In an extraordinary history of the criminal trial, Sadakat Kadri shows with wit, legal insight and a travel writers eye for detail, how the irrationality of the past lives on in the legal systems of the present. A bold and brilliant debut from a prizewinning new writer. The Trial spans a vast distance in time, opening in the dread silence of the Egyptian Hall of the Dead and ending with the melodramas and hubbub of the 21stcentury trial circus. Reconciliation and vengeance, secrecy and spectacle, superstition and reason all intertwine continually. The book crosses from the marbled courtrooms of Athens through the ordeal pits of AngloSaxon England, past the torture chambers of the Inquisition to the judicial theatres of 17thcentury Salem, and from 1930s Moscow and postwar Nuremberg to the virtual courtrooms of modern Hollywood. Kadri shows throughout how the trial has always been concerned with doing more than guaranteeing fairness and holding human beings to account for their deliberate crimes. He recounts how insentient and irrational defendants from caterpillars to corpses were once summonsed to court, before being exiled for their failure to attend or sentenced to die again and argues that the same urge to punish lives on in todays trials of children and the mentally ill. But although Justices sword has always been doubleedged as ready to destroy a communitys enemies as to defend its dreams of due process the judicial contest also operates to enshrine some of the...

Binding: Paperback;514 pages; Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd; Classification: N/A; Weight: 576.31 g; Dimensions: N/A

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