The Trial
A History from Socrates to O. J. Simpson
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- 85,00 kr
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- 85,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
In an extraordinary history of the criminal trial, Sadakat Kadri shows with wit, legal insight and a travel writer’s eye for detail, how the irrationality of the past lives on in the legal systems of the present. A bold and brilliant debut from a prize-winning writer.
‘The Trial’ spans a vast distance in time, opening in the dread silence of the Egyptian Hall of the Dead and ending with the melodramas and hubbub of the 21st-century trial circus. Reconciliation and vengeance, secrecy and spectacle, superstition and reason all intertwine continually. The book crosses from the marbled courtrooms of Athens through the ordeal pits of Anglo-Saxon England, past the torture chambers of the Inquisition to the judicial theatres of 17th-century Salem, and from 1930s Moscow and post-war Nuremberg to the virtual courtrooms of modern Hollywood.
Kadri shows throughout how the trial has always been concerned with doing more than guaranteeing fairness and holding human beings to account for their deliberate crimes. He recounts how insentient and irrational defendants from caterpillars to corpses were once summonsed to court, before being exiled for their failure to attend or sentenced to die again – and argues that the same urge to punish lives on in today's trials of children and the mentally ill. But although Justice’s sword has always been double-edged – as ready to destroy a community’s enemies as to defend its dreams of due process – the judicial contest also operates to enshrine some of the western world’s most cherished values. The show trials of Stalin's Soviet Union were shams, but Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are a reminder that a lack of a trial is equally unjust, and at a time when our constitutional landscape seems to be melting away, an appreciation of the criminal courtroom’s history is more necessary than ever. As the Labour government launches an almost annual attempt to truncate trial by jury, and as authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are indefinitely detaining people in the name of an endless war on terror, ‘The Trial’ could hardly be more timely.
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Reviews
‘He tells a good story, deftly managing to mix anecdote and serious analysis. An impressive performance.’ The Times
‘A mine of information and an entertaining read, written with wit and style.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘An amusing and colourful and a deeply thoughtful book of contemporary relevance…a real achievement.’ Guardian
‘An interesting and timely book.’ Observer
‘You don’t have to agree with Kadri’s political views to find his history of the trial engaging stuff.’ Daily Telegraph
About the author
Sadakat Kadri was born in 1964 and studied history and law at Cambridge and Harvard universities. As well as being a member of the New York Bar and a tenant at London’s Doughty Street Chambers, he is a travel writer whose Cadogan Guide to Prague was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook award and who won the Shiva Naipaul/Spectator Prize in 1998. As a barrister, he has represented several prisoners on death row in the Carribean, prosecuted one African dictator and challenged the legality of a military dictatorship in Fiji. He lived in Manhattan while writing the book, arriving shortly before 11 September 2001, but now lives in London.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kadri's history of the criminal trial in the Western legal tradition presents representative cases, many famous, some little known, to illustrate the approaches, both rational and not, that organized societies have used to deal with law-breaking. One theme is the role of evidence in criminal prosecutions. Medieval trial by ordeal, for example, relied on the direct intervention of God to reveal guilt or innocence. In later epochs, confessions were accorded decisive weight, even if they were extracted by torture, as in the Inquisition and Stalin's show trials. Today, of course, we apply an intricate code of evidence, but, the author says, we still have verdicts based on ignorance and hysteria, and we have celebrity trials where evidence is subordinated to publicity. Much more serious is Kadri's summary of war crimes prosecutions stemming from atrocities in WWII and in Vietnam. Not many of the trials discussed reached objectively just conclusions, but these judicial failures tend to illuminate the dynamics (secrecy vs. transparency, hatred of crime vs. fear of mistaken verdicts) underlying criminal prosecutions. This thoughtful survey by Kadri, a prize-winning travel writer and criminal lawyer in England, helps us understand how far our system has advanced and how far we still have to go. B&w illus.