In a culture where extreme punitive measures have become the default, the line between strict yet still appropriate discipline and abject criminal abuse can be quickly crossed. Add to that a scenario where the abuser in question holds a position of respect (i.e. the Catholic Church), and public opinion appears unlikely to bend in favor […]

When 15-year-old Paula Cooper  became one of the youngest people ever sentenced to death in the United States in 1985, her verdict sent shockwaves through an already turbulent criminal justice system and polarized everyone from her own family to the Vatican. Only a few short years after a brief federal moratorium on capital punishment was […]

When partners Jennifer and Sarah Hart drove their family SUV off a cliff in Mendocino County, CA in 2018, killing themselves and all six of their adoptive children, journalist Roxanna Asgarian was several states away reporting on the child welfare system in Texas. Despite her distance and lack of involvement with the active investigation into […]

  A forensic anthropologist’s primary job is to parse through the evidence of some of the most upsetting crimes of humanity, chronicle the aftermath, and try to piece together factual unknowns. When that job requires taking an up close look at the remains of genocide — as anthropologist and Still Life with Bones author Alexa […]

When rumors of a stylishly dressed man robbing stagecoaches and leaving poems behind at the scene of the crime started to hit newspapers in the late 1800s, the culprit Charles “Black Bart” Boles became an instant cultural sensation. Set against the dusty, rugged backdrop of the Old West, Black Bart’s gentlemanly image still persists in […]

  How is it that an industry that makes up $24 billion of the United States’ annual economy and 2.69  percent of its global exports exists almost entirely in the shadows of its society? In Blood Money, investigative journalist Kathleen McLaughlin exhumes the messy business of the blood plasma trade, which in the past two […]

  Survival, as journalist Michelle Dowd describes in her newly released memoir Forager, can sometimes be a trickier concept to understand than it is to achieve. If one is raised in the confines of a religious commune built on the twin pillars of gender-based oppression and violent abuse, such as Dowd was, is it more […]

  “Reconstructing the last months of Liliana’s life is not easy. There was more to her than just the bright girl ; the reliable and sometimes protective friend; the outspoken and quick-witted young woman who knew how to heal and hurt with words; the young student who was falling more and more in love with […]

  In his first published novel, New York public defender and Law&Crime host Brian Buckmire artfully transforms his professional understanding of the criminal justice system into the written experiences of two young, Black students living in Brooklyn — 14-year old soccer star, Reed, and his 12-year old debate champion sister, Olive — as they are […]

  If one wants to evaluate the health and vitality of their community, just take a long, hard look at how it processes its dead. At least that’s what Bruce Goldfarb, former Executive Assistant to the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland and self-proclaimed “reformed journalist,”implies in his eye-opening chronicle of the nation’s preeminent forensics lab.   […]

At one point or another, every new doctor must make a decision about which branch of medicine to pursue. For former Chief Medical Officer of New York City and host of HBO’s Autopsy, Dr. Michael Baden, the decision between internal medicine and forensic pathology was a particularly formative one. At a time when forensics was […]

1. Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (by Dr. William Maples) Published in 1995, Dead Men Do Tell Tales was one of the first forensic “tell-alls” of its kind. In a surprising blend of wit and horror, renowned forensic physician Dr. William Maples walks readers through some […]