Welcome to our weekly review of the events at crimestory.com.
In this time of pandemic, Crime Story will continue to examine how stories of crime and justice are told in our society and in our culture. That includes exploring narratives about the functions and dysfunctions of our criminal legal and punishment processes in a period of national crisis. It also includes covering fascinating trials that are impacted by the crisis.
This past week, we presented two stories that continued our deep-dive into the trial of Robert Durst.
On Monday, we published Defending Robert Durst: The Opening Statement by Karen Ann Coburn, which explores the roadmap offered by the defense team of how they plan to try to instill “reasonable doubt” in the minds of the jurors of Durst’s culpability for the murder of Susan Berman.
On Tuesday we presented my piece, The Durst Trial: Victim Shaming Strategy Meets the Supermodel which explores an example of the challenges that the defense team faces in pursuing their strategy of maligning the character of Durst’s alleged victims.
In the latter part of the week, Amanda Knox and Christopher Robinson, who will be publishing more regularly with Crime Story in the coming weeks, offered pieces exploring issues related to the accused and the wrongfully-convicted in this time of national crisis.
On Wednesday, we presented an interview that Amanda and Chris did with Justin Brooks of the California Innocence Project about The Threat to Habeas Corpus presented by requests made to Congress by the U.S. Department of Justice.
On Friday, Amanda and Chris presented their piece The Too-Steep Climb to Righting Wrongful Convictions which explores the story of the long road to freedom for Jens Soering, whose full story was told in Amand and Chris’s podcast The Truth About True Crime. They present Jens’s saga as representative of how difficult it is for injustice to be righted in our society even in normal times. Many of those efforts are now on hold and are likely to remain just as daunting after this crisis passes.
For those of you wondering how you can catch up on previous Crime Story newsletters, just click here and your question shall be answered.
We close this week, as is our habit, with Hannah Teich’s curated selection of some of the more interesting stories from Crime Story Daily over the past week.
Hannah, who edits this Daily section, groups the aggregation into four general topic areas: criminal justice policy reporting; muckraking/watchdog reporting; complex crime storytelling; and stories that examine the impact of criminal justice and true-crime in the culture.
Again, Hannah’s work on the Crime Story Daily aggregated list of crime and justice stories is a tremendous resource for information about how the pandemic is impacting the people caught up in our justice system.
Click here to go to Hannah’s weekly essay.
Thanks for reading and listening.
Kary Antholis
Publisher/Editor, Crime Story
