George R (Bob) Dekle, Sr.

Shortly after NYPD Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrnes publicly criticized the London police for failing to capture Jack the Ripper, he received a letter purportedly from Jack himself saying New York was his next target. Not long after, Byrnes was confronted by his own Ripper-style murder case in the death of Carrie Brown, a.k.a. "Old Shakespeare," a colorful character who worked as a prostitute and had a penchant for quoting Shakespeare. Given the near-hysteria surrounding this vicious murder soon after the Jack the Ripper murders in London, people were worried that Jack might have actually come to America.

The detective bureau finally arrested Amir Ben Ali, an Algerian immigrant. The newspapers, however, immediately criticized Byrnes for moving too quickly, suggesting that he had tried to save face by pinning the crime on an easy target.

When the verdict of murder in the second degree was announced, the papers erupted in anger and disbelief. With the aid of the French consulate, they embarked on a 10-year campaign to have Ben Ali pardoned and finally won his release by producing new evidence. Immediately upon Ben Ali's departure for France, fresh evidence of his guilt surfaced.

Was Ben Ali falsely convicted or falsely exonerated? And if he did not commit the murder, then who did? Issues of false convictions, fake news, illegal immigration, police corruption, and racial prejudice are common tropes in today's news cycles. The East River Ripper demonstrates that these are not simply matters of recent vintage and seeks to answer such questions in trying to determine whether and in what way justice miscarried.

As Ted Bundy was to the latter half of the twentieth century, so Carlyle Harris was to the latter half of the nineteenth. Harris, a brilliant, charismatic, handsome young medical student with an insatiable appetite for sexual conquest, left a trail of debauched women wherever he went. The trail came to an end with Helen Potts, a beautiful young daughter of wealth and privilege who was determined to keep herself pure for marriage. Unable to conquer her by any other means, Harris talked her into a secret marriage under assumed names, and when she became inconvenient, he poisoned her. The resulting trial garnered nationwide headlines and launched the careers of two of New York's most famous prosecutors, Francis L. Wellman and William Travers Jerome.

According to the conventional wisdom, Abraham Lincoln didn't like to try criminal cases, wasn't very good at trying criminal cases, and was especially bad at defending murder cases. This book seeks to correct the conventional wisdom and show Lincoln to be a very good criminal defense attorney.

Analyzes the prosecution and defense of Hauptmann.

Examines the prosecution of People v. Armstrong. Looks at the commission of the crime itself, Lincoln's successful defense, at how the story of the trial captured the popular imagination, and how the story acquired its mythical elements.

"The reader learns not only how the investigation and prosecution of a complex circumstantial case is put together, but also the terrifying truth that there is often a gap between what we know and what we can prove."

Take decisive control in cross-examination. All the skills and strategies you need are here in the Cross-Examination Handbook: Persuasion, Strategies and Techniques. Straightforward step-by-step instruction combined with outstanding examples from illustrious trials.

This handbook explores every aspect of the prosecutor's multiple roles, relating them to commonly encountered real-world situations and giving pragmatic guidance for dealing with those situations. It investigates the history, theory, and philosophy of prosecution and provides the student with a conceptual framework for employing sound techniques of ethical prosecutorial advocacy. By looking at each stage of the criminal prosecution from the unique vantage point of the prosecutor, it enables students to receive maximum benefit from the clinical setting and prepares them for the efficient discharge of their duties as entry-level prosecutors.

Some two thousand years ago, in a small province of the Roman Empire, an obscure Roman governor ordered the execution of a peasant leader. It went virtually unnoticed at the time. No official report of the event has survived, and we would have no memory at all of it except for the efforts of a handful of followers of the condemned man. Those followers who kept that memory alive changed the course of history, and the results of their efforts continue to reverberate to this day.

Conventional interpretation says that the execution of Jesus of Nazareth came on the heels of a series illegal trials before a number of different tribunals, and at the culmination of that series of trials a moral coward by the name of Pontius Pilate ordered Jesus’ execution despite being satisfied that he was innocent. Revisionist interpretation says that there was no trial at all, that Pilate simply executed Jesus because he was a nuisance, and that Jesus’ followers invented the story of his execution as a means of shifting the blame from the Roman government to a group of people whom they despised—the Jews.

Are the Gospels good history or bad propaganda? Does a fair reading of the Gospel accounts support either the conventional or the revisionist interpretation of the trial of Jesus? Who, if anyone, should shoulder the blame for the crucifixion of Jesus? The Case against Christ seeks to answer these questions by treating the matter as a forensic death investigation and answering the questions as they might be answered by a prosecutor attempting to determine who should be held criminally responsible for the death of Jesus.

Books on a variety of subjects, from chess to murder to short fiction.