An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes. And so it began-a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweet's story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times. Arc of Justice is the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

When the law won't work, you have to work the law... The murderer stalking the quiet town of Warwick, Rhode Island in the late summer of 1989 was an unrepentant psychopath--"a living, breathing killing machine," in the words of a Boston Globe columnist. He butchered a family in their home--not far from the site where he had killed another woman two years earlier--just for the thrill, it seemed, of watching them die. When Craig Price was apprehended by police two weeks later, he grinned cheerfully and confessed to the crimes. He was tried and convicted, but sentenced to a mere five years imprisonment--the maximum penalty allowed by law. At the age of twenty-one he would be sent back to the streets and no one doubted he would kill again...unless drastic measures were taken. A Call for Justice is the gripping true story of how a cop willing to put his career on the line, members of the victims' families, and other enraged citizens banded together and dedicated years of their lives to keeping a remorseless young killer behind bars. They would gain national media attention, enlist the aid of Rhode Island's attorney general, and even capture the ear of the President of the United States. Theirs is a cautionary tale of a flawed legal system ill-equipped to dispense true justice--and of a community's determination to see justice done, even if it meant twisting the law until it worked.When the law won't work, you have to work the law... The murderer stalking the quiet town of Warwick, Rhode Island in the late summer of 1989 was an unrepentant psychopath---"a living, breathing killing machine," in the words of a Boston Globe columnist. He butchered a family in their home---not far from the site where he had killed another woman two years earlier---just for the thrill, it seemed, of watching them die. When Craig Price was apprehended by police two weeks later, he grinned cheerfully and confessed to the crimes. He was tried and convicted, but sentenced to a mere five years imprisonment---the maximum penalty allowed by law. At the age of twenty-one he would be sent back to the streets and no one doubted he would kill again...unless drastic measures were taken. When the law won't work, you have to work the law... The murderer stalking the quiet town of Warwick, Rhode Island in the late summer of 1989 was an unrepentant psychopath---"a living, breathing killing machine," in the words of a Boston Globe columnist. He butchered a family in their home---not far from the site where he had killed another woman two years earlier---just for the thrill, it seemed, of watching them die. When Craig Price was apprehended by police two weeks later, he grinned cheerfully and confessed to the crimes. He was tried and convicted, but sentenced to a mere five years imprisonment---the maximum penalty allowed by law. At the age of twenty-one he would be sent back to the streets and no one doubted he would kill again...unless drastic measures were taken. A CALL FOR JUSTICE is the gripping true story of how a cop willing to put his career on the line, members of the victims' families, and other enraged citizens banded together and dedicated years of their lives to keeping a remorseless young killer behind bars. They would gain national media attention, enlist the aid of Rhode Island's attorney general, and even capture the ear of the President of the United States. Theirs is a cautionary tale of a flawed legal system ill-equipped to dispense true justice---and of a community's determination to see justice done, even if it meant twisting the law until it worked.

Standing Up For Justice is about a fourteen-year-old boy who had come from Chicago to Mississippi to visit an uncle in 1955. After making a pass at a white woman, the black youth was brutally beaten, then shot. His murder and subsequent trial tell the story of how African American witnesses were courageous enough to tell the truth about what they knew of the kidnapping and killing. The murder trial also graphically exposes the ugly horrors of racism in the South.

In this deeply researched prequel to his 2006 study Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947, Michael J. Pfeifer analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history. Scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching offers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era. Pfeifer examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. He addresses the transformation of ideas and practices of social ordering, law, and collective violence in the American colonies, the early American Republic, and especially the decades before and immediately after the American Civil War. His trenchant and concise analysis anchors the first book to consider the crucial emergence of the practice of lynching of slaves in antebellum America. Pfeifer also leads the way in analyzing the history of American lynching in a global context, from the early modern British Atlantic to the legal status of collective violence in contemporary Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Seamlessly melding source material with apt historical examples, The Roots of Rough Justice tackles the emergence of not only the rhetoric surrounding lynching, but its practice and ideology. Arguing that the origins of lynching cannot be restricted to any particular region, Pfeifer shows how the national and transatlantic context is essential for understanding how whites used mob violence to enforce the racial and class hierarchies across the United States.

Further Reading; Notes; Chapter 9 Transitional Justice: New Democracies Grapple with Their Past; Coming to Terms with the Past: Justice vs. National Reconciliation; The Problem of Punishment; Corrective Justice for Victims of Human Rights Abuses; Summary; Further Reading; Notes; Chapter 10 The Right to be Let Alone: Determining the Scope of Personal Freedom; The Harm Principle; Paternalism; Harm to Third Parties; Moral Relativism and the Diversity of Human Practices; The Possibility of an Offense Principle; Summary; Further Reading; Notes; Part 3 Doing Justice Within the Law.

In the bitter cold of 1985, two buddies embark on a hunting trip from suburban Detroit to rural Michigan, unaware they would soon become the hunted. Darker than Night tells the chilling true story of the mystery that haunted a community and baffled the police for two decades. The eerie silence surrounding their sudden disappearance is broken after nearly two decades when a relentless investigator inspires a terrified witness to break her silence. The witness narrates a haunting scene that had unfolded years back, pointing fingers at the prime suspects–the Duvall brothers. With no bodies unearthed, the justice system is riveted by the startling revelations during an electrifying trial in 2003. The brothers, Raymond and Donald Duvall, had bragged about the murders, evocatively explaining how they dismembered their victims and fed them to pigs. Despite the shocking confession, the case holds its ground purely on a single witness's account, taking the courtroom through a labyrinth of dark secrets and sinister acts. This gripping thriller presents a vivid tale of crime that reveals the devastating power of evil.