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Finally, convicted murderess Louisa Collins can tell her own story. But will she confess?To lose one husband may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like murder.Louisa Collins was hung in New South Wales in 1889. She was tried four times for the alleged murders of her two husbands. In three of those trials the juries could not agree that she was guilty. At her fourth trial the testimony of Louisa's young daughter, May, contributed to Louisa's conviction. Intimately reimagined from Louisa's perspective, with a story that just might fit the historical facts, this clever and compelling novel visits Louisa in her prison cell as she reflects on her life and the death and loss that have dictated her fate. Will she confess? Or was an innocent woman brutally hanged?

When an out-of-town merchandiser goes missing in 1930s rural Southern Appalachia, whiskey and foul play are suspected. The small town of Woodbury, Tennessee, soon forgets and moves on, until the man's skeletal remains are uncovered three years later by two boys digging for mayapple root. Two men are immediately charged with the murder, though only one would be convicted. The trial would attract newspapers from across the state and beyond through the end of the decade. The story was lost to time and largely unknown to the descendants of those involved. The tale might have stayed buried in the past if not for a pulp fiction magazine that made its way back to the family some seventy years later.

A powerful novel about three young women caught in the hysteria of their own times. In 1628, Veronica and her brother flee for their lives into the German woods after their father is burned at the stake. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, Scottish maid Katherine is lured into political dissent after her parents are butchered for their beliefs. In present-day Australia, Paisley navigates her way through the burning torches of small-town gossip after her mother's new-age shop comes under scrutiny.

A tale of love, class, and murder during the era of the trade-union movement in nineteenth-century England, from the author of North and South. In Manchester, long-suffering John Barton and his daughter, Mary, both want a better future for each other.  John toils away with the trades' union for better wages for his fellow workers in the textile mill, while Mary must consider whom she will marry. She decides to leave the working-class Jem Wilson, hoping instead to wed Harry Carson, the wealthy mill owner's son. But when Harry is shot down in the street, Jem becomes the prime suspect—and learning the truth may yield a future Mary cannot bear.   A portrait of the working class's struggles during the Victorian era, Mary Barton was Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel. She went on to write classics such as Wives and Daughters and was the creator of the town of Cranford, the setting for several BBC series.

This is the story of Omar, a man convicted of murder and sentenced to seventeen years in prison. Despite appearances, this is also the story of a criminal justice system that fails to effectively guarantee the fundamental rights of the defendant. Omar's case is not unique, but a telling example of the systematic failure of the Colombian criminal justice, which is not fit for the purpose of protecting the constitutional rights to access to justice and to defense. Through the account of Omar's case, here Iturralde discusses the legal fiction of the right to access to justice and to defense in the Colombian criminal justice system, pinpointing its features and especially its systematic shortcomings, despite legal guarantees and recent legal reforms. He will also try to make sense of why this is the case and how it is not a peculiarity of the Colombian criminal justice, but rather a worrying trend that affects different liberal democracies from the global north and south.

In 1930s Paris, Madeleine, a pretty, young, penniless and talentless actress, is accused of murdering a famous producer. Helped by her best friend Pauline, a young unemployed lawyer, she is acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. A new life of fame and success begins, until the truth comes out.

How a society defines crimes and prosecutes criminals illuminates its cultural values, social norms, and political expectations. InMurder Most Russian, Louise McReynolds uses a fascinating series of murders and subsequent trials that took place in the wake of the 1864 legal reforms enacted by Tsar Alexander II to understand the impact of these reforms on Russian society before the Revolution of 1917. For the first time in Russian history, the accused were placed in the hands of juries of common citizens in courtrooms that were open to the press. Drawing on a wide array of sources, McReynolds reconstructs murders that gripped Russian society, from the case of Andrei Gilevich, who advertised for a personal secretary and beheaded the respondent as a way of perpetrating insurance fraud, to the beating death of Marianna Time at the hands of two young aristocrats who hoped to steal her diamond earrings. As McReynolds shows, newspapers covered such trials extensively, transforming the courtroom into the most public site in Russia for deliberation about legality and justice. To understand the cultural and social consequences of murder in late imperial Russia, she analyzes the discussions that arose among the emergent professional criminologists, defense attorneys, and expert forensic witnesses about what made a defendant's behavior \"criminal.\" She also deftly connects real criminal trials to the burgeoning literary genre of crime fiction and fruitfully compares the Russian case to examples of crimes both from Western Europe and the United States in this period. Murder Most Russianwill appeal not only to readers interested in Russian culture and true crime but also to historians who study criminology, urbanization, the role of the social sciences in forging the modern state, evolving notions of the self and the psyche, the instability of gender norms, and sensationalism in the modern media.

A Southern town scandalized by the murder of its most prominent citizen uncovers a mystery even more shocking in this ironic suspense story from a great American master Afraid for her infant son's life, a slave switches the boy with her master's child. A young New York lawyer fascinated by palmistry and fingerprint analysis moves below the Mason–Dixon line, makes a bad joke, and is immediately and forever branded a \"pudd'nhead.\" Two Italian noblemen pay a visit to Dawson's Landing, Missouri, and become prime suspects in the murder of a local judge. From these disparate plot strands, Mark Twain fashions a humorous and entertaining tale with all the elements of the traditional murder mystery: a case of mistaken identity, a gruesome crime, a sinister villain, an eccentric detective, a climactic courtroom showdown, and an ingenious solution. But beneath this potboiler's pomp and circumstance lurks a clear-eyed and savagely compelling indictment of slavery and its poisonous effects on American society. Twain's last novel set in the antebellum South, Pudd'nhead Wilson offers his clearest and most provocative condemnation of racial prejudice. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF FEBRUARY 10, 1930, CHARLES GUERAND, a white, off-duty New Orleans policeman, fatally shot fourteen-year-old Hattie McCray, an African American dishwasher, after she rebuffed his sexual advances. For New Orleanians, white and African American alike, the aftermath of this shooting proved to be more shocking than the murder itself. Although Guerand eventually escaped execution, his conviction and incarceration made this case stand apart from the other 2,117 homicide cases in New Orleans between 1920 and 1945. Both national and local observers declared that the verdict heralded the dawn of a new era in race relations. This essay, however, argues that the Guerand verdict reinforced the racial order of Jim Crow New Orleans. For local law enforcers, and especially for Eugene Stanley, the Orleans Parish district attorney who spearheaded the prosecution, the trial and conviction of Charles Guerand was an expression of a more zealous and more unyielding embrace of Jim Crow and a hardening of racial boundaries.

A wealthy dowager confronts the brutality of the class system and fights for justice in this dramatic account of the Sacco and Vanzetti case With the publication of The Jungle in 1906, Upton Sinclair became the literary conscience of America. Two decades later, he brought his singular artistry and steadfast commitment to the cause of social equality to bear on the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists accused of armed robbery and murder. Boston, a \"documentary novel\" published one year after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, brilliantly combines fact and fiction to expose the toxic atmosphere of paranoia, prejudice, and greed in which the two men were tried.   Recently widowed sixty-year-old Cornelia Thornwell abandons her Boston Brahmin family to take a factory job in Plymouth, Massachusetts. She witnesses the crushing poverty and heartless bigotry endured by immigrant laborers, and befriends the charismatic fishmonger Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a committed anarchist and atheist. When Vanzetti and his fellow countryman Nicola Sacco are arrested and charged with murder, Cornelia's belief in the fairness of the American judicial system is shattered. Joining the public outcry heard from Boston to Buenos Aires, she demands a fair trial—but it is too late. As Sacco knew all too well: \"They got us, they will kill us.\"   This ebook has been authorized by the estate of Upton Sinclair.