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Black Rage Confronts the Law

Author: Paul Harris

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1997-05

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0814735274

Harris, creator of the black rage defense, traces its origin. Emphasizing that the black rage defense must be enlisted responsibly and selectively, he skillfully distinguishes between applying an environmental defense and simply blaming society in the abstract for individual crimes. He also addresses the possibilities of a white rage defense and the more recent phenomenon of cultural defenses. He illustrates how a person's environment can and does affect his or her life and actions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Black Rage Confronts the Law

Author: Paul Harris

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1997-05-01

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 081477315X

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Traces the origins of the black rage defense in criminal court history In 1971, Paul Harris pioneered the modern version of the black rage defense when he successfully defended a young black man charged with armed bank robbery. Dubbed one of the most novel criminal defenses in American history by Vanity Fair, the black rage defense is enormously controversial, frequently dismissed as irresponsible, nothing less than a harbinger of anarchy. Consider the firestorm of protest that resulted when the defense for Colin Ferguson, the gunman who murdered numerous passengers on a New York commuter train, claimed it was considering a black rage defense. In this thought-provoking book, Harris traces the origins of the black rage defense back through American history, recreating numerous dramatic trials along the way. For example, he recounts in vivid detail how Clarence Darrow, defense attorney in the famous Scopes Monkey trial, first introduced the notion of an environmental hardship defense in 1925 while defending a black family who shot into a drunken white mob that had encircled their home. Emphasizing that the black rage defense must be enlisted responsibly and selectively, Harris skillfully distinguishes between applying an environmental defense and simply blaming society, in the abstract, for individual crimes. If Ferguson had invoked such a defense, in Harris's words, it would have sent a superficial, wrong-headed, blame-everything-on-racism message. Careful not to succumb to easy generalizations, Harris also addresses the possibilities of a white rage defense and the more recent phenomenon of cultural defenses. He illustrates how a person's environment can, and does, affect his or her life and actions, how even the most rational person can become criminally deranged, when bludgeoned into hopelessness by exploitation, racism, and relentless poverty.

Black Rage Confronts the Law

Author: Paul Harris

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1999-05

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0814735924

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The Rage of Innocence

Author: Kristin Henning

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-09-28

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 1524748919

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A brilliant analysis of the foundations of racist policing in America: the day-to-day brutalities, largely hidden from public view, endured by Black youth growing up under constant police surveillance and the persistent threat of physical and psychological abuse "Storytelling that can make people understand the racial inequities of the legal system, and...restore the humanity this system has cruelly stripped from its victims.” —New York Times Book Review Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience representing Black youth in Washington, D.C.’s juvenile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America’s irrational, manufactured fears of these young people and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children. Henning explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police, and she details the long-term consequences of racism that they experience at the hands of the police and their vigilante surrogates. She makes clear that unlike White youth, who are afforded the freedom to test boundaries, experiment with sex and drugs, and figure out who they are and who they want to be, Black youth are seen as a threat to White America and are denied healthy adolescent development. She examines the criminalization of Black adolescent play and sexuality, and of Black fashion, hair, and music. She limns the effects of police presence in schools and the depth of police-induced trauma in Black adolescents. Especially in the wake of the recent unprecedented, worldwide outrage at racial injustice and inequality, The Rage of Innocence is an essential book for our moment.

Black Rage

Author: William H. Grier

Publisher: Bantam Books

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13:

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This acclaimed work by two black psychiatrists has established itself as the classic statement of the desperation, conflicts, and anger of black life in America.

Race, Ethnicity, and Crime

Author: Dianne Williams

Publisher: Algora Publishing

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0875869165

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Melting pot or tossed salad? the U.S. criminal justice system may prove to be fueling intolerance rather than enabling society to accommodate racial and ethnic differences. This fresh new textbook to balance theory and the real world, addressing topics relating to race, ethnicity, criminality and criminalization, looking at the criminal justice system, the media, and the death penalty. In addition to information on crime and incarceration rates, White-collar crime, and the "typical criminal," the discussion of minorities and public perceptions is set within a broader context including the issues of terrorism and human trafficking, where race and ethnicity are also vital to public perceptions. the manual is designed for junior colleges and four year colleges, including those offering distance-learning courses. It is a thought-provoking combination of facts and questions. the pedagogical focus is on collaborative, problem-based learning, with foundational support for the development of critical thinking and analytical skills.

Whispered Consolations

Author: Jon-Christian Suggs

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2009-12-10

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0472022822

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African Americans have experienced life under the rule of law in quite different contexts from those of whites, and they have written about those differences in poems, songs, stories, autobiographies, novels, and memoirs. This book examines the tradition of American law as it appears in African American literary life, from pre-Revolutionary murder trials to gangsta rap. The experience, and the critique it produces, changes our pictures of both American law and African American literature. This study reads the already canonical works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black literature in the context of their responses to and critiques of American legal history. At the same time, it examines little known texts of African American life, from the urban humor of James D. Corrothers, through the early political essays of Chester Himes, to the adventures of black comic book heroes like Steel, Wise Son, and Xero. These are contextualized within specific legislation and case law, from the slave laws of early Virginia to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, from the case of Phillis and Mark in 1755 to the Simpson trials of the mid 1990s. Finally, the legal texts presented are themselves critiqued by the fictions and legal analyses of the African Americans who lived out their implications in their daily lives. Through a positing of the legal and cultural concepts of privacy, property, identity, desire and citizenship, and the romantic ideals of authenticity, irony, and innocence, Suggs is able to show how our understanding of American law should be influenced by African American conceptions of it as depicted through literature. This book will appeal to students and scholars of literary and cultural studies, law and literature, American history, as well as to scholars of African American literature and culture. Jon-Christian Suggs is Professor of English, John Jay College, City University of New York.

Shifting the Blame

Author: Saundra Davis Westervelt

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780813525846

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More than just a study of legal history, Shifting the Blame looks at the "abuse excuse" defense as an indicator of broad social change in cultural understandings of victimization, responsibility, and womanhood. The introduction of victimization as an exculpatory condition within the context of a criminal defense tells the story of a society that has accepted victimization as a new way of explaining and excusing misbehavior. Through case law analysis, the book documents the initial development of the strategy in three different types of cases in the 1970s - "rotten social background", brainwashing, and battered women's self-defense cases. Since its initial acceptance in battered women's cases in the early 1980s, the use of the strategy has expanded to a variety of offenders in different types of relationships arguing different defenses. In lively, readable prose, Westervelt examines each form of expansion, revealing that while the expansion of the strategy has been fairly extensive, it has also been limited in some important ways. Her research shows readers that only certain types of "victims," particularly victims of physical abuse, have successfully used this defense. Shifting the Blame exposes the ways in which the acceptance of this new defense strategy illuminates a cultural shift in understandings of individual responsibility and shows how the law plays a role in defining who can be an acceptable victim. Saundra D. Westervelt is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.