No Heroes No Villains Summary

1857 Words4 Pages

No Heroes, No Villains: The Story of a Murder Trial by Steven Phillips takes the reader behind the scenes of a particular case. This is the story of James Richardson, a black man who was accused of murdering police officer, John Skagen. John Skagen, a white off duty officer, was headed home in the subway system in South Bronx, New York. For reasoning still questionable, he ordered Richardson to get up against the wall with his hands up. While being frisked, Richardson pulled a gun on Skagen and the two exchanged shots. Richardson then escaped the custody of Skagen and headed up the subways stairs firing four shots, two of which hit Skagen in the shoulders. Richardson shouted as he reached the top of the stairs “He’s shooting, a crazy man …show more content…

Steven Phillips goes into detail about the case and keeps his chapters short making it an easy read. Personally, I believe that Steven Phillips wrote this book not only to shed some light on the Richardson case but to also to show the difficulty of the prosecutor and the defense attorney’s job. Phillips talks about his overloading cases and how sometimes there is little time to prepare which means sometimes justice does not always happen. “The Bronx Criminal Court was a crucible which melted down and transformed my sensibilities. There was no time to even attempt to do justice to the cases that came before me. There was no real information available upon which to make intelligent, let alone fair, decisions. There was nothing except a vast caseload, and a never-ended pressure to dispose of it rapidly.” (Phillips 1977 p.65) I also believe Phillips gives the reader an in depth look and the necessities for building a case and how it relates to nothing like we watch on television which can be categorized as courtroom drama. He specially mentions about how the moral component of cases are somewhat no existent, which applies to many prosecutors and defense attorneys. He sees the Richardson case as a challenge but recognized it is a tragedy. It really shows how prosecutors and defense attorneys have an important job to do which is to defend their client at all

Show More
Related

  • Who Shot Johnny, by Debra Dickerson

    532 Words  | 2 Pages

    In “Who Shot Johnny” by Debra Dickerson, Dickerson recounts the shooting of her 17 year old nephew, Johnny. She traces the outline of her life, while establishing a creditable perception upon herself. In first person point of view, Dickerson describes the events that took place after the shooting, and how those events connected to her way of living. In the essay, she uses the shooting of her nephew to omit the relationship between the African American society, and the stereotypic African American society.

    Read More

  • Jordan Davis Case Analysis

    763 Words  | 2 Pages

    Whether Dunn spends the rest of his life in prison or in society, he will have to live with the fact that he took a teen’s life. Cases regarding self-defense and stand your ground laws can be tricky when deciding the verdict because the criminal justice system is required to stay just and fair. Throughout my essay, I have summarized the article on the shooting of Jordan Davis, the relevance it has to my criminal justice class, and discussed the implications for the criminal justice system.

    Read More

  • Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case

    2404 Words  | 5 Pages

    The New York Times bestseller book titled Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case examines the O.J. Simpson criminal trial of the mid-1990s. The author, Alan M. Dershowitz, relates the Simpson case to the broad functions and perspectives of the American criminal justice system as a whole. A Harvard law school teacher at the time and one of the most renowned legal minds in the country, Dershowitz served as one of O.J. Simpson’s twelve defense lawyers during the trial. Dershowitz utilizes the Simpson case to illustrate how today’s criminal justice system operates and relates it to the misperceptions of the public. Many outside spectators of the case firmly believed that Simpson committed the crimes for which he was charged for. Therefore, much of the public was simply dumbfounded when Simpson was acquitted. Dershowitz attempts to explain why the jury acquitted Simpson by examining the entire American criminal justice system as a whole.

    Read More

  • Richard Chase: The Vampire of Sacramento

    1098 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...fferent murder cases so police stormed Chases house. Onced the police entered Richards home and seized him the found the 22 month old baby head mummified, they also found the blender covered with blood and gunk. When they opened the refrigerator the police saw human remains and dog collars. When Richard chase was in court he was originally sentenced to the gas chamber but he pled innocent and claimed insanity. After careful consideration they concluded that richard chase was actually sane when he was committing the crime, but they did not put him in the death sentence. Richard chase was sentenced life in prison and shortly killed himself by saving the medical prescribed anti depressants.

    Read More

  • Judge Karlin Case Summary

    783 Words  | 2 Pages

    This episode began with the attempted murder of a female New York Judge by an unknown assailant with a handgun in daylight outside the courthouse. Judge Karlin’s reputation as being extremely tough on crime and handing out maximum sentences creates a long list of potential suspects. The hitman, carrying no identification, was killed by the judge’s bodyguards, leaving the detectives with no obvious leads.

    Read More

  • A Time To Kill

    797 Words  | 2 Pages

    In A Time To Kill, by John Grisham, two drunken white men violently raped, beat, and nearly killed a 10-year-old black girl named Tonya Hailey. Her father, in a clouded rage, executed the two rapists with an M-16 on their way out of the courthouse. His vigilante form of justice was not well taken by many in prejudiced Ford County, Mississippi. On the other hand, he had lots of support from the black community and from any white person whom dared to step into his shoes. A young, thirty-something lawyer named Jack Brigance was hired as his defense. He personally hoped it would give him national recognition, but his outlook turned sour when an all-white jury was drawn to decide on the fate of this Negro man. As the case gained popularity, the KKK got involved, and everyone involved in the court case was put in severe danger through shootings, riots, bombings, and random acts of violence. The non-stop action this book has to offer would keep any reader on the edge of his seat through the last page of the novel.

    Read More

  • Blink: The Shooting Of Amadou Diallo

    233 Words  | 1 Pages

    This idea is at the heart of what I consider (if I'm allowed to be immodest for a moment) to be the strongest chapter in Blink—the retelling of the story of the shooting of Amadou Diallo five years ago in the South Bronx. The police saw a black man—Diallo—pulling a shiny dark object out of his jacket, thought it was a gun, and shot him 41 times. Only after he lay dead in the vestibule of his apartment did they realize that what he was pulling out of his pocket was his wallet. Now, what should we do with this story? One response is simply to call it an inevitable byproduct of racism: Four white cops from Long Island confront a black man in the South Bronx and jump to an immediate, prejudicial conclusion. My problem with that analysis, though,

    Read More

  • Injustice: Colin Warner's Wrongful Conviction

    316 Words  | 1 Pages

    This paper depicts how a sequence of injustices led to the wrongful conviction of a Trinidadian immigrant living in the Brooklyn Crown Heights neighborhood. No motive, no murder weapon, no forensic evidence, a questionable autopsy report, coerced witness testimonies, and a lying witness resulted in Colin Warner spending 21 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. It was the year of 1982 when Colin Warner was convicted for the murder of 16 year old Mario Hamilton. Martell Hamilton, the victim’s brother, and Thomas Charlemagne, 14 year old Haitian immigrant, were picked up by investigators shortly after Hamilton’s murder. Thomas Charlemagne would soon become the investigator’s star witness for this case. After hours of interrogation and

    Read More

  • The Collapse Of American Criminal Justice Summary

    419 Words  | 1 Pages

    The problem with the prosecutorial process in our legal system described by William Stuntz (2011), author of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, asserted that

    Read More

  • Police Shooting Research Paper

    265 Words  | 1 Pages

    A local police department is facing scrutiny by the African American community for the killing of an unarmed African American man. Diante Yarber was shot at by a Barstow law enforcement officer while waiting in a Walmart parking lot. It is estimated that the police fired 30 rounds at the parked car. The shooting has sparked protests among residents of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Additionally, video of the shooting has been viewed over 200,000 times on social media. The Yarber’s lawyer, S. Lee Merritt, alleges that the family is ready to sue both the city and the police department. According to Merritt, “this is the worst case of excessive force that I’ve ever seen”. Additionally, Merritt states that “unless you know they are actively engaging

    Read More

  • Murder On A Sunday Morning Analysis

    429 Words  | 1 Pages

    The novel was written by Walter Dean Myers. The story starts off where he is in first person writing in his little notebook that the prison gave to him. He says that he put’s the covers over his head and cries there is someone always getting beaten up so he can sob some when he is crying. Then when he is saying all the stuff to the reader.Then it goes into third person.Tells us about the characters in the courtroom all of the main ones that are included with the case. The setting is in Harlem and transitions between the prison and his house. The official case starts on the week after July 4th. Steve Harmon is participating in a case where he don't know what is happening. Then the robbery went wrong.

    Read More

  • Death Row Essay

    603 Words  | 2 Pages

    On May 23, 1981 in the state of Jacksonville, Florida, Leo Jones was convicted of the murder of a police officer, Thomas Szafranski. The officer was struck in the head by a sniper bullet while sitting in his police car in downtown Jacksonville. Leo Jones was later arrested that same day in a nearby apartment where two Winchester rifles were found and was sentenced to death by electrocution. Only one of the rifles found contained Jones’ fingerprints. Jones did confess to the killing saying he killed the officer because of police beatings, but however he later said that the confession was a lie and that the police forced him to confess and a gun was held to his head. After the arrest Jones was taken to a medical hospital and was treated for minor injuries such as cuts and bruises on his face. A retired police officer of the name Cleveland Smith, came forward and announced that the officer Lynwood Mundy, the same officer who supposedly beat Jones had bragged to Smith that he beat Jones after the arrest. Smith had also said that he had witnessed Mundy receive an confession from a suspect by squeezing his genitals in a firm grip. This evidence can almost prove that Mundy in fact did beat Jones but it was never proved. Jones was not the only one to say that another man had killed the officer, about a dozen other people had also indicated that it was a different man and other witnesses have said they heard the criminal brag that he has shot the officer. The case had sent Jones to death row for sixteen years. Suspicion began to rise as the main witnesses against Jones had recanted, two of the key police officers had left the police department randomly, a...

    Read More

  • Police Brutality And Social Injustice

    422 Words  | 1 Pages

    My story shows the same trendline as other incidents that relate to black people which is that at the end, the black man or woman ends up getting killed for doing nothing wrong. These situations are very sad to hear, and that's why i made a story that relates to all these stories relating to police brutality and social injustice. The story is like most of

    Read More

  • The Innocent M Murder And Injustice In A Small Town

    752 Words  | 2 Pages

    This is something that happens all the time in everyday life. While reading the book it seems John Grisham was neutral towards the story. John Grisham seemed like he was telling an interesting story to get feedback from others. Grisham wanted readers to be aware of the unfair trial, but also wanted to know how they feel towards the situation. The author’s arguments showed both sides of the story. He showed the way two innocent men could have been accused because of obvious reason such as their personalities and he also showed how it was wrong and both men should have had a better trial. The author didn’t show any feelings in the book. He told the story exactly how he was told as he did his research for the

    Read More

  • Literary Techniques In To Kill A Mockingbird

    264 Words  | 1 Pages

    The pace of narration slows down, and the climax of the story comes. The author spends more than 5 chapters describing one day's trial, in contrast to compressing a whole summer's story into one chapter. The scene in the court makes me think of Ace Attorney, a recent Japanese anime about lawyers. The author uses multiple writing strategies to render lawyers' conflicts on the court. Although they are dull in real life, they are attractive in the novel.

    Read More

More about No Heroes No Villains Summary

Open Document