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The Trial : A History, from Socrates to O. J. Simpson
Sadakat Kadri
For as long as accuser and accused have faced each other in public, criminal trials have been establishing far more than who did what to whom?and in this fascinating book, Sadakat Kadri surveys four thousand years of courtroom drama.
Random House
August 2005
480 pages
ISBN: 0375505504
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A brilliantly engaging writer, Kadri journeys from the
silence of ancient Egypt’s Hall of the Dead to the clamor of
twenty-first-century Hollywood to show how emotion and fear
have inspired Western notions of justice–and the extent to
which they still riddle its trials today. He explains, for
example, how the jury emerged in medieval England from
trials by fire and water, in which validations of vengeance
were presumed to be divinely supervised, and how delusions
identical to those that once sent witches to the stake were
revived as accusations of Satanic child abuse during the 1980s. Lifting the lid on a particularly bizarre niche of legal
history, Kadri tells how European lawyers once prosecuted
animals, objects, and corpses–and argues that the same
instinctive urge to punish is still apparent when a child or
mentally ill defendant is accused of sufficiently heinous
crimes. But Kadri’s history is about aspiration as well as
ignorance. He shows how principles such as the right to
silence and the right to confront witnesses, hallmarks of
due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, were
derived from the Bible by twelfth-century monks. He tells of
show trials from Tudor England to Stalin’s Soviet Union, but
contends that “no-trials,” in Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere,
are just as repugnant to Western traditions of justice and
fairness. With governments everywhere eroding legal
protections in the name of an indefinite war on terror,
Kadri’s analysis could hardly be timelier. At once encyclopedic and entertaining, comprehensive and
colorful, The Trial rewards curiosity and an appreciation of
the absurd but tackles as well questions that are profound.
Who has the right to judge, and why? What did past
civilizations hope to achieve through scapegoats and
sacrifices–and to what extent are defendants still made to
bear the sins of society at large? Kadri addresses such
themes through scores of meticulously researched stories,
all told with the verve and wit that won him one of
Britain’s most prestigious travel-writing awards–and in
doing so, he has created a masterpiece of popular history.
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