num_pages: 287
description: In From Blood to Verdict, Homsher explores three trials involving women that took place in an upstate New York college town. Shirley Kinge was accused of helping clean up the house of the family her son had murdered. Christine Lane was convicted of suffocating and burying her young daughter. Deborah Dennett was acquitted of killing her husband, a powerful local attorney, with a shotgun blast to the head. No one questioned that she had shot him; her defense rested on the contention that she had been abused by him for years. Homsher interviews people who sided with the victims and the defendants in every case, including friends, trial witnesses, jury members, police, and attorneys. And she watches to see how American jury trials work. Though our trials attempt to insure testimony is "objective," they rely on heated confrontations between attorneys. As a result, the jury is given two exaggerated portraits of the as villain and victim. Ultimately, the heartfelt stories witnesses long to tell are broken into fragments by the machinery of a trial, so that by the end the community is left with bits and pieces of evidence. Trials do not help us comprehend tragedy; they serve to box, tape, and store it away. "Since the first murderer was banished to the wilderness, the trail of private violence has never been disentangled from the thickets of daily circumstance. As Homsher points out, 'the truth will not be found' by rituals of courts or journalism. Yet profound trouble in the heart goads us on 'to catch the thing that makes victims. Catch it. Look at it. Tell it to stop.' Such impassioned need illuminates the stories here and reclaims some territory from the ignorant dark where the beast lives."
language: English
title: From Blood to Verdict: Three Women on Trial
titlecomplete: From Blood to Verdict: Three Women on Trial
ratings_count: 11
publisher: McBooks Pr