Superman, Batman, Daredevil, and Wonder Woman are iconic cultural figures that embody values of order, fairness, justice, and retribution. Comic Book Crime digs deep into these and other celebrated characters, providing a comprehensive understanding of crime and justice in contemporary American comic books. This is a world where justice is delivered, where heroes save ordinary citizens from certain doom, where evil is easily identified and thwarted by powers far greater than mere mortals could possess. Nickie Phillips and Staci Strobl explore these representations and show that comic books, as a historically important American cultural medium, participate in both reflecting and shaping an American ideological identity that is often focused on ideas of the apocalypse, utopia, retribution, and nationalism. Through an analysis of approximately 200 comic books sold from 2002 to 2010, as well as several years of immersion in comic book fan culture, Phillips and Strobl reveal the kinds of themes and plots popular comics feature in a post-9/11 context. They discuss heroes’ calculations of “deathworthiness,” or who should be killed in meting out justice, and how these judgments have as much to do with the hero’s character as they do with the actions of the villains. This fascinating volume also analyzes how class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are used to construct difference for both the heroes and the villains in ways that are both conservative and progressive. Engaging, sharp, and insightful, Comic Book Crime is a fresh take on the very meaning of truth, justice, and the American way.

This book is concerned to analyse the production of criminological knowledge, with particular reference to one of the most important institutions in the western world involved in this -the official inquiry. The core focus of this book is thus to investigate the structures and processes of official discourse, and the ways in which this produces knowledge on crime and justice - a much neglected topic in comparison to the attention that has been played to the role of the media in this process. The mechanisms that produce official discourse vary according to different jurisdiction, but some clear themes nevertheless emerge.

After more than twenty years in prison, Adnan Syed’s murder conviction was overturned, and he was finally set free. Rabia Chaudry’s New York Times bestseller and award-winner Adnan’s Story reveals how the case was mishandled and became the subject of Sarah Koenig’s Peabody Award-winning podcast Serial. In early 2000, Adnan Syed was convicted and sentenced to life plus thirty years for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, a high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland. Syed has maintained his innocence, and Rabia Chaudry, a family friend, has always believed him. By 2013, after almost all appeals had been exhausted, Rabia contacted Sarah Koenig, a producer at This American Life, in hopes of finding a journalist who could shed light on Adnan’s story. In 2014, Koenig's investigation turned into Serial, a Peabody Award-winning podcast with more than 500 million international listeners. But Serial did not tell the whole story. In this compelling narrative, Rabia Chaudry presents key evidence that she maintains dismantles the State’s case: a potential new suspect, forensics indicating Hae was killed and kept somewhere for almost half a day, and documentation withheld by the State that destroys the cell phone evidence—among many other points—and she shows how fans of Serial joined a crowd-sourced investigation into a case riddled with errors and strange twists. Featuring information about Adnan’s life in prison, and weaving in his personal reflections with never-before-seen letters, Rabia’s account is “a true story about real people. Adnan’s Story adds context and humanizes it in a way that could change how you think about the case and about Serial itself” (Los Angeles Times). “Chaudry’s clear, vivid and highly readable account of the case will bring the story to life for readers unfamiliar with the podcast, and even the most devoted Serial fans will find fresh insight and a vast amount of new material. Chaudry’s legal training serves her well as she marshals her defense, but so too does the Pakistani heritage and Muslim faith she shares with Syed.” —Washington Post

James Comey, former FBI Director and New York Times bestselling author of A Higher Loyalty, uses his long career in federal law enforcement to explore issues of justice and fairness in the US justice system. James Comey might best be known as the FBI director that Donald Trump fired in 2017, but he’s had a long, varied career in the law and justice system. He knows better than most just what a force for good the US justice system can be, and how far afield it has strayed during the Trump Presidency. In his much-anticipated follow-up to A Higher Loyalty, Comey uses anecdotes and lessons from his career to show how the federal justice system works. From prosecuting mobsters as an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York in the 1980s to grappling with the legalities of anti-terrorism work as the Deputy Attorney General in the early 2000s to, of course, his tumultuous stint as FBI director beginning in 2013, Comey shows just how essential it is to pursue the primacy of truth for federal law enforcement. Saving Justice is gracefully written and honestly told, a clarion call for a return to fairness and equity in the law.

Can the criminal justice system achieve justice based on its ability to determine the truth? Drawing on a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, this book investigates the concept of truth – its complexities and nuances – and scrutinizes how well the criminal justice process facilitates truth-finding. From allegation to sentencing, the chapters take the reader on a journey through the criminal justice system, exposing the marginalization of truth-finding in favour of other jurisprudential or systemic values, such as expediency, procedural fairness and the presumption of innocence. This important work bridges the gap between what people expect from the criminal justice system and what it can legitimately deliver.

A History of Infamy explores the broken nexus between crime, justice, and truth in mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Faced with the violence and impunity that defined politics, policing, and the judicial system in post-revolutionary times, Mexicans sought truth and justice outside state institutions. During this period, criminal news and crime fiction flourished. Civil society’s search for truth and justice led, paradoxically, to the normalization of extrajudicial violence and neglect of the rights of victims. As Pablo Piccato demonstrates, ordinary people in Mexico have made crime and punishment central concerns of the public sphere during the last century, and in doing so have shaped crime and violence in our times.

This new book by the well-known anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff explores the global preoccupation with criminality in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the risks posed by lawlessness to the conduct of everyday life. Ours in an epoch in which law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves, an epoch in which criminology, broadly defined, has displaced sociology as the privileged means by which the social world knows itself. They also argue that as the result of a tectonic shift in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime and, with it, the nature of policing, have undergone significant change; also, that there has been a palpable muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, between corruption and conventional business; even between crime-and-policing, which exist, nowadays, in ever greater, hyphenated complicity. Thinking through Crime and Policing is, therefore, an excursion into the contemporary Order of Things; or, rather, into the metaphysic of disorder that saturates the late modern world, indeed, has become its leitmotif. It is also a meditation on sovereignty and citizenship, on civility, class, and race, on the law and its transgression, on the political economy of representation.