Johnnie Cochran had finished his speech and returned to his seat next to the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima when the Rev. Al Sharpton began one of the call-and-response routines that he often uses to pump up a crowd. Earlier in the evening, he had trundled out a well-worn “No justice, no peace.” But this time, Read More
Anyone who has ever served on a jury knows that there’s nothing that quite prepares you for the experience-no juror’s colloquium, no lineup of network courtroom dramas, no endless playbacks of 12 Angry Men . My introduction to the system started when I served as foreman on the federal jury that tried former police officer Read More
Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture , by John Conroy. Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $26.
If the Abner Louima case had anything to teach New York, it was that the practice of torture, which an enlightened age and society were supposed to have abolished, was alive and well in 1997 in Flatbush, Read More
The New York Post , which gets off on Grand Guignol , did itself proud the other day with a front-page headline proclaiming the glad tidings that “Fla.’s ‘Too Fat to Fry’ Fiend Dies Suffering.” The article’s lead sentence read, “A 350-pound killer-who insisted he was ‘too fat to fry’-screamed, shook and spouted blood as Read More
Johnnie Cochran had finished his speech and returned to his seat next to the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima when the Rev. Al Sharpton began one of the call-and-response routines that he often uses to pump up a crowd. Earlier in the evening, he had trundled out a well-worn “No justice, no peace.” But this time, Read More
Sixteen years ago, Steven Bochco rubbed the TV cop show in the gutter and made it fresh. Hill Street Blues had a ragged look, a layered sound, a penchant for double-entendres, an adroit movement between criminal stories and domestic intrigue, and a smoky feel for moral ambiguity among ghetto cops. It mixed farce with melodrama, Read More
