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This chapter examines how the issues of language, labor, and justice intertwined in the murder trial of Ah Jake, a Chinese gold miner in nineteenth-century California. The focus is on the transcript of the Sierra County court's hearing in October 1887, on whether to bring the charge of murder against Ah Jake for the killing of another miner, Wah Chuck. Much of the hearing took place in pidgin, or Chinglish. The chapter first tells the story of Ah Jake and how he came to stand trial for murder before discussing the cross-cultural relations between Anglo, Mexican, and Chinese workers in the gold fields of nineteenth-century California. It suggests that the traces of history that can be gleaned from Ah Jake's trial and pardon, when considered within the frame of transpacific circulations of people, language, and organization, produce new knowledge about social relations in the late-nineteenth-century California interior.

This chapter describes the occurrences of accusations of ritual murder against Jews between 1500 and 1800 in the territories of Poland. In that period, these lands constituted the ‘main centre and reserve of world Jewry’. The marked increase in ritual murder trials in the mid-eighteenth century forced the Jewish Council of Four Lands to send a representative to the Apostolic See in 1758. Both Benedict XI and Clement XIII took the side of the Jews, defending them against the unjust accusations. In 1776, the Sejm prohibited the use of torture; this resolution was of great significance for future ritual murder trials. There are relatively few primary sources for ritual murder trials from this period. The sources are, first of all, trial records and court sentences concerning accusations of ritual murder. Much more information about such accusations against Jews and the ritual murder trials can be found in antisemitic literature. Numerous works of this kind contributed to the widespread belief that Jews do, indeed, use Christian blood for ritual purposes.

The trial, to read the Confession, was an utter travesty, and Jereboam Beauchamp the victim of a “tornado of prejudice”. There has been a disappearance of evidence at the trial and it provides obvious examples of perjury and perhaps bribery. Bizarrely, Beauchamp at times seemed to enjoy his own murder trial. The defense denied not only that Beauchamp had killed Solomon Sharp but that he had any ill will toward the man at all—despite the fact that everyone knew that his wife had previously charged Sharp with seduction and abandonment. The state's first order of business was the unexpectedly easy task of establishing Beauchamp's habit of announcing his intent to murder Solomon Sharp. The prosecution focused a great deal of attention on the erstwhile handkerchief and brought forth a number of witnesses who testified that Beauchamp was wearing a similar one before the murder. The Commonwealth of Kentucky would execute Jereboam O. Beauchamp on June 16.

This chapter focuses on the defense's efforts to leave the jury with a radically different vision of Laura Fair. In questioning the witnesses, as well as in their initial remarks and summations, defense attorneys Elisha Cook and Leander Quint tried to convince the jury that Laura Fair bore little resemblance to the prosecution's portrayal of the wanton woman who had boldly attacked all social conventions and maliciously took the life of her repentant lover.

This chapter describes Laura Fair's second trial in the fall of 1872. Popular attention now turned to Laura Fair's new counsel, N. Greene Curtis, who devised a defense strategy that differed significantly from that of his predecessor, Elisha Cook. The trial was no longer to be about the relationship between the intimate pair; it would not touch on her reputation or her colorful—some would argue sordid—history. Instead, it would focus on only one issue: could Laura, at the moment of the shooting, be classified as insane?

Furie is hired by the new regime at Paramount and takes Brad Dexter along with him. There, they form Furie Productions and are handed “The Sam Sheppard Murder Trial” as their first film project. Furie rewrites everything to focus on the lawyer defending the murderous doctor Sam Sheppard, basing the character on the real-life litigator F. Lee Bailey, whom they officially cast in the role and then drop. Furie selects unknown New York actor Barry Newman, who now plays a small-town defender named Petrocelli, and Furie enjoys one of the most tension-free shoots of his career. He follows this film, The Lawyer (1970), with Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), from a script by Charles Eastman, starring Robert Redford and Michael J. Pollard. The tensions between the two stars and a negative reception to the film plague any chance of its success.

As seen in chapter 5, trial coverage brought even greater scrutiny of Mississippi racial mores. Central to this chapter is a study of how national and regional news outlets chose to cover the trial (e.g., Associated Press newswire, United Press newswire, embedded reporters, stringer reporters, editorials, letters to the editor) as well as of which aspects of the trial and the milieu each publication found salient. This chapter also covers the dispute between Mamie Till-Mobley and the NAACP that led to a severing of ties between the two parties. Through their framing of the trial, regional and national publications put Mississippi mores under scrutiny as Tallahatchie County shepherded Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam through a farcical criminal proceeding.

This chapter describes the prosecution's case against Laura Fair. Harry Byrne, who spoke for the prosecution, initially disclosed their intention to prove that Laura Fair had, with clear malice, committed premeditated murder. But as the trial proceeded, and especially in the prosecution's response to the defense's assertions of temporary insanity, it became clear that the case for the state rested on far more than whether Laura had planned and committed the shooting. Rather, the central question for the prosecution came to revolve less around the facts of the case than around issues of character.

This chapter describes events following Laura Fair's guilty verdict. The court's ruling brought both surprise and widespread celebration. Many doubted that a jury would actually condemn a woman to death. As the newspapers continually informed the public, it would mark the first such hanging in California's history.

This chapter describes events following Laura Fair's acquittal. In the decade following her release, Laura's behavior only seemed to reinforce the widely shared view that she was simply the most bold and audacious of all living women. Suing those who she felt unfairly controlled her fortune or slandered her reputation, she refused to retreat from public space. Instead, in an aborted lecture series and a privately published essay, she openly declared that she was a “true and pure woman” who had been attacked on all sides by powerful, vindictive men.

Chapter 10 reinterprets how the prison responded to the Ruiz victory with a new regime of militarization dedicated to waging war on what it considered to be the new class of prisoner insurgent. In the militarized climate, the new development of prison gangs erupted from the challenges of prison-made civil rights and racial struggle to initiate a new era of political assassination within the prison that constituted a carceral version of 1980s outsourcing and violence. The formation of the neo-Nazi and KKK white gangs attempted prison assassinations for radical white supremacist ends as an effort to stem the victories of civil rights in both the courtroom and the prison courtyard. This chapter contends that the new prison violence was due to mass incarceration, overcrowding, an attempt to reassert white privilege through gang outsourcing, and the militarized prison where gangs functioned as prison insurgents and correctional officers became counterinsurgent forces. As such, the final chapter reconsiders the sociological “paradox of reform” and “authority as good social order” argument by demonstrating that the shift from prison mobilization for prisoners’ rights to racialized balkanization must be understood within the onset of mass incarceration.

This chapter recounts the last days of the Massie–Fortescue murder trial, the sentencing of the group, and the subsequent commutation of their sentences by Governor Lawrence McCully Judd in the spring of 1932. Local audiences in the islands and malihini haoles saw the outcome of the case much differently from those on the “Mainland.” While the trial’s unorthodox legal ending provided closure to the Massie case for most continental Americans, it left an open wound for local audiences. The trial’s outcome illustrated and maintained a boundary between “locals” and “mainlanders” that was crucial to the formation of local identity in Hawaii.

This chapter discusses O. O. Gruzenberg's Yesterday: Memoirs of a Russian-Jewish Lawyer (1981). This book is a nostalgic reminiscence of selected episodes from the life of Oskar Gruzenberg (1866–1940), a noted Russian-Jewish attorney whose courtroom successes in a wide range of political trials during the last two decades of the tsarist regime culminated in his brilliant defence of Mendel Beiliss in the notorious 1913 ritual murder trial in Kiev. Gruzenberg recounts scenes of his youth and of legal dramas in which he was a participant. He also describes some of the well-known writers he knew and relates several successful interventions with Russian bureaucrats during World War I in order to avert miscarriages of justice. Gruzenberg comes across in these memoirs as a skilful lawyer, eloquent advocate, humanitarian liberal, and passionate lover of the Russian language and literature.

This chapter describes the trials for the Dixie Furniture Company robbery and the murder of Officer Frank Schlatt. Warren McCleskey’s Atlanta murder trial began with the prosecutor arguing that McCleskey killed Officer Frank Schlatt, while McCleskey’s lawyer argued McCleskey was innocent. The prosecutor’s witnesses included Ben Wright, another Dixie Furniture Company robber who claimed McCleskey admitted to the murder, and Offie Evans, who had been held in a cell next to McCleskey. After McCleskey was found guilty, his attorney did not present any witnesses during McCleskey’s sentencing hearing, and the court sent McCleskey to death row, where he would spend more than a decade.

This chapter describes the trial of Spencer Cowper in 1699 for the murder of Sarah Stout, whose body was found floating in a mill pond in Hertford. The manner of her death and identity of her killer remain uncertain; but the subsequent trial exposed key features of a society in transition.

In 1966 Pamela was asked by the Daily Telegraph to write about the infamous Moors murders trial in which Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were charged with the torture and murder of five children. Her experience of the trial was so powerful and her feelings about the social damage caused by pornography so strong that she expanded her newspaper article into her most controversial non-fiction work, On Iniquity, published in 1967. Some critics praised her strong moral insistence that the ready availability of pornography had led to the murders; but others attacked her as an enemy of free speech. At the end of the 1960s she visited Auschwitz with Snow and her son Philip and began her most ambitious novel to date: The Survival of the Fittest, which traces the lives of five friends over a period of thirty years—from the 1930s to the late 1960s.