An uncompromising look at a troubling bias in our legal system.
Wall Street Journal editorial board member and Pulitzer-winner Rabinowitz revisits some of the most spectacular sexual-abuse trials of the 1980s—and concludes the guilty verdicts were egregious miscarriages of justice.
Taking her title and thesis from Montesquieu’s declaration that there are no crueler tyrannies than those “perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice,” the author finds nothing more baffling that the decisions of various Massachusetts authorities to continue to incarcerate Gerald Amirault, who along with other family members saw their preschool and their reputations destroyed by a flood of accusations in the mid-1980s. Rabinowitz explores the bizarre nature of the children’s claims, which included being raped publicly with sharp instruments and taken to a “magic room” in which a clown forced them to perform or endure sordid acts. (Spaceships and robots were involved too.) She attacks the entire system that made these trials possible: overzealous police and prosecutors whose leading interviews of children prompted many outrageous accusations; professional child-abuse experts willing, even eager to testify for the state; the rapacious media; a public with a boundless appetite for the salacious; incompetent public defenders; and the whole notion that children are innocent and must be believed. The author intercuts the Amiraults’ sad story with accounts of other cases, including the trial of police officer Grant Snowden, convicted of a sexual offense against a three-year-old; multiple cases in Wenatchee, Washington, where more than 40 people were charged with more than 2,400 counts of abuse; the weird and disgusting charge against Dr. Patrick Griffin, convicted of performing oral sex on a woman undergoing a colonoscopy; and the conviction of a marina owner for raping his 13-year-old stepdaughter. Rabinowitz takes a few gratuitous potshots at liberals and implies that most of Harvard Law School’s faculty are cowards, but she successfully carries the point that the testimony of children in these cases must be submitted to more rigorous standards.
An uncompromising look at a troubling bias in our legal system.Pub Date: March 27, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2834-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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