Law: The author is both a history and law graduate and practised at the criminal bar in London for seven years during the 1990s. The initial idea for the book was ignited in post-revolutionary Prague where many Czechoslovakians had appeared to the author to be blaming others in order to avoid their own contributions to the communist era, writes John McBratney.
The "dynamic of naming and shaming" haunted the author for 10 years and it eventually helped him to decide to write a history of the criminal trial. He chose New York as the place from where he would carry out the necessary research and started in the summer of 2001. Consequently, come September 11th, he watched from his windows as "the towers of the World Trade Center burned and collapsed". In the ensuing days, as people were detained without trial, the need "for a little historical perspective" became more apparent as well as the even more fundamental question of why trials take place at all. It is with the history of such thoughts that the book grapples. It is not an easy task but, given the vastness of the subject, the author does demonstrate the importance of the role the trial has to play in the ordering of any society.
The substantive part of the book is divided into eight chapters, each of which begins with a quotation from Kafka and proceeds in a rough historical sequence. There is, in addition, a final chapter entitled "Conclusion", which is more of a reflection than a conclusion. The book starts with the religious rituals of the classical and barbarian worlds and ends in the trial circuses of today. Its principal focus is on the Anglo-American jury trial and it relies on the stories of trials rather than theories to drive the text. The author, like a good storyteller, describes the trials and a certain amount of the facts surrounding them with a light touch.
While the first two chapters - "From Eden to Ordeals" and "The Inquisition" - hold the attention, the book finds its stride when it engages with the emergence of the jury trial in the 13th century. Its subsequent evolution was a slow process but the descriptions of various well-known trials, such as those of Walter Raleigh and William Penn, are still of importance. It is with incredulity that one reads of trials of weevils for invading a vineyard and shame when one reads of the trials of so-called witches, even if Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a well-known part of the modern repertory theatre. These trials are useful to remember when the author turns to the more modern, such as the Moscow show trials (a form of public humiliation), the trials of the Nazi war criminals (where new offences were created), the trials of individuals in a racially mixed society (OJ Simpson and Bernhard Goetz, the subway vigilante) and the trials of outsiders (the Birmingham Six). He also brings to the reader's attention the grim words of Justice Antonin Scalia, a current member of the US Supreme Court, in relation to an accused who is mentally deficient: "Society's moral outrage sometimes demands execution of retarded offenders. By what principle of law, science or logic can the court pronounce that this is wrong? There is none."
While the author shows a distaste for what has happened and is happening to the rights of the accused he does not, wisely, in his "Conclusion", offer any simplistic solutions in relation to the perceived inadequacies of a criminal trial. However, he makes an honourable claim for the trial when he states: "Perhaps, most potently of all, the criminal trial enacts the meaning of human dignity, showing a civilization that treats its most despicable enemies with respect - presuming them innocent, confronting them as equals and giving them a champion to argue their cause."
While such sentiments might sound quaint or naive, a society which adopts them is to be compared and contrasted with a society which detains people without trial.
John McBratney is a barrister and the chairman of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig
The Trial: A History from Socrates to OJ Simpson. By Sadakat Kaari, HarperCollins, 474pp. £25