Making a Murderer

This text delves into wrongful convictions studies but expands upon them by offering potential reforms that would alleviate the problem of wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system. Written to be accessible to students, it is the main text for wrongful convictions courses or a secondary text for more general courses in criminal justice, political science, and law school innocence clinics.

This critical yet honest appraisal of our criminal justice system addresses its strengths and its flaws—and makes recommendations for improvement. * Provides an extensive bibliography including books, journal articles, newspaper accounts, and government documents .

Federal, state, county, and municipal police forces all have their own codes of conduct, yet the ethics of being a police officer remain perplexing and are often difficult to apply in dynamic situations. The police misconduct statistics are staggering and indicate that excessive use of force comprises almost a quarter of misconduct cases, with sexual harassment, fraud/theft, and false arrest being the next most prevalent factors. The ethical issues and dilemmas in criminal justice also reach deep into the legal professions, the structure and administration of justice in society, and the personal characteristics of those in the criminal justice professions.

A New Juvenile Justice System aims at nothing less than a complete reform of the existing system: not minor change or even significant overhaul, but the replacement of the existing system with a different vision. The authors in this volume--academics, activists, researchers, and those who serve in the existing system--all respond in this collection to the question of what the system should be. Uniformly, they agree that an ideal system should be centered around the principle of child well-being and the goal of helping kids to achieve productive lives as citizens and members of their communities.

Juvenile Justice Sourcebook is the first comprehensive volume devoted exclusively to the biopsychosocial assessment, police and juvenile court processing, and institutional and community-based treatment and rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. The overriding objective of this sourcebook is to trace the tremendous progress achieved toward resolving juvenile justice issues, dilemmas, and controversies, while providing futuristic visions for the juvenile justice field. Each chapter, authored by preeminent expert practitioners and researchers, explores topics ranging from innovative counseling and multisystemic programs, to restorative justice, to rehabilitation programs such as aggression replacement training, wilderness programs, family treatment, substance abuse treatment, restitution, and aftercare.

This book, based on a large-scale research project funded by the National Institute of Justice and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, provides an overview of the restorative justice conferencing programs currently in operation in the United States, paying particular attention to the qualitative dimensions of this, based on interviews, focus groups and ethnographic observation. It provides an unrivalled view of restorative justice conferencing in practice, and what the people involved felt and thought about it.

This text delves into wrongful convictions studies but expands upon them by offering potential reforms that would alleviate the problem of wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system. Written to be accessible to students, it is the main text for wrongful convictions courses or a secondary text for more general courses in criminal justice, political science, and law school innocence clinics.

Josiah Sutton was convicted of rape. He was five inches shorter and 65 pounds lighter than the suspect described by the victim, but at trial a lab analyst testified that his DNA was found at the crime scene. His case looked like many others--arrest, swab, match, conviction. But there was just one problem--Sutton was innocent. We think of DNA forensics as an infallible science that catches the bad guys and exonerates the innocent. But when the science goes rogue, it can lead to a gross miscarriage of justice.

On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington-defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case-was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing

Federal, state, county, and municipal police forces all have their own codes of conduct, yet the ethics of being a police officer remain perplexing and are often difficult to apply in dynamic situations. The police misconduct statistics are staggering and indicate that excessive use of force comprises almost a quarter of misconduct cases, with sexual harassment, fraud/theft, and false arrest being the next most prevalent factors. The ethical issues and dilemmas in criminal justice also reach deep into the legal professions, the structure and administration of justice in society, and the personal characteristics of those in the criminal justice professions.

"It pulls no punches, shuns no controversial topic, and glosses over no issues or problems that beset America's law enforcement community in our day. For those who may be prone to suspect the motives of these self-confessed lovers of cops and warriors, the title of this book...should be sufficient to allay such concerns." --John C. Hall, Supervisory Special Agent, FBI (Retd.), from the Foreword

A Chicago journalist reveals how pervasive police misconduct, brutality, and corruption are changing the perspective of the criminal justice system and eroding the morals of the American people.

A trenchant and wide-ranging look at this alarming national trend, Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline is unsparing in its account of the problem while pointing in the direction of meaningful and much-needed reforms.The "school-to-prison pipeline" has received much attention in the education world over the past few years. A fast-growing and disturbing development, it describes a range of circumstances whereby "children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems."

In this sequel to The Psychology of Interrogations, Confessions and Testimony, Gisli Gudjonsson focuses specifically on aspects of vulnerability, confabulation and false confessions supported by vivid case illustrations and theories.

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.