Getting Away With Murder: Acquittals in High-Profile CasesGetting Away With Murder: Acquittals in High-Profile Cases
Have you ever wondered why our legal system is so inconsistent and baffling? Have you asked why some apparently guilty, high-profile defendants are acquitted but innocent people are convicted or accept a plea agreement? Or why the American criminal justice and penal systems appear so unjust, with the United States having the highest rate of incarceration in the world, a penal population of over two million people, and one third of young African American men involved in the criminal justice system (Alexander, 2010; Ferguson, 2014)? Richard Gabriel’s Acquittal: An Insider Reveals the Stories and Strategies Behind Today’s Most Infamous Verdicts answers some of these questions. Gabriel explains how the U.S. legal system works, provides extensive insider information about the actual trial process, and discusses six well-known criminal cases, many of which resulted in acquittals. Gabriel is neither a lawyer nor a psychologist. Yet he has lived in the psycholegal world his entire life, having grown up with a mother who was a judge and a father who was a psychologist. He indicates having worked as a trial consultant for almost 30 years and on more than 1,000 cases, many of which were nationally prominent.