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Creating a composite legal case based on real-life criminal investigations and trials, Seymour Wishman’s Anatomy of a Jury carries us from crime scene to courthouse to jury room, providing a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look into the nation’s criminal justice system.
In autumn 1982, in the affluent New Jersey community of Glen Ridge, a woman is found brutally murdered in her home. The victim’s distraught husband points police to a likely perpetrator: an African American handyman with a criminal record. A search of the suspect’s home reveals nothing, but still the man is indicted for the crime. His ultimate fate is to be determined by “a jury of his peers”—twelve strangers with no special legal skills or training and a fervent desire to do what is right.
As dramatic and riveting as it is educational, Wishman’s staging and analysis of a criminal trial is a “rousing endorsement of the jury and a superb description of how the system really operates” (St. Louis Dispatch).
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 19, 2013 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781480406056
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781480406056
- File size: 2738 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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June 1, 1987
Based on various studies and Wishman's own observations as a trial lawyer, this book centers on a mock murder case, from commission of the crime through trial verdict. PW found the trial dynamics and jurors' reactions to the evidence highly educational. -
May 1, 1986
Those who have had jury experience will recognize the accuracy of Wishman's views, especially regarding the "halo effect'' on jurors that attends their realization of powerful responsibility. Basing his book on the findings of the University of Chicago Jury Project of the 1950ssurprisingly valid still, at least as presented hereand other studies, as well as on his own observations as a trial attorney, the author stages a mock murder case, from commission of a crime through trial verdict. Suspect is black, married with two children, a bodyguard, accused of the rape-murder of the wife of his employer, a doctor, in this white family's New Jersey home. With novelistic drama, the legal process unfolds; and although we learn the victim's family secrets as brought out in court, we're told nothing about the defendant's domestic life. More interesting and instructive than the case itself, however, are the trial dynamics, and the jurors' reactions to the evidence as they deliberate and return a verdict of not guilty. BOMC alternate.
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