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A mother’s search for the son she gave up uncovers terrifying secrets in a Minnesota town in this “masterfully depicted true-crime tale” (Publishers Weekly). In 1962, Jerry Sherwood gave up her newborn son, Dennis, for adoption. Twenty years later, she set out to find him—only to discover he had died before his fourth birthday. The immediate cause was peritonitis, but the coroner had never decided the mode of death, writing “deferred” rather than indicate accident, natural causes, or homicide. This he did even though the autopsy photos showed Dennis covered from head to toe in ugly bruises, his clenched fists and twisted facial expression suggesting he had died writhing in pain. ...
How one man brought the Olympics to Los Angeles, fueling the city's urban transformation. Dreamers and Schemers chronicles how Los Angeles’s pursuit and staging of the 1932 Olympic Games during the depths of the Great Depression helped fuel the city’s transformation from a seedy frontier village to a world-famous metropolis. Leading that pursuit was the “Prince of Realtors,” William May (Billy) Garland, a prominent figure in early Los Angeles. In important respects, the story of Billy Garland is the story of Los Angeles. After arriving in Southern California in 1890, he and his allies drove much of the city’s historic expansion in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then, from 1920 to 1932, he directed the city’s bid for the 1932 Olympic Games. Garland’s quest to host the Olympics provides an unusually revealing window onto a particular time, place, and way of life. Reconstructing the narrative from Garland’s visionary notion to its consequential aftermath, Barry Siegel shows how one man’s grit and imagination made California history.
In this remarkable legal page-turner, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Barry Siegel recounts the dramatic, decades-long saga of Bill Macumber, imprisoned for thirty-eight years for a double homicide he denies committing. In the spring of 1962, a school bus full of students stumbled across a mysterious crime scene on an isolated stretch of Arizona desert: an abandoned car and two bodies. This brutal murder of a young couple bewildered the sheriff 's department of Maricopa County for years. Despite a few promising leads—including several chilling confessions from Ernest Valenzuela, a violent repeat offender—the case went cold. More than a decade later, a clerk in the sheriff 's departme...
In 1948, three civilian engineers were killed in an Air Force plane crash while testing secret navigational equipment. The widows filed suit, but the Air Force, at the dawn of the Cold War, refused to hand over accident reports and witness statements, claiming the documents contained classified information that would threaten national security. In 1953 the Supreme Court sided with the Air Force in United States v. Reynolds, formally recognizing the "state secrets" privilege, a legal precedent since used to conceal conduct, withhold documents, block troublesome litigation, and, most recently, detain terror suspects without due process. A half century later, the government revealed the "top-secret" information--there were no national security secrets, but rather a shocking chronicle of negligence. This book tells the story of this shameful incident, and the dangerous consequences of this historic cover-up: the violation of civil liberties and the abuse of constitutional protections.--From publisher description.
Doug Bard has been a detective with the sheriff’s department in La Graciosa, California, long enough to know the score. Now that an influx of upscale chain stores and luxury housing has turned sleepy Chumash County into a boom town, the last thing anyone wants is crime casting a shadow over the prosperity. But Bard also knows he’s not the kind of man who can write off a double fatality as a tragic accident—especially when all his instincts tell him it was murder. When a devastating housefire claims the lives of a kindly local retiree and his eleven-year-old piano student, District Attorney Angela Stark wastes no time declaring the blaze a mishap. But the verdict just doesn’t sit righ...
Was Edward Snowden a patriot or a traitor? Just how far do American privacy rights extend? And how far is too far when it comes to government secrecy in the name of security? These are just a few of the questions that have dominated American consciousness since Edward Snowden exposed the breath of the NSA's domestic surveillance program. In these seven previously unpublished essays, a group of prominent legal and political experts delve in to life After Snowden, examining the ramifications of the infamous leak from multiple angles: • Washington lawyer and literary agent RONALD GOLDFARB acts as the book's editor and provides an introduction outlining the many debates sparked by the Snowden ...
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What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She then introduces a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experienc...
Small-town lawyer Greg Monarch takes on the legal challenge of his career when he agrees to defend his former partner against a charge of murder.
The word "ethical” can be defined as proper conduct. A failure of forensic scientists to act ethically can result in serious adverse outcomes. However, while seemingly simple to define, the application of being "ethical” is somewhat more obscure. That is, when is ethical, ethical, and when is it not? Because we have an adversarial legal system, differences of opinion exist in forensic science. However, there are instances when differences are so divergent that an individual's ethics are called into question. In light of not only the O.J. Simpson trial - the first national trial to question the ethical behavior of forensic scientists - and the National Academy of Science critique of foren...