1st Edition

In Crime's Archive The Cultural Afterlife of Evidence

By Katherine Biber Copyright 2019
217 Pages
by Routledge

217 Pages
by Routledge

217 Pages
by Routledge

This book investigates what happens to criminal evidence after the conclusion of legal proceedings. During the criminal trial, evidentiary material is tightly regulated; it is formally regarded as part of the court record, and subject to the rules of evidence and criminal procedure. However, these rules and procedures cannot govern or control this material after proceedings have ended. In its... Read more

Table of Contents

 

Acknowledgements

Permissions

Introduction: Afterlife, evidence, archive

Chapter 1: The afterlife of police photographs

Chapter 2: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death: Crime scenes as doll’s houses

Chapter 3: The afterlife of criminal evidence in the news media

Chapter 4: The Oscar Pistorius Trial: An afterlife in real time
Chapter 5: The Museum: Curating evidence

Chapter 6: The Lindy Chamberlain Case: The afterlife of a miscarriage of justice

Chapter 7: International crimes: The afterlife of evidence of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity

Conclusion: Destroying the evidence

Index

Biography

Katherine Biber is Professor of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney.

"In the course of seven wonderfully self-contained chapters, each focused upon different evidentiary afterlives in different institutional contexts, In Crime’s Archive explores the ways in which criminal evidence continues to play formative and expansive roles in the cultural and popular life of society as well as the very real lives of those most directly implicated in it."

Michelle Brown, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, Law and Society Review

 

 

"One of the gifts this book offers is its capacity to open multiple windows onto the world of evidence, criminal justice, and culture ... This book offers a different way of thinking about the objects that the criminal justice process accumulates, organizes, and stores in its archives. It shines a light on the ways in which a wide variety of individuals and institutions are mining them. It calls for the reader to question and problematize the journey that the objects in law’s archive take into wider society."

Leslie J Moran, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, Social and Legal Studies