The Trial On Trial

Over the past few years, public attention focused on the Jian Ghomeshi trial, the failings of Judge Greg Lenehan in the Halifax taxi driver case, and the judicial disciplinary proceedings against former Justice Robin Camp have placed the sexual assault trial process under significant scrutiny. Less than one percent of the sexual assaults that occur each year in Canada result in legal sanction for those who commit these offences. Survivors often distrust and fear the criminal justice process, and as a result, over ninety percent of sexual assaults go unreported. Unfortunately, their fears are well founded. In this thorough evaluation of the legal culture and courtroom practices prevalent in sexual assault prosecutions, Elaine Craig provides an even-handed account of the ways in which the legal profession unnecessarily – and sometimes unlawfully – contributes to the trauma and re-victimization experienced by those who testify as sexual assault complainants. Gathering conclusive evidence from interviews with experienced lawyers across Canada, reported case law, lawyer memoirs, recent trial transcripts, and defence lawyers’ public statements and commercial advertisements, Putting Trials on Trial demonstrates that – despite prominent contestations – complainants are regularly subjected to abusive, humiliating, and discriminatory treatment when they turn to the law to respond to sexual violations. In pursuit of trial practices that are less harmful to sexual assault complainants as well as survivors of sexual violence more broadly, Putting Trials on Trial makes serious, substantiated, and necessary claims about the ethical and cultural failures of the Canadian legal profession.

This book is questions whether the discovery of truth is the central aim of the rules and practices of criminal investigation and trial.

This page-turning translation of a seventeenth-century infanticide trial tells the story of a single mother accused of poisoning two children, including her own.

What do you do when your father becomes the enemy of your family? Danny McMillan never knew that his father was abusing his mother, until a night of violence that shattered his family forever. Watching in the courtroom as his father is sentenced, Danny struggles with divided loyalties -- to his mother on one side and to his father whom he wants to forgive on the other. After one trial is over, another begins for Danny. Social services and the police convince Danny's mother that they must go into a victim protection program. Danny is asked to leave everything behind -- his home, his friends, and the love and support of his grandparents. In a new city and attending a new school, Danny is even given a new name -- David Mayer. But who is David? He is someone that Danny does not want to be, living a life he cannot accept. As David, he is pushing boundaries he never would have pushed.

In unraveling the long-hidden issues of the most famous free speech case of all time, noted author I.F. Stone ranges far and wide over Roman as well as Greek history to present an engaging and rewarding introduction to classical antiquity and its relevance to society today. The New York Times called this national best-seller an "intellectual thriller."

What are the aims of a criminal trial? What social functions should it perform? And how is the trial as a political institution linked to other institutions in a democratic polity? What follows if we understand a criminal trial as calling a defendant to answer to a charge of criminal wrongdoing and, if he is judged to be responsible for such wrongdoing, to account for his conduct? A normative theory of the trial, an account of what trials ought to be and of what ends they should serve, must take these central aspects of the trial seriously; but they raise a number of difficult questions. They suggest that the trial should be seen as a communicative process: but what kinds of communication should it involve? What kind of political theory does a communicative conception of the trial require? Can trials ever actually amount to more than the imposition of state power on the defendant? What political role might trials play in conflicts that must deal not simply with issues of individual responsibility but with broader collective wrongs, including wrongs perpetrated by, or in the name of, the state? These are the issues addressed by the essays in this volume. The third volume in this series, in which the four editors of this volume develop their own normative account, will be published in 2007.