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Overview
According to renowned defense attorney and Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz, "abuse excuses" are enabling people to get away with murder - literally. From the Menendez brothers to Lorena Bobbitt, more and more Americans accused of violent crimes are admitting to the charges, but arguing that they shouldn't be held legally responsible. The reason: they're victims - of an abusive parent, a violent spouse, a traumatic experience, ethnic hatred, society at large, or anything else - who struck back at a real or perceived oppressor. And they couldn't help themselves, they say. In this provocative and important collection of essays, Dershowitz reviews a wide range of recent cases - including those of O. J. Simpson, Tonya Harding, and Woody Allen - and argues that the current vogue in victim defenses is antithetical to the ideals of our constitutional democracy. For Dershowitz, the foundations of American society are individual responsibility and the rule of law. And people who claim to be above the law - whatever the excuse - are no more than vigilantes.
Dershowitz reviews a wide range of recent cases--including those of O.J. Simpson, William Kennedy Smith, Tonya Harding, the Menendez brothers, and Lorena Bobbitt--and argues that the failure to hold people accountable for criminal actions goes against the fundamental principle of personal responsibility--and will only lead to disaster. This is is vintage Dershowitz.
Synopsis
According to renowned defense attorney and Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz, "abuse excuses" are enabling people to get away with murder - literally. From the Menendez brothers to Lorena Bobbitt, more and more Americans accused of violent crimes are admitting to the charges, but arguing that they shouldn't be held legally responsible. The reason: they're victims - of an abusive parent, a violent spouse, a traumatic experience, ethnic hatred, society at large, or anything else - who struck back at a real or perceived oppressor. And they couldn't help themselves, they say. In this provocative and important collection of essays, Dershowitz reviews a wide range of recent cases - including those of O. J. Simpson, Tonya Harding, and Woody Allen - and argues that the current vogue in victim defenses is antithetical to the ideals of our constitutional democracy. For Dershowitz, the foundations of American society are individual responsibility and the rule of law. And people who claim to be above the law - whatever the excuse - are no more than vigilantes.
Publishers Weekly
More and more criminal defendants are claiming a history of abuse to avoid accountability for their behavior. Harvard Law School professor Dershowitz (Chutzpah) views battered wife syndrome, ``black rage,'' the ``crime of passion'' mitigation, sexual abuse syndrome and other defenses as ``abuse excuses.'' In his blistering critique, Dershowitz sees such ploys and jurors' sympathetic responses to them as an abdication of individual and societal responsibility. Despite the author's attempt to link these 68 articles and essays under the broad theme of denial of accountability, this is a miscellany of his feisty views on such defendants as Michael Jackson, Erik and Lyle Menendez, John Demjanjuk, Woody Allen and William Kennedy Smith, as well as Serbian genocide, U.S. feminists' anti-pornography campaigns and Germany's lax prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Dershowitz, a consultant to the O.J. Simpson defense team, intimates that Simpson might have to use some variation of the abuse excuse-a glaring irony that blunts his book's impact. (Oct.)