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Justice
A young GI in Germany during the Korean War making the journey from war to peace, and from enmity to friendship, finds, amid the most tremendous change, smoldering embers of an old tyranny.
Separate and Unequal and Unconstitutional
A five-day uprising by Irish immigrants in New York was ostensibly against the draft, but was in fact a chance for Irish mobs to attack and murder as many black people as possible.
Kevin Baker, our “In The News” columnist, has just published a historical novel called Paradise Alley.
What happens when the constitution is set aside in the name of "national security"?
What does it mean to be an American? This may sound like a trite question, but it is one that we have been asking for the entire history of the United States, and it has more relevance than ever in the age of globalization—and terrorism.
For nearly a hundred years, the FBI has been fighting for America, and its discipline and professionalism have often been at odds with its shadowy, extra-legal tactics.
When American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, Robert S. Mueller III, had been at his post for just one week.
Our platoon was probably the only group of Allied soldiers to witness the final degradation of Mussolini.
In December of 1942, I was drafted and sent overseas to Oran, Algeria, where I was assigned to the 91st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron. The eyes and ears for the troops, we rode in jeeps, armored cars, and light tanks, scouting the numbers and supplies of the enemy forces.
There have never been many of them, and they haven’t always behaved well. But, for more than a century now, they’ve been one of the most famous law-enforcement outfits in the world.
The trouble with military trials
Secret military tribunals, from which there is no appeal, are imbued with the power to order the secret execution of non-citizens, the suspension of habeas corpus for suspected terrorists, and the abrogation of attorney-client confidentiality.
On the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the granddaughter of a Japanese detainee recalls the community he lost and the fight he waged in the Supreme Court to win back the right to earn a living.
To the casual visitor, terminal island in Los Angeles Harbor is no more than a complex of dull warehouses and empty lots.
WHY BASEBALL DOESN’T PLAY BY THE RULES OF BUSINESS
As the 2000 election made very clear, we are torn between revering judges and despising them. It’s in the nature of the job.
A judge, the old saw goes, is a lawyer who knew a governor (or a president or a senator). In most states, a judge is a lawyer who knows how to attract voters.
Should our leaders say they’re sorry about slavery? About Indians? About their personal behavior? Such questions are hardly new; public contrition has been a national preoccupation for centuries.
Before President Clinton went to Africa in March of this year, his press secretary, Mike McCurry, made a double announcement. The president would discuss American slavery while visiting the continent from which America’s slaves had come. But he would not apologize for it.
Can it be fair? Humane? Does it deter crime? These very current questions troubled Americans just as much in the day of the Salem witch trials as in the day of Timothy McVeigh.
Why the possible liaison between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings matters to us.
When the Supreme ruled that President Clinton was not immune during his term of office from Paula Jones’s suit charging alleged sexual harassment, I thought at once of writing a column about the accusations of sexual misconduct brought against previous Presidents.
A turn-of-the-century jurist devoted his life to keeping the young out of what he called “a school for crime.”
When I came upon a news item not long ago to the effect that the Florida representative Bill McCollum had called for changes in federal law that would allow for the trial (in certain circumstances) of 13- and 14-year-old juveniles as adults and that other “get-tough” members of
He was a Northerner. He was an industrialist. He was a Jew. And a young girl was murdered in his factory.
ON DECEMBER 23, 1983, THE LEAD EDITORIAL IN THE ATLANTA CONSTITUTION began, “Leo Frank has been lynched a second time.” The first lynching had occurred almost 70 years earlier, when Leo Frank, convicted murderer of a t13-
IT BEGAN AS America’s most modern penal institution, and, for generations, the Vermont State Prison reflected the changing ways by which we thought we should punish our wrongdoers. Then, a tormented era and a ghastly crime combined to end its old career, and give it a surprising new one.
Most of them were American soldiers who fought with skill, discipline, and high courage against a U.S. Army that numbered Ulysses Grant in its ranks. The year was 1847.
The court-martial of Captain John O’Reilly was one of 29 convened by the United States Army at the San Angel prison camp in Mexico on August 28, 1847: 36 other men of O’Reilly’s San Patricio Battalion faced courts-martial on that same day at nearby Tacubaya.
A letter dated June 15, 1995 came to me clipped to an attachment: our July/August cover, scissored from the issue. It showed a somber O. J. Simpson in three-quarter profile behind a cover line— THE JURY ON TRIAL —heralding Hiller B.
Is trial by jury the essential underpinning of our system of justice or, as more and more critics charge, a relic so flawed that it should perhaps even be abolished? An experienced trial judge examines the historical evidence in the case.
The distinguished lawyer could not restrain himself. Even in the somber pages of the American Bar Association’s Tort & Insurance Law Journal late last year, his rage blazed and fulminated.
He spent his tour of duty bombing German cities and made it home only to discover he could never leave the war behind him. Then, a lifetime later, he found a way to make peace.
My story begins in 1925. I was the youngest of nine children born to Frank and Leata Clark, factory workers in southern Wisconsin who were hit hard by the Depression. My father died when I was 13.
There was no evidence that Captain Rosenbluth was a murderer, but Henry Ford set out to prove him one.
On an October afternoon in 1918, Major Alexander Pennington "Buddy" Cronkhite took practice with a .45 at a tobacco can atop a post at Camp Lewis, Washington.
Why litigiousness Is a national character trait
BACK BEFORE CLAUS VON BULOW ever heard of Jeremy Irons, a judge who found the news media’s attitude toward the case puzzling put a question to a friendly television reporter.
On the morning of December 8, 1969, our taxicab stopped at the main entrance of the United States Supreme Court, and my wife and I saw through the back-seat window the long sweeping steps, a portico with massive Corinthian columns, and the words EQUAL J
Justice served nearly 50 years ago in a wrecked German city still casts its light and shadow over much of the world.
A SENSATION OF PARALLEL TIME, of one eye fixed on the present and the other focused on the past, of one ear hearing the moment and the other distant echoes, was there from the beginning of the project. Nuremberg 1945, San Miguel de Allende 1991.
Want to write about a famous crime? Why not start out by totally ignoring character and motive?
The presumption of innocence is carried a very long way by the American reading public, at least when it comes to celebrated crimes. Despite the weight of the evidence against them, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and James Earl Ray, all have their dogged defenders in print.
For the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, we devoted the entire December issue to the Second World War.