Conklin on The Admissiblity of Rap Lyrics in Court: A Review of As We Speak

Michael Conklin, Angelo State University; Texas A&M School of Law, is publishing The Admissibility of Rap Lyrics in Court: A Review of As We Speak in the Journal of Law & Social Deviance. Here is the abstract.

The use of rap lyrics at trial is a timely issue given the current confluence of events, including the Young Thug trial, the Black Lives Matter movement, a growing “tough on crime” sentiment due to rising violent crime, the introduction of the Restoring Artistic Protection (RAP) Act in Congress, and societal debate about separating the artist from the art. This review provides a critical analysis of the 2024 documentary As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial, a film that advocates against the use of rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials. The cinematography is beautiful, creating an aesthetically pleasing experience. And it is engagingly structured as a road movie with the guide, rapper Kemba, taking the viewer to Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York City, and London to interview rappers and legal experts. This results in a powerful documentary that has received glowing reviews from both film critics and audiences. Unfortunately, while the film’s subject is certainly a legitimate topic of discussion, the film suffers from significant shortcomings. This review will analyze how the leading study regarding rap on trial is deceptively presented, misrepresentations of the topic as a free-speech issue whereby rap lyrics are “criminalized,” ineffective attempts to analogize rappers to Shakespearian actors, and claims regarding race that are contrary to the evidence.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bellin on Murder on the Hearsay Trail @BellinJ @WMLawSchool @TAMU_Law_Review

Jeffrey Bellin, William & Mary Law School, is publishing Murder on the Hearsay Trail in the Texas A&M Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Judges, lawyers, and law students struggle to apply American evidence law’s most distinctive feature – the hearsay prohibition. The problem is that hearsay is difficult to master and astonishingly dull. At the same time, hearsay evidence is ubiquitous and important. Every litigator has a story about a judge’s eccentric hearsay rulings; mine is the trial judge who waved his hand dismissively at hearsay objections, letting witnesses answer on the grounds that, “I want to hear it.” And the case law is littered with appellate opinions scolding trial judges for erroneous hearsay rulings while introducing errors of their own. That is just the visible aspect of the problem. Lawyers are no better at hearsay than judges. Yet for every trial, there are countless non-trial resolutions where no evidence is presented, much less ruled upon. When hearsay is involved, parties evaluate the wisdom of these dispositions (dismissals, settlements, and guilty pleas) with only a rough understanding of the evidence that would be admissible at trial. This Article attempts to remedy this unsettling state of affairs. First, to get around the dullness problem, it weaves hearsay analysis into a mystery in the spirit of a John Grisham novel. The fictional tale of intrigue and murder twists and turns while dropping clues that ultimately solve the case. Then, the Article tackles hearsay’s complexity by solving the evidentiary puzzles inherent in those clues, which represent key inflexion points in the doctrine. By explaining which clues can be presented to the jury, and how those answers evolved over time, the Article paints the modern American hearsay landscape and rehabilitates its (unfairly) reviled rules. Finally, the Article explains why – if we are going to have a hearsay prohibition – this is as good as it gets. Contrary to the complaints of a legion of critics, the current hearsay definition is the simplest of the alternatives and offers the best results.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Casini on Addressing the Use of Rap Lyrics as Criminal Evidence @KCEsq @QuinnipiacLaw

Kevin Casini, Qiunnipiac University School of Law, has published Addressing the Use of Rap Lyrics as Criminal Evidence. Here is the abstract.

The judicial bias against rap music is a growing contributor to systemic racism that must be ended before it causes any more damage. Whether because of personally held beliefs, latent cultural insensitivity, or a win-at-all-costs prosecutorial approach to criminal trials that promotes an appeal to those traits in jurors, prosecutors should be bound from using the Constitutionally protected speech and expression in rap lyrics as evidence against criminal defendants. At an increasing frequency, courts across the country are making it known that they have no problem using a rapper’s lyrics against them in a criminal case. This practice is particularly egregious, not only because of its chilling effect on creativity but because it is specifically targeted against rap music and rap music alone; in other words, it is a practice targeted against Black defendants. Congress now needs to enact law expressly upholding, again, freedom of expression, and preventing that expressive speech from being weaponized against the communities that rely on it to express themselves, to tell the stories of their communities, and to create, and recreate, identity.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Stern on Biographical Evidence and the Law of Presumptions @ArsScripta @StanfordLawHist @J19Americanists @HedgehogsFoxes @ProjectMUSE

Simon Stern, University of Toronto, has published Biographical Evidence and the Law of Presumptions, at 9 J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 83-89 (2021). Here is the abstract.

The rules and history of evidence law can provide useful resources for understanding the role of biographical evidence in literary criticism. During the nineteenth century, as evidence law became increasingly formalized, presumptions acquired a newfound significance as a device for allocating the burden of proof in evidentiary disputes. Presumptions generally operate by stipulating a legal conclusion that flows from a certain factual premise, such that the conclusion remains dispositive unless the opposing party offers witnesses or documents that contradict it. The result is a burden-shifting procedure that licenses a generic inference, assumed to flow from a factual premise but capable of being rebutted by specific details to the contrary. Literary critics often use biographical evidence in a similar fashion: in the absence of concrete information about a writer's beliefs or experiences, critics use some kinds of generic biographical information to draw inferences about the attitudes that someone with a certain background would have held. When more specific biographical details become available, they are used to confirm, refine, or contradict those inferences. Unlike lawyers, however, literary critics tend to use biographical information of all kinds—both generic and specific—to raise new inferences rather than to resolve questions definitively.

Solan on Linguistic Evidentials and the Law of Hearsay @brooklynlaw @OxUniPress

Lawrence M. Solan, Brooklyn Law School, is publishing Linguistic Evidentials and the Law of Hearsay in Philosophical Foundations of Evidence (Oxford University Press, 2020) (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

This essay, using insights derived from linguistics and the philosophy of language, explores the relationship between how natural language expresses degrees of certainty in the truth of an assertion on the one hand, and how the law handles this issue on the other. The hearsay rule bars certain kinds of speech acts from serving as legal evidence, in particular assertions that report what another person earlier said, and which are offered to express the truth about the events at issue in a case. Some languages actually require that a speaker specify the source of information conveyed. At a trial, the witness will use one expression if he saw the defendant at the relevant time, another expression if he knows this information from having been told, and perhaps a third if he figured it out from the circumstances. Just as English speakers include tense as part of their linguistic expressions, other languages, including Cuzco Quechua (a Peruvian language) and Turkish include information about how the speaker came to know the assertions that he makes. These linguistic elements are called evidentials. In essence, these languages have a built-in identifier of hearsay. They require that the speaker tip off the hearer when a statement is made based on hearsay evidence. In some ways, the use of evidentials mirrors the hearsay rule in law. But in other respects, the two systems differ. This essay introduces the legal community to evidentials, and explores similarities and differences between legal and linguistic rules.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Simon-Kerr on Unmasking Demeanor @UConnLaw

Julia Ann Simon-Kerr, University of Connecticut School of Law, has published Unmasking Demeanor. Here is the abstract.

Demeanor is seen as a critical tool for assessing credibility in U.S. courtrooms. From the Confrontation Clause to the Immigration and Nationality Act to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to the common law of credibility, the U.S. legal system gives priority and deference to assessing demeanor in the courtroom. Evidence law instructs that we must see a witness’s whole face in order to effectively “read” demeanor. Yet, a growing number of jurisdictions will require all participants in the courtroom to wear masks covering the nose, mouth and chin in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This essay canvasses the legal impediments to mask-wearing by witnesses. It argues that these legal obstacles are surmountable, and that this mask-wearing moment offers a unique opportunity to reassess the role of demeanor in credibility assessments. Focusing on demeanor forces witnesses to perform credibility, a performance that does not necessarily bring us closer to the truth.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Okidegbe on "A 'Bad Rap': R. v. Skeete and the Admissibility of Rap Lyric Evidence @NgoziOkidegbe @CardozoLaw

Ngozi Okidegbe, Cardozo School of Law, has published A ‘Bad Rap’: R. v. Skeete and the Admissibility of Rap Lyric Evidence at 66 Crim. L.Q. 294 (2018). Here is the abstract.

This paper explores the evidentiary treatment of violent and prejudicial defendant-authored rap lyrics in Canadian criminal trials. It argues that the current evidentiary threshold jeopardizes trial fairness by allowing the Crown to adduce highly prejudicial rap lyric evidence at trial. It also problematizes the judicial reliance on corroborative evidence, which does not establish the truthfulness of the lyrics tendered, to admit these violent rap lyrics at trial. It argues that the reliance on such corroborative evidence results in a misapprehension of the lyrics’ evidentiary value and ultimately in the admission of defendant-authored rap lyric evidence of low probative value at trial. This result is particularly concerning in the case of young black male defendants, since the introduction of their lyrics at trial can prime a jury’s unconscious anti-black bias and therefore serve to increase the distortive effect of this type of evidence on the fairness and integrity of criminal proceedings. It concludes by advocating for a rap specific approach to the admissibility of this evidence.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Brooks on Dying Declarations @Princeton

Peter Brooks, Center for Human Values, Princeton University, is publishing Dying Declarations in Fictional Discourse and the Law (Hans J. Lind, ed., New York and London: Routledge, Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

In Chavez v. Martinez, where a police officer interrogated a badly wounded—blinded and partially paralyzed—suspect undergoing treatment in the emergency room, Justice Kennedy evoked the ancient doctrine of “dying declarations,” which provides an exception to the exclusion of hearsay evidence in the case of words spoken where “the expectation of almost immediate death will remove all temptation to falsehood.” In a context once marked by the fear of eternal damnation, the brink of death was considered to produce the truth. One can find in the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts—containing confessions from those about to be hung at Tyburn—material that may both confirm and throw some doubt on the unconstrained truth of the dying declaration. But here I am especially concerned with deathbed scenes in the nineteenthcentury novel as moments of the transmission of truth—or sometimes a kind of cosmic lie. My examples are drawn from Balzac, Dickens, Collins, and Conrad.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Wilson @richardawilson7 on Propaganda and History in International Criminal Trials

Richard Ashby Wilson, University of Connecticut School of Law, is publishing Propaganda and History in International Criminal Trials in the Journal of International Criminal Justice (2016). Here is the abstract.

In the course of prosecuting crimes against humanity, international criminal tribunals from the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg to the International Criminal Court (ICC) have provided accounts of the origins and causes of mass atrocities. Their historical narratives exhibit a common feature that has not been remarked upon, and that is the central role they assign to political propaganda in explaining popular participation in mass crimes. Judges have invoked propaganda to answer one of the most vexing questions at international criminal tribunals: why neighbor turned against neighbor and committed extreme acts of collective violence in contexts characterized by long periods of co-existence. This article evaluates the evidence for claims regarding the role of propaganda and concludes that eyewitness evidence for the causal role of propaganda is often slender and unconvincing. Insiders and material perpetrators more often than not repudiate their original testimony amid allegations of intimidation and bribery. At times, judges have balked at expert evidence on propaganda and refused to recognize it as germane to a criminal trial. Given the relative paucity of evidence for a directly causal role, why has propaganda become one of the overarching narratives that international courts employ to explain atrocities during armed conflicts? How does the model of causation customarily used in criminal law shape the kind of histories that international courts write? In answering these questions, the article refers to the unique model of causation used in criminal law, the apolitical nature of propaganda as an historical explanation, and the moral expressivist function of criminal courts.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Wendie Ellen Schneider on Veracity in the Victorian Courtroom

ICYMI: Wendie Ellen Schneider has published Engines of Truth: Producing Veracity in the Victorian Courtroom (Yale University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

During the Victorian era, new laws allowed more witnesses to testify in court cases. At the same time, an emerging cultural emphasis on truth-telling drove the development of new ways of inhibiting perjury. Strikingly original and drawing on a broad array of archival research, Wendie Schneider’s examination of the Victorian courtroom charts this period of experimentation and how its innovations shaped contemporary trial procedure. Blending legal, social, and colonial history, she shines new light on cross-examination, the most enduring product of this time and the “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.”

Using Popular Culture to Demonstrate the Rules of Evidence

 

Martin A. Schwartz, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, has published Trial Evidence Brought to Life: Illustrations from Famous Trials, Film and Fiction (2015 Edition)(Practising Law Institute, 2015). Here is the abstract.

This book is a guide to the law of evidence that utilizes evidentiary examples from popular culture to provide a strong understanding of the Federal Rules of Evidence, and its interpretive case law. It also provides an understanding of how popular culture sources inform jurors’ preconceptions about the trial process. Illustrations from famous cases, movies, novels, cartoons, and other media highlight the presumptions jurors bring to the courtroom. Issues covered include: relevance; unfair prejudice; the rule against hearsay and its exceptions; recent developments in the Confrontation Clause; expert testimony; differences between expert witness and lay witness testimony; impeachment methods; procedures for juror questioning of witnesses; admissibility of videotape evidence; and requirements for introducing electronic evidence.

Social Scientific Evidence and Its Place In the Contemporary U. S. Trial

Robert P. Burns, Northwestern University, School of Law, has published Social Scientific Evidence as Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 15-43. Here is the abstract.

This paper considers two distinct and internally complex language regions, those of the contemporary American trial and of the social sciences. Its concern is how the trial treats the social sciences, not how the social sciences treat the trial. It first surveys the controversies that surround each region and argues that those controversies counsel against any "craving for generality" in defining their relationship with one another. It then describes the canonical account of the trial implicit in the rationalist tradition of evidence scholarship and explains how that account understands the place of social scientific evidence within it. The paper contrasts that received view of the trial with a more concrete and, to my mind, adequate interpretation of the trial. It then provides an account of the various functions of the social sciences within that more adequate understanding of the trial.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Creating Art Out of Crime

Katherine Biber, University of Technology, Sydney, Faculty of Law, is publishing In Crime's Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Criminal Evidence in the British Journal of Criminology. Here is the abstract.

This article explores the cultural afterlife of criminal evidence. During the criminal trial, strict rules govern the collection, admission and interpretation of evidence at trial. However, after the conclusion of the trial, this material returns to a notional ‘archive’ and is sometimes used by artists, scholars, curators and others, but subject to no rules nor standards. This article examines a range of instances in which criminal evidence has been used post-trial, and proposes a jurisprudence of sensitivity for responding to the harm that is sometimes done when criminal evidence leads a cultural afterlife.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Film as Memory

Jessica M. Silbey, Suffolk University Law School, is publishing Persuasive Visions: Film and Memory in Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Here is the abstract.

This commentary takes a new look at law and film studies through the lens of film as memory. Instead of describing film as evidence and foreordaining its role in truth-seeking processes, it thinks instead of film as individual, institutional and cultural memory, placing it squarely within the realm of contestability. Paralleling film genres, the commentary imagines four forms of memory that film could embody: memorabilia (cinema verite), memoirs (autobiographical and biographical film), ceremonial memorials (narrative film monuments of a life, person or institution), and mythic memory (dramatic fictional film). Imagining film as memory resituates film’s role in law (procedural, substantive and cultural) as authoritative rhetoric that must be disputed and reappropriated to serve the specific goals of justice.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Evidentiary Rules and "The Crucible"

Martin H. Pritikin, Whittier Law School, is publishing Can Law and Literature Be Practical? The Crucible and the Federal Rules of Evidence in the West Virginia Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Counter-intuitively, one of the best ways to learn the practice-oriented topic of evidence may be by studying a work of fiction — specifically, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which dramatizes the 17th century Salem witch trials. The play puts the reader in the position of legal advocate, and invites strategic analysis of evidentiary issues. A close analysis of the dialogue presents an opportunity to explore both the doctrinal nuances of and policy considerations underlying the most important topics covered by the Federal Rules of Evidence, including relevance, character evidence and impeachment, opinion testimony, hearsay, and the mode and order of interrogation.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

A "Reverse CSI Effect"?

Mark Godsey, University of Cincinnati College of Law, and Marie Alou have published She Blinded Me with Science: Wrongful Convictions and the 'Reverse CSI-Effect' in volume 17 of Texas Wesleyan Law Review (2011). Here is the abstract.

Prosecutors in the United States are often heard to complain these days of the "CSI-effect.'' Jurors today, the theory goes, have become spoiled as a result of the proliferation of these "high-tech" forensic shows, and now unrealistically expect conclusive scientific proof of guilt before they will convict. What I have come to notice, however, is a different kind a reverberation from the CSI-type shows that I believe often hurts defendants and benefits the prosecution. While not reported or discussed in the popular media as is the "CSI Effect," the other side of the coin, which I will call the "Reverse CSI Effect:' may be more damaging to the criminal justice system and the interests of justice than the opposite impact of which prosecutors complain. The "Reverse CSI Effect," as I call it, can be stated as follows: while jurors may have come to expect, as a result of CSI-type shows, high-tech forensic testimony in criminal cases, and may inappropriately acquit when such evidence is lacking, these same jurors, as a result of these same CSI-type shows, often place too much weight on forensic evidence in cases where forensic evidence IS in fact produced by the prosecution, resulting in convictions in cases where the defendant probably should have been acquitted.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Gender, Evidence, and Language Usage

Janet Ainsworth, Seattle University School of Law, has published The Performance of Gender as Reflected in American Evidence Rules: Language, Power, and the Legal Construction of Liability as part of the proceedings of the International Gender and Language Association (Victoria University Press, 2009). Here is the abstract.

The rules of evidence both govern the admissibility of evidence in trials and determine the scope of meaning to be accorded to that evidence. This article examines two American evidence rules and suggests that both rules incorporate ‘masculine’ norms of language usage. The evidence rule defining adoptive admissions provides that, when a person is confronted with an accusation of wrong-doing and fails to assertively deny it, the allegation is deemed to be admitted through silence. This rule presumes that one’s natural reaction upon an accusation would invariably be an explicit denial, such that silence can fairly be taken as a confession. Thus, this rule privileges assertive and confrontational modes of speech - all coded as ‘masculine’ - and additionally ignores the ways in which power assymmetries impact responses to accusation. Likewise, the evidence rule construing apology as an admission of fault denigrates expression of emotional solidarity - coded as ‘feminine’ - in favor of a presumption that penalizes those who say ‘sorry’ by presuming it means ‘I’m sorry I did something wrong’ rather than ‘I’m sorry that something bad has happened to you.’ Evidence rules such as these both channel and constrain the legal interpretation of language in ways that sustain linguistic ideologies of gender and gendered hierarchies of legal power.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

The Use of Images and Law

Jessica M. Silbey, Suffolk University Law School, has published Evidence Verité and the Law of Film, at 31 Cardozo Law Review 1257 (2010). Here is the abstract.

This paper explores a puzzle concerning the authority of certain images that increasingly find themselves at the center of legal disputes: surveillance or “real time” film images that purport to capture an event about which there is a dispute. Increasingly, this kind of “evidence verité” is used in United States courts of law as the best evidence of what happened. Film footage of arrests, criminal confessions, photographs of crime scenes (during and after) is routinely admitted into court as evidence. It tends to overwhelm all other evidence (e.g., testimonial or documentary) and be immune to critical analysis. Why would this be so?

This paper situates this phenomenon in the current legal United States context, with a brief history of “evidence verité” and its treatment at law. It then compares side-by-side two cultural institutions, photography and law, as examples of institutions with power and influence over public and popular consciousness. How do these two institutions intersect? What patterns of influence and persuasion emerge from the partnership of photographic or filmic images and the role of law? The paper explores these questions by tracing the life of certain iconic public images in hopes that doing so will tell us something about how they came to be iconic: how their circulation and reception in the United States rendered the images meaningful beyond their textual existence. Studying the circulation and recirculation of these photograph images helps make sense of how “real time” images in culture and at law might shape our understanding of important, historic events beyond the facts these images depict.

This paper is not a paper about how we understand images as a psychological or neurological matter. It is a paper about how law and legal processes frame images and how images – especially “real time” images – frame or shape the law. The photographs the paper examines include the “Migrant Mother” from the Great Depression, the bombing of Hiroshima, the flag raising at Iwo Jima during WWII, the Times Square Kiss on VJ day, the US landing on the moon, the first in utero photographs of a human fetus, and images of torture at Abu Ghraib prison.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Book Review: Harold Schechter's The Devil's Gentleman

Harold Schechter, The Devil's Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial that Ushered in the Twentieth Century
Ballantine Books (October 2007)

Harold Schechter, an American literature professor at CUNY, has written a gripping account of the criminal trial and appeal of Roland Molineux, a case that grabbed headlines throughout the late 1890s. His book, The Devil's Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial that Ushered in the Twentieth Century (2007) is a page-turner, and it reads almost like a novel.

Roland Molineux, the son of a revered Civil War general, was accused of an elaborate scheme of sending medicines and potions containing cyanide in order to kill two men. One was his friend whom Molineux wanted out of the picture because he was having an affair with the woman Molineux had his sights on marrying. The other was the director of an athletic club to which Molineux belonged and whom Molineux hated. The result was two murders, one of which involved an unintended victim. Oddly, anonymously sending potions or food laced with poison in the mail was an effective way to kill at that time. People apparently thought nothing of ingesting things that were sent to them anonymously. Poison was a popular murder instrument at the time, and people viewed poisoning as an especially sinister and "unmanly" way to kill. And one could readily be poisoned not through any nefarious scheme, but by the medicines at the time, some of which contained cyanide and arsenic. The cure was often more deadly than the disease.

The book focuses considerably on the role that the media played in the justice system. The media in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century was rabidly sensationalistic. The rise of "Yellow Journalism" was one of the factors that prompted Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis to write their famous article, The Right to Privacy in 1890. Yellow Journalism emerged as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst transformed the newspaper business, from small circulations and weak profits (sometimes even losses), to a booming success. In two years, for example, Pulitzer increased the circulation of the New York World from under 12,000 a day to 150,000 a day:

The very look of the paper underwent a radical alternation. Headlines now stretched over several columns or were splashed across the entire top of the page. And there were cartoons, caricatures, lurid illustrations, and other voyeuristic visual aids. Not only were grisly murders reported in graphic detail; they were diagrammed so that readers could picture the horrors more clearly. (p. 98)

The newspapers conducted their own investigations into criminal cases, interviewing witnesses, tracing leads, shadowing the police. In one instance, a newspaper even funded an investigation. The police needed to go through 50,000 sales slips at a pharmacy, and "they would have had an impossible time of it, since orders were full of Latin medical terms and abbreviations. Only people with pharmaceutical training could accomplish the task." The pharmaceutical supply company "couldn't afford to loan [its clerks with the requisite training] out for an indefinite period of time." Enter the media:

At that point, however, the yellow papers, with their genius for self-promotion, insinuated themselves into the proceedings. The World--which never wearied of trumpeting its own invaluable contributions to the case--offered to reimburse Smith for his clerks' time. (p. 164)

When it came to the trial, the newspapers presented it more as a play than as a real event. One newspaper "presented a summary of the case in the form of a stage play, complete with a 'Cast of Characters'; a synopsis of the 'Great Double Poisoning Drama' divided into acts and scenes." (p. 173). A different paper had its theater critic covering the trial, which drew an attack from another newspaper as stepping over the line. "The trial is dramatic but it is not a dramatic spectacle," the editorial decried. "A murder trial should not be made to wear the aspect of a public diversion." (p. 289)

The Devil's Gentleman is riveting and engaging, and it and captures a vivid slice of life at the turn of the Twentieth Century. It contains an extensive and very interesting account of police investigations, trials, and appeals at the time. The book chronicles step-by-step how the police and press pieced together the case, as well as demonstrates the impact of various courtroom strategies and evidence (there were two trials, each involving considerably different strategies and admitted evidence).

And along the way, the book contains some interesting tidbits of information. For example, Theodore Dreiser mulled over writing a novel based on the case, but abandoned the project. He found another crime which formed the basis of An American Tragedy. And the book notes that in the 1890s, "dealers in mail-order patent medicine brought in extra income by saving the correspondence they received from customers, then selling these letters to other mail-order firms." (p. 269). Selling people's personal information, it seems, was a popular pastime then, as it is now.

Cross-posted at Concurring Opinions.