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 Yorker staff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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