by Peter Manso ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2011
Examination of a murder investigation perhaps gone awry, with Caucasian racism against African-Americans as the leading cause.
Manso (Ptown: Art, Sex and Money on the Outer Cape, 2002, etc.) has resided off and on in Cape Cod, Mass., for decades. One of his neighbors was Christa Worthington, an heiress and fashion writer from a prominent family. In early 2002, Worthington was murdered at her home, leaving her toddler daughter in the house with the bloodied body. Despite the large cast of suspects, for years local police and prosecutors could not announce a solution to the puzzling homicide. Finally, in 2006, the trial of Christopher McCowen began. McCowen, an African-American garbage collector who serviced multiple Cape Cod towns, had been measured with a borderline IQ, but seemed to manage well in his geographically constricted realm, especially with Caucasian women who allegedly found him sexually alluring. Worthington, portrayed by Manso and his sources as sexually promiscuous, might have engaged in casual sex with McCowen. But the author believed from the start that McCowen was being investigated primarily because of racist police and prosecutors. According to information gathered by Manso, other men and even a few women, all Caucasian, were far more likely subjects. As the investigation and the trial unfolded, Manso began openly assisting McCowen's defense lawyer. Because of that role, the author believed he was being singled out for harassment by the prosecutor, who is portrayed throughout the book as dishonest, incompetent and personally unpleasant. Manso says repeatedly that the book is meant as an unbiased account of an investigation, a town and an entire island. Yet his claim of unbiased journalism is contradicted repeatedly by his loaded language. The author devotes 240 pages to the trial itself, presenting a day-by-day chronicle that contains useful information but eventually becomes tedious. A flawed account of a sensational murder case.
Pub Date: July 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9666-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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by Sidney Powell ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2014
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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by Elizabeth Smart with Chris Stewart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2013
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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