Trials

May 21, 2012

by Evan Whitton

The lawyer-run adversary system used in Britain and its former colonies, including the United States, India, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia does not try to find the truth. It is the only system which conceals evidence. Our Corrupt Legal System explains why trial lawyers, famously economical with the truth, control evidence; civil hearings take weeks, months or years; in serious criminal cases, 24 anti-truth devices allow more than 50 percent of guilty accused to escape justice. By contrast, in the investigative system used in Europe and other countries, including Japan, trained judges control evidence and seek the truth; civil hearings take a few hours; 95 percent of guilty accused are convicted. It is the most widespread, accurate and cost-effective system. Russell Fox, an Australian judge who researched the law for 11 years, concluded: “The public estimation must be correct, that justice marches with the truth.”

Evan Whitton began researching the two legal systems in 1991 after observing at first hand how each system dealt with the same criminal, Police Chief Sir Terence Lewis.

Whitton was chief reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald, and Reader in Journalism at the University of Queensland. He received the Walkley Award for National Journalism five times, and was Journalist of the Year 1983 for “courage and innovation” in reporting an inquiry into judicial corruption. He is now a columnist on a legal journal, Justinian.

Dr George Miller, director of Happy Feet (Academy Award), said Whitton is “a dazzling writer, incisive and addictive.”

Phillip Knightley, twice British Journalist of the Year, called it “a masterpiece.”

Dr. Robert Moles, LLB Hons Belfast, PhD Edinburgh, says Our Corrupt Legal System “is one of the most important books I have ever read on the common law legal system”.

The book is available at bookdepository.com (free shipping worldwide), Amazon, etc. Six of his other non-fiction books are free online at www.netk.net.au/WhittonHome.asp

Dec. 5, 2011

by Claudette Walker & Matrix Filia

Permission granted for use of the following experts from the book to Crime Magazine by Abacus Books, Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Abacus Books, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

With Postscript  by Laura Schultz, MFT

Excerpt from Chapter 1

WHY?

No other single word is less relevant or more relevant in the death of Caylee Anthony. A lovely child, she was allowed only 34 months to dance on this earth.

Caylee Anthony, not quite three years old, had been missing for 31 days before a police report was filed. That, we believe, is what brought worldwide media attention to this case. Since that day, the media has brought every detail they could find to the attention of the public, including the arrest of the child’s mother, who will be tried for first-degree murder over the next month.

The media has provided us with everything from pictures of the beautiful child to pictures of the mother out dancing during the 31 days she did not report her child missing. We have heard the 911 calls and seen thousands of pages of discovery documents filed in the court by the prosecution and defense for the upcoming criminal case. All which are available online in a click, from the media. TV coverage from the Discovery Channel, 48 Hours, Geraldo Rivera, True TV, and Nancy Grace has played week after week during the three years the criminal charges have been pending. Some of that coverage has been because of the peculiarities of the case, some of it because the defendant is a pretty young white woman, and some of it because of Florida’s position among the top five states in both death row population and the imposition of executions.

The mother, Casey Anthony, has been tried in the media and presumed guilty by most who have heard the massive media coverage. Now the questions are what of this information will be admissible and what other evidence yet unknown will make the courtroom? Who will judge her on that evidence and what will the result be under the judicial system of the United States of America? 

Lawyers have debated this case on national TV. The defense team’s lawyers have granted interviews for pretrial publicly. To us, that is simply stunning – their job is not to aggrandize themselves but to defend their client, and most of the media interviews seem to be the former and not the latter. Casey has a legal dream team that has been paid in part by her parents, in part by her sale of photos of her child, in part by taxpayers, and in part pro bono (without pay) except for the massive media advertising the lawyers are receiving for free. And the people of the State of Florida are paying for all other costs: investigators, costs of prosecution, discovery documents, hearings, judges, bailiffs, and so forth. The list is unending, and the dollars spent are said to be in the millions.

Nov. 14, 2011

Marie Besnard

In France, in the 17^th Century, alchemists became wealthy grinding arsenic rock into a colorless and odorless powder and selling the powder to their countrymen who wanted to do away with a wealthy old parent, grandparent, uncle or aunt. There was even an “epidemic” of arsenic poisonings in the year 1670 so that the substance became known as the “succession powder.” Three centuries later, kind and homely Marie Besnard amazed her female friends when she described arsenic as an excellent substitute for divorce. They thought she was joking. But was she? 

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Illness and death were no strangers to Marie Antigny, yet, cradling Auguste, her dead husband, in her arms she sobbed uncontrollably.

Marie was 31 years old and she and Auguste, who was two years her senior, had been married for seven years. The two were first cousins – her mother was his father’s sister – and Marie had fancied Auguste since she was 17 years old, but it was not until she was 18 that her parents allowed the two to step out together, and another six years had to pass before they’d given their consent for the two to walk down the aisle. By then Marie was 24 and Auguste 26, and what doctors had described previously as his weak constitution had been diagnosed as tuberculosis. It was 1920 and tuberculosis was an incurable, even untreatable illness, but in Marie’s own words, “We were in love!”

Marie was born Marie Josephine Philippine Davaillaud in the village of Saint-Pierre-de-Maillé, 200 miles south-west of Paris, in the Vienne department close to the beautiful Loire valley.  Her parents, well-to-do farmers, adored her because before she arrived, they lost two infant sons to long illnesses. Her father Pierre Eugène used to cuddle her when he came in from working his fields, and her mother Marie-Louise never failed to tell her that she loved her “for three,” including the girl’s two dead brothers in her affection.

July 18, 2011

An excerpt from Peter Manso’s recently published book Reasonable Doubt: The Fashion Writer, Cape Cod, and the Trial of Chris McCowen.

by Peter Manso

Introduction

The American murder trial as a metaphor for the nation as a whole has become, in recent years, almost a cliché. Our best writers have seized upon it as a vehicle of self-expression. Academics argue over its myths and realities. The producers of TV series capitalize on its imagery, earning the networks heady profits second only to those raked in by Oprah. At some point or another, almost every American, rich or poor, white or black, has confronted the American justice system and its complexities—with pride, skepticism, awe, revulsion, or a combination of all these.

I began this project with the assumption that the Christa Worthington murder would be the basis for my “trial book” (every journalist wants to do a trial book), that it would take only 18 months to complete, and that my involvement as the author would be no different from my involvement in the half-dozen other books I’ve written, even though I’d known Christa Worthington, my neighbor in the town of Truro on the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for more than a dozen years.

Like so many assumptions, these proved false, largely because of what I found while digging into the crime, its investigation by the Massachusetts State Police, and the trial I’d planned to cover in the style of the late Dominick Dunne, notebook in hand, memorializing courtroom events in a so-called objective manner. Instead, I wound up lending assistance to the defense team and soon found myself in a great deal of trouble—specifically (not to say surreally), hauled into court, where I was indicted on a series of felonies after voicing my belief, both in print and as a guest commentator on Court TV, that the Cape and Islands district attorney in charge of the case (and also the case against me) was an ambitious, racially insensitive politico who’d cut corners in the courtroom and during the three and a half years he’d supervised the police investigation. My run-in with the lawman, however, is a story for another time.

May 16, 2011

Kathleen Marshall

Andrew Fitzherbert was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on the basis of DNA evidence alone.  His case shows that it is often not the technology or the science but the supervising biologist’s subjective interpretation of the results that is the crucial factor in assessing whether a suspect sample and a crime-scene sample “match.”

 by Mary Garden

 On Friday, February 27, 1998, between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., veterinarian Kathleen Marshall (subsequently dubbed the “Catwoman”) was murdered in the downstairs clinic of her home in Wilston, on Brisbane’s northside. Her decomposing body with 52 shallow stab wounds was not discovered until Sunday afternoon when two directors of the Cat Protection Society of Queensland (CPSQ), of which Marshall was president, visited her home. Sixteen cats and three dogs, unfed and distressed, were upstairs.

The police investigation initially focused on members of the CPSQ where power struggles and infighting had been a common occurrence, intensifying during the six months before 52-year-old Marshall’s death. In April, however, Ken Cox, a forensic biologist from the John Tonge Center, announced that he had found male blood in the crime-scene samples. Investigators decided to eliminate every male person involved in the deceased’s life, beginning with male members of the CPSQ and any male connected to a female member.

Sept. 27, 2010 Updated Dec. 2, 2011

Gurparkash Singh Khalsa

The author’s account of her role as jury foreperson at a 2010 murder trial in Stockton, California.

by Joan Bannan

Ajmer Singh Hothi, a 23-year-old trucker from Jalandhar, India was shot and killed in the cab of his parked big rig in Stockton, California on March 27, 2007. The weapon that killed him was a 9mm handgun that discharged nine bullets into the cab – six of those into Ajmer’s body. The one that entered his heart killed him instantly. He had been in the United States for 10 years, primarily residing with his parents. His mother and sister, who were in great fear for his life, had not been able to reach him for a couple of hours so they drove to the yard where he parked his truck. They found his lifeless body and called 911.

Four days after the murder, the San Joaquin Sherriff’s Department arrested Gurparkash Singh Khalsa, the father of Ajmer’s former girlfriend, Kirin Pannu. Several months later, the evidence, all circumstantial, was sent to a grand jury. After the four-day grand jury session, Khalsa was indicted on the charge of first-degree murder.

Fifty-eight year-old Khalsa, a prominent member of the local Sikh community and owner of a local trucking firm, avoided trial for three years by changing attorneys. In March 2010, a jury was selected for Khalsa’s murder trial.  I would become Juror No. 7.