Customer Reviews

Minds on Trial: Great Cases in Law and Psychology

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In "Minds on Trial," the authors, Charles Patrick Ewing and Joseph McCann select 20 cases from roughly the past 50 years in which there is a fascinating intersection between law and psychology. The work initially looks like a book the casual reader may have some difficulty getting through. Such is not the case as each of the 20 cases are broken down into manageable chapters and are written in such a way so as to engage even the casual reader.

The cases that are the most fascinating include, George Metesky and the work of the psychological profiler; The Guildford Four which shows the danger of involuntary confessions; Prosenjit Poddar and Tatiana Tarasoff and the development of the requirement now known as a "Tarasoff Letter;" John Demjanjuk and vicisitude of identification testimony conducted over several year; and the USS Iowa and the failure of equivocal death analysis.

In many cases, the case comes down to a "battle of the experts" which illustrates just how important expert testimony has become in our legal system. The authors' only apparent bias aoppears to lie against those expert witnesses whose opinion is bought and sold by fee. In many of the cases, such biased experts take the hardest falls.

The authors provide a scholarly yet entertaining look behind the scenes to the expert psychological evidence in 20 renowned cases. Some of the cases involve household names - Lee Harvey Oswald, Patricia Hearst, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Hinckley Jr., Dan White, Judas Priest, Woody Allen, Mike Tyson. Others are seminal cases in which the names are less well known - the fascinating 1956 case of "mad bomber" George Metesky, credited with initiating the field of criminal profiling, the Guildford Four IRA bombing case in 1974 that led to psychological interest in false confessions (and Icelandic psychologist Gisli Gudjonsson's development of an instrument to measure interrogative suggestibility), and the case of Daryl Atkins, in which the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for the mentally retarded.

This book is appropriate for both professionals in forensic psychology and law and also for laypeople who enjoy fact-based accounts of true crime. I assign my graduate students several chapters as examples of forensic topics. In particular, the chapter on the USS Iowa explosion, which catalogues the failure of the "equivocal death analysis" technique, is a great example of the shortcomings of forensic profiling. And the chapter on Colin Ferguson provides a vivid example of the whittling down of competency jurisprudence in the wake of the 1993 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Godinez v. Moran.

Minds on Trial is well-written, factually accurate, and educational. Yet it still works as entertaining bedtime reading. I recommend it highly.

This book has been very helpful to in my class but it is also a very interesting read! The trials that are being discussed are very fascinating, especially the use of social science in the trials. Very good book, in great condition