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Getting Away With Murder (Most Of The Time): A Sesquicentennial Analysis Of Civil War Era Homicide Cases In Boone County, Missouri, Frank O. Bowman Iii
Getting Away With Murder (Most Of The Time): A Sesquicentennial Analysis Of Civil War Era Homicide Cases In Boone County, Missouri, Frank O. Bowman Iii
Frank O. Bowman III
In the quarter century centered on the Civil War, 1850-1875, fifty-three homicide cases came before the courts of Boone County, Missouri, of which Columbia, home of the University of Missouri, is the county seat. To remarkable degree, the story of these killings, told in this article, is a chronicle of the place and period.
The article’s method might be described as “murder as social history.” Its narrative thread is an effort to explain the remarkable fact that only twelve of the fifty-three defendants charged with murder were ever convicted of any form of criminal homicide. The explanation requires an introduction …
Debacle: How The Supreme Court Has Mangled American Sentencing Law And How Justice Sotomayor Might Help Fix It, Frank O. Bowman
Debacle: How The Supreme Court Has Mangled American Sentencing Law And How Justice Sotomayor Might Help Fix It, Frank O. Bowman
Frank O. Bowman III
This Article argues that the line of Supreme Court Sixth Amendment jury right cases that began with McMillan v. Pennsylvania in 1986, crescendoed in Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Booker in 2004-2005, and continues in 2009 in cases such as Oregon v. Ice, has been a colossal judicial failure. First, the Court has failed to provide a logically coherent, constitutionally based answer to the fundamental question of what limits the Constitution places on the roles played by the institutional actors in the criminal justice system. It failed to recognize that defining, adjudicating and punishing crimes implicates both the …