eyewitnesses; time after time, her uncannily accurate renderings have helped close the most baffling of cases. She has worked with investigators worldwide and the nation's top FBI task force commanders, but Boylan herself connects with victims and grieving families in a way law enforcement officers cannot: over weeks and months she immerses herself in their lives, shares their frustrations and hopes; from this bond of trust, lost memories inevitably resurface. Through her sketches, Boylan is able to arm police with telling details of a fugitive's face, as well as aspects of the case often overlooked during conventional investigations. It is that combination of empathy and artistry that has placed her squarely outside the box -- and inside the most shattering cases of our time. But her compassion -- and her compulsion for justice -- have come at a price. Jeanne Boylan knows about loss and heartache: with searing honesty she portrays the effects on her marriage and her personal life of this career that calls her, at all hours, to step behind the scenes, to join the highest-profile manhunts, to find the faces of the most violent criminals, and at the same time, to help pick up the pieces of lives devastated by shocking violence. And, in a moving disclosure, Jeanne Boylan reveals that she, too, knows firsthand the price of crime. For the first time, in Portraits of Guilt, the woman who has formed the faces of the nation's most wanted killers uses her talents to bring about the resolution of a surprisingly personal twenty-year-old case. This remarkable memoir includes Boylan's own never-before-published drawings of two attackers who remain at large.