Spar and Bernstein

eBook, 560 pages | Vintage | Law – Criminal Law; Social Science – Discrimination & Race Relations | $14.99 | February 22, 2012 | 978-0-307-81465-4 (0-307-81465-3)

In this powerfully reasoned, lucidly written work, Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy takes on the highly complex issues of race, crime, and the legal system, uncovering the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals and revealing difficult truths about these factors in the United States.

From the Hardcover edition.

Hardcover, 320 pages | Knopf | True Crime – Murder; Law – Discrimination; Law – Ethics | $26.95 | February 21, 2012 | 978-0-307-70021-6 (0-307-70021-6)

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row.
 
In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim’s body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
 
Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. After attending the University of Texas School of Law, Holt was eager to help the disenfranchised and voiceless; she herself had been a childhood victim of abuse. It required little scrutiny for Holt to discern that Elmore’s case—plagued by incompetent court-appointed defense attorneys, a virulent prosecution, and both misplaced and contaminated evidence—reeked of injustice. It was the cause of a lifetime for the spirited, hardworking lawyer. Holt would spend more than a decade fighting on Elmore’s behalf.
 
With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt’s battle to save Elmore’s life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. He reviews police work, evidence gathering, jury selection, work of court-appointed lawyers, latitude of judges, iniquities in the law, prison informants, and the appeals process. Throughout, the actions and motivations of both unlikely heroes and shameful villains in our justice system are vividly revealed.           
 
Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation’s ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

eBook, 320 pages | Knopf | True Crime – Murder; Law – Discrimination; Law – Ethics | $13.99 | February 21, 2012 | 978-0-307-95736-8 (0-307-95736-5)

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row.
 
In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim’s body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
 
Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. After attending the University of Texas School of Law, Holt was eager to help the disenfranchised and voiceless; she herself had been a childhood victim of abuse. It required little scrutiny for Holt to discern that Elmore’s case—plagued by incompetent court-appointed defense attorneys, a virulent prosecution, and both misplaced and contaminated evidence—reeked of injustice. It was the cause of a lifetime for the spirited, hardworking lawyer. Holt would spend more than a decade fighting on Elmore’s behalf.
 
With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt’s battle to save Elmore’s life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. He reviews police work, evidence gathering, jury selection, work of court-appointed lawyers, latitude of judges, iniquities in the law, prison informants, and the appeals process. Throughout, the actions and motivations of both unlikely heroes and shameful villains in our justice system are vividly revealed.           
 
Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation’s ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

Trade Paperback, 240 pages | Beacon Press | Social Science – Gender Studies; Social Science – Criminology; Law – Discrimination | $18.00 | January 24, 2012 | 978-0-8070-5115-3 (0-8070-5115-2)

A groundbreaking work that turns a “queer eye” on the criminal legal system, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences—as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes—like “gleeful gay killers,” “lethal lesbians,” “disease spreaders,” and “deceptive gender benders”—to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, they prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities. 

eBook, 416 pages | Vintage | Law – Courts; Law – Criminal Law | $11.99 | December 14, 2011 | 978-0-307-81419-7 (0-307-81419-X)

Steve Bogira’s riveting book takes us into the heart of America’s criminal justice system. Courtroom 302 is the story of one year in one courtroom in Chicago’s Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the busiest felony courthouse in the country.

We see the system through the eyes of the men and women who experience it, not only in the courtroom but in the lockup, the jury room, the judge’s chambers, the spectators’ gallery. When the judge and his staff go to the scene of the crime during a burglary trial, we go with them on the sheriff’s bus. We witness from behind the scenes the highest-profile case of the year: three young white men, one of them the son of a reputed mobster, charged with the racially motivated beating of a thirteen-year-old black boy. And we follow the cases that are the daily grind of the court, like that of the middle-aged man whose crack addiction brings him repeatedly back before the judge.
Bogira shows us how the war on drugs is choking the system, and how in most instances justice is dispensed–as, under the circumstances, it must be–rapidly and mindlessly. The stories that unfold in the courtroom are often tragic, but they no longer seem so to the people who work there. Says a deputy in 302: “You hear this stuff every day, and you’re like, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s get this over with and move on to the next thing.’”

Steve Bogira is, as Robert Caro says, “a masterful reporter.” His special gift is his understanding of people–and his ability to make us see and understand them. Fast-paced, gripping, and bursting with character and incident, Courtroom 302 is a unique illumination of our criminal court system that raises fundamental issues of race, civil rights, and justice.

From the Hardcover edition.

Trade Paperback, 336 pages | Vintage | True Crime; Law – Forensic Science; Social Science – Criminology | $16.00 | November 1, 2011 | 978-0-307-27908-8 (0-307-27908-1)

Winner of the Gold Dagger Award

A fascinating true crime story that details the rise of modern forensics and the development of modern criminal investigation.
 
At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher terrorized the French countryside, eluding authorities for years, and murdering twice as many victims as Jack The Ripper. Here, Douglas Starr revisits Vacher’s infamous crime wave, interweaving the story of the two men who eventually stopped him—prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, the era’s most renowned criminologist. In dramatic detail, Starr shows how Lacassagne and his colleagues were developing forensic science as we know it. Building to a gripping courtroom denouement, The Killer of Little Shepherds is a riveting contribution to the history of criminal justice.

Hardcover, 304 pages | Pantheon | Business & Economics – Economics – International; Political Science – Economic Conditions; Law – Commercial | $25.95 | October 18, 2011 | 978-0-375-42489-2 (0-375-42489-X)

• Thousands of Africans head to China each year to buy cell phones, auto parts, and other products that they will import to their home countries through a clandestine global back channel.
 
• Hundreds of Paraguayan merchants smuggle computers, electronics, and clothing across the border to Brazil.
 
• Scores of laid-off San Franciscans, working without any licenses, use Twitter to sell home-cooked foods.
 
• Dozens of major multinationals sell products through unregistered kiosks and street vendors around the world.
 
When we think of the informal economy, we tend to think of crime: prostitution, gun running, drug trafficking. Stealth of Nations opens up this underground realm, showing how the worldwide informal economy deals mostly in legal products and is, in fact, a ten-trillion-dollar industry, making it the second-largest economy in the world, after that of the United States.
 
Having penetrated this closed world and persuaded its inhabitants to open up to him, Robert Neuwirth makes clear that this informal method of transaction dates back as far as humans have existed and traded, that it provides essential services and crucial employment that fill the gaps in formal systems, and that this unregulated market works smoothly and effectively, with its own codes and unwritten rules.
 
Combining a vivid travelogue with a firm grasp on global economic strategy—along with a healthy dose of irreverence and skepticism toward conventional perceptions—Neuwirth gives us an eye-opening account of a world that is always operating around us, hidden in plain sight.

eBook, 288 pages | Pantheon | Business & Economics – Economics – International; Political Science – Economic Conditions; Law – Commercial | $13.99 | October 18, 2011 | 978-0-307-90680-9 (0-307-90680-9)

• Thousands of Africans head to China each year to buy cell phones, auto parts, and other products that they will import to their home countries through a clandestine global back channel.
 
• Hundreds of Paraguayan merchants smuggle computers, electronics, and clothing across the border to Brazil.
 
• Scores of laid-off San Franciscans, working without any licenses, use Twitter to sell home-cooked foods.
 
• Dozens of major multinationals sell products through unregistered kiosks and street vendors around the world.
 
When we think of the informal economy, we tend to think of crime: prostitution, gun running, drug trafficking. Stealth of Nations opens up this underground realm, showing how the worldwide informal economy deals mostly in legal products and is, in fact, a ten-trillion-dollar industry, making it the second-largest economy in the world, after that of the United States.
 
Having penetrated this closed world and persuaded its inhabitants to open up to him, Robert Neuwirth makes clear that this informal method of transaction dates back as far as humans have existed and traded, that it provides essential services and crucial employment that fill the gaps in formal systems, and that this unregulated market works smoothly and effectively, with its own codes and unwritten rules.
 
Combining a vivid travelogue with a firm grasp on global economic strategy—along with a healthy dose of irreverence and skepticism toward conventional perceptions—Neuwirth gives us an eye-opening account of a world that is always operating around us, hidden in plain sight.

From the Hardcover edition.

Hardcover, 320 pages | Knopf | True Crime – Murder; Law – Discrimination; Law – Ethics | $26.95 | February 21, 2012 | 978-0-307-70021-6 (0-307-70021-6)

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row.
 
In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim’s body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
 
Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. After attending the University of Texas School of Law, Holt was eager to help the disenfranchised and voiceless; she herself had been a childhood victim of abuse. It required little scrutiny for Holt to discern that Elmore’s case—plagued by incompetent court-appointed defense attorneys, a virulent prosecution, and both misplaced and contaminated evidence—reeked of injustice. It was the cause of a lifetime for the spirited, hardworking lawyer. Holt would spend more than a decade fighting on Elmore’s behalf.
 
With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt’s battle to save Elmore’s life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. He reviews police work, evidence gathering, jury selection, work of court-appointed lawyers, latitude of judges, iniquities in the law, prison informants, and the appeals process. Throughout, the actions and motivations of both unlikely heroes and shameful villains in our justice system are vividly revealed.           
 
Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation’s ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

eBook, 320 pages | Knopf | True Crime – Murder; Law – Discrimination; Law – Ethics | $13.99 | February 21, 2012 | 978-0-307-95736-8 (0-307-95736-5)

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row.
 
In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim’s body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
 
Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. After attending the University of Texas School of Law, Holt was eager to help the disenfranchised and voiceless; she herself had been a childhood victim of abuse. It required little scrutiny for Holt to discern that Elmore’s case—plagued by incompetent court-appointed defense attorneys, a virulent prosecution, and both misplaced and contaminated evidence—reeked of injustice. It was the cause of a lifetime for the spirited, hardworking lawyer. Holt would spend more than a decade fighting on Elmore’s behalf.
 
With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt’s battle to save Elmore’s life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. He reviews police work, evidence gathering, jury selection, work of court-appointed lawyers, latitude of judges, iniquities in the law, prison informants, and the appeals process. Throughout, the actions and motivations of both unlikely heroes and shameful villains in our justice system are vividly revealed.           
 
Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation’s ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

Trade Paperback, 288 pages | Broadway | Technology – History; True Crime – Hoaxes & Deceptions | $15.00 | February 7, 2012 | 978-0-307-58869-2 (0-307-58869-6)

Former hacker Kevin Poulsen has, over the past decade, built a reputation as one of the top investigative reporters on the cybercrime beat. In Kingpin, he pours his unmatched access and expertise into book form for the first time, delivering a gripping cat-and-mouse narrative—and an unprecedented view into the twenty-first century’s signature form of organized crime.
 
The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone—some brilliant, audacious crook—had just staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the US economy.
 
The FBI rushed to launch an ambitious undercover operation aimed at tracking down this new kingpin; other agencies around the world deployed dozens of moles and double agents. Together, the cybercops lured numerous unsuspecting hackers into their clutches. . . . Yet at every turn, their main quarry displayed an uncanny ability to sniff out their snitches and see through their plots.
 
The culprit they sought was the most unlikely of criminals: a brilliant programmer with a hippie ethic and a supervillain’s double identity. As prominent “white-hat” hacker Max “Vision” Butler, he was a celebrity throughout the programming world, even serving as a consultant to the FBI. But as the black-hat “Iceman,” he found in the world of data theft an irresistible opportunity to test his outsized abilities. He infiltrated thousands of computers around the country, sucking down millions of credit card numbers at will. He effortlessly hacked his fellow hackers, stealing their ill-gotten gains from under their noses. Together with a smooth-talking con artist, he ran a massive real-world crime ring.
 
And for years, he did it all with seeming impunity, even as countless rivals ran afoul of police.
 
Yet as he watched the fraudsters around him squabble, their ranks riddled with infiltrators, their methods inefficient, he began to see in their dysfunction the ultimate challenge: He would stage his coup and fix what was broken, run things as they should be run—even if it meant painting a bull’s-eye on his forehead.
 
Through the story of this criminal’s remarkable rise, and of law enforcement’s quest to track him down, Kingpin lays bare the workings of a silent crime wave still affecting millions of Americans. In these pages, we are ushered into vast online-fraud supermarkets stocked with credit card numbers, counterfeit checks, hacked bank accounts, dead drops, and fake passports. We learn the workings of the numerous hacks—browser exploits, phishing attacks, Trojan horses, and much more—these fraudsters use to ply their trade, and trace the complex routes by which they turn stolen data into millions of dollars. And thanks to Poulsen’s remarkable access to both cops and criminals, we step inside the quiet, desperate arms race that law enforcement continues to fight with these scammers today. 
 
Ultimately, Kingpin is a journey into an underworld of startling scope and power, one in which ordinary American teenagers work hand in hand with murderous Russian mobsters and where a simple Wi-Fi connection can unleash a torrent of gold worth millions.

From the Hardcover edition.

Trade Paperback, 336 pages | Vintage | True Crime; Law – Forensic Science; Social Science – Criminology | $16.00 | November 1, 2011 | 978-0-307-27908-8 (0-307-27908-1)

Winner of the Gold Dagger Award

A fascinating true crime story that details the rise of modern forensics and the development of modern criminal investigation.
 
At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher terrorized the French countryside, eluding authorities for years, and murdering twice as many victims as Jack The Ripper. Here, Douglas Starr revisits Vacher’s infamous crime wave, interweaving the story of the two men who eventually stopped him—prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, the era’s most renowned criminologist. In dramatic detail, Starr shows how Lacassagne and his colleagues were developing forensic science as we know it. Building to a gripping courtroom denouement, The Killer of Little Shepherds is a riveting contribution to the history of criminal justice.

eBook, 40 pages | Knopf | Business & Economics; True Crime | $1.99 | October 25, 2011 | 978-0-307-95971-3 (0-307-95971-6)

In DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You, Misha Glenny plunged into the murky depths of the world’s most notorious carder fraud site, DarkMarket. In this exclusive short eBook, he takes you even deeper into that world.

In the realm of the cyberthief, your best friend can be your worst enemy, or worse still, undercover law enforcement. The Hunt for Lord Cyric: An eShort Follow-Up to DarkMarket uncovers the trail of the most elusive cyberthief of all. In doing so, Glenny unveils some of his investigative methods, explores new lines of inquiry and tries to untangle the web at the black heart of the Internet. A unique supplement to DarkMarket, this eBook delves further into the most compelling crime story of the year.

Trade Paperback, 768 pages | Vintage Canada | True Crime – Murder | $19.95 | October 25, 2011 | 978-0-676-97585-7 (0-676-97585-2)

Now that the publication bans are lifted, you need Stevie Cameron to get the whole story, which includes accounts of Pickton’s notoriety that police never uncovered. You need On the Farm.

Covering the case of one of North America’s most prolific serial killer gave Stevie Cameron access not only to the story as it unfolded over many years in two British Columbia courthouses, but also to information unknown to the police – and not in the transcripts of their interviews with Pickton – such as from Pickton’s long-time best friend, Lisa Yelds, and from several women who survived terrifying encounters with him. You will now learn what was behind law enforcement’s refusal to believe that a serial killer was at work.

Stevie Cameron first began following the story of missing women in 1998, when the odd newspaper piece appeared chronicling the disappearances of drug-addicted sex trade workers from Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside. It was February 2002 before Robert William Pickton was arrested, and 2008 before he was found guilty, on six counts of second-degree murder. These counts were appealed and in 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered its conclusion. The guilty verdict was upheld, and finally this unprecedented tale of true crime can be told.

From the Hardcover edition.

eBook, 560 pages | Vintage | Law – Criminal Law; Social Science – Discrimination & Race Relations | $14.99 | February 22, 2012 | 978-0-307-81465-4 (0-307-81465-3)

In this powerfully reasoned, lucidly written work, Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy takes on the highly complex issues of race, crime, and the legal system, uncovering the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals and revealing difficult truths about these factors in the United States.

From the Hardcover edition.

When the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) was being debated nationally in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, it became part of a wildly intense debate about the nature of contract law that ultimately led to the rejection of two misguided efforts to revise ancient UCC Article 2. UCITA barely survived vitriolic and often dishonest attacks. It was enacted in two commercially major states and the concepts it set out have become mainstream judicial analyses, referred to in a number of legal treatises. 

 

In my opinion, the true test of a contract law statute lies in how little litigation it creates. Under that standard, UCITA has been a true success in Maryland and Virginia. Ten years after enactment, it is only now that a small trickle of cases under UCITA have begun to appear.

 

One of the false arguments brought by opponents against UCITA was that it tipped the scale too strongly in favor of vendors and online providers wanting to impose terms. The Court of Appeals in Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp., 306 F.3d 17 (2d Cir. 2002) refuted that claim, commenting the UCITA enacted contract formation rules consistent with common law, but placed them in a codified form. A similar observation was made by a neutral scholar, Bob Hillman. See Robert A. Hillman & Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Standard-Form Contracting in the Electronic Age, 77 N.Y.U. L.Rev. 429, 491 (2002) (“[W]e contend that UCITA maintains the contextual, balanced approach to standard terms that can be found in the paper world.â€).

 

So, the first time a court was asked in Virginia to apply UCITA to a contract formation issue, what happened? The court applied UCITA and reached the conclusion that the particular online provider did not do enough to create a contractual obligation with respect to users of its site.  

 

The case was Cvent v. Eventbrite, 2010 WL 3732183 (ED Va. 2010). The case involved scraping of data from the Cvent site by Eventbrite. The data concerned venues for events. There were a number of claims, including a claim for violation of computer crime law. But also a claim for breach of contract. The court said:

 

Cvent’s breach of contract claim fails to state an entitlement to legal relief because Cvent has not alleged sufficient facts to support a plausible allegation that a contract existed between Cvent and Eventbrite. … Cvent relies exclusively on its “Terms of Use,†which are displayed on secondary pages of its website and can be accessed only through one of several dozen small links at the bottom of the first page. … Moreover, users of event’s website are not required to click on that link, nor are they required to read or assent to the Terms of Use in order to use the website or access any of its content. This case is therefore not a “clickwrap†case, but rather falls into a category of alleged contracts that many courts have termed “browsewrap agreements.†… Most courts which have considered the issue … have held that in order to state a plausible claim for relief based upon a browsewrap agreement, the website user must have had actual or constructive knowledge of the site’s terms and conditions, and have manifested assent to them. …

UCITA provides a breach of contract claim for violation of electronic Terms of Use, if a person (1) has an “opportunity to review†the terms and (2) engages in statements or conduct indicating, or leading one to infer, the person’s “assent†to the terms. Individuals, however, are only deemed to have had an “opportunity to review†a term if the term is “available in a manner that ought to call it to the attention of a reasonable person,†or if the website “disclose[s] the availability of the standard terms in a prominent place on the site†and “does not take affirmative acts to prevent printing or storage of the standard terms for archival or review purposes.â€

In its complaint, plaintiff makes bare assertions that its Terms of Use were prominently displayed on its website, that defendants had an “opportunity to review†the Terms of Use pursuant to and that defendants manifested assent to those terms merely by accessing Cvent’s venue location database. However, those conclusory allegations are flatly contradicted by the screenshots of Cvent’s website and are plainly insufficient …

 

The statute fits smoothly with the common law and the result underscores, once again, the basic premise that if a contract is desired, the process must be on that ensures that reasonable notice and reasonable opportunity for assent exist.