The riveting account of the landmark "Hit Man Case"--involving a man who hired a contract killer to execute his ex-wife, his severely brain-damaged son, and the boy's nurse--written by a noted First Amendment attorney who risked his reputation and career to take on the case.

A wealthy psychopath threatens the life of an innocent young manThe note comes during Barry Sanford’s dinner. It’s to the point, explaining succinctly that very soon, Barry is going to die. Though the note is unsigned, Barry knows that it comes from the desk of King Hubbard. Two years ago, Hubbard’s younger brother staggered drunk out of a bar and into the path of Barry’s car. Though the courts exonerated the young architect for the killing, King Hubbard has spent the last two years trying to kill Barry Sanford. His efforts—first a subway accident, then a runaway truck—forced the young architect to flee for Florida. Two months later, three shots rang out from a car parked beside Sanford’s, missing him only because fear keeps him vigilant. He wound up in Belize, but now Hubbard has found him once more. It is time to keep running, or to make a stand.

In A Question of Intent: Homicide Law and Criminal Justice in Qing and Republican China, Jennifer M. Neighbors uses legal cases from the local, provincial and central levels to explore both the complexity with which Qing law addressed abstract concepts and the process of adoption, adaptation, and resistance as late imperial law gave way to criminal law of the Republican period. This study reveals a Chinese justice system, both before and after 1911, that defies assignment to binary categories of modern and pre-modern law that have influenced much of past scholarship.

It was in the early spring of 1938 in the township of St. Basil when Inspector Maxwell Hamilton was summoned to Hemstead Manor, the large estate of the Hemstead family. Squire Cyril Hemstead was found in his bed with multiple stab wounds. The ivory-handled carving knife was still protruding from the dead man’s back when he was discovered by the housekeeper. The conversation in the homes and pubs took an abrupt turn from the fear of an upcoming war to the fear that someone was living among them who was a murderer. The good people of St. Basil all agreed: it had to a stranger. No one they knew would do such an evil thing. Max Hamilton began his investigation with the unfortunate duty to find the killer even if it was one of them. It was as if the roof of Hemstead Manor was torn off causing the walls to collapse leaving everything exposed, all the scandals and secrets buried long ago were unearthed for all to see. Miss Heloise Hemstead, the spinster daughter of the squire, Cora Brown, a distant cousin who was a constant companion of the middle-aged squire, Dorothy Hemstead, a.k.a. Kate Purcell, a successful businesswoman and the estranged wife of the deceased, Harry Morgan, proprietor of The George, a pub and inn, the center of social life in St. Basil, and lastly, Robbie Pitts, the gardener and handyman for the Hemsteads and Mrs. Brown are the characters in this tragedy. They play their roles while Inspector Max Hamilton tries to discover how he can put an end to the mystery.

This book contains commentary on three key sentencing statutes, and on sentencing law for nine offence categories.

This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases--across time, place, and circumstance--to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters' rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as "property," from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves. To explore the conflicts of masters' rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners' families, heirs, and creditors. Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws con-sistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.

This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.