In an extraordinary history of the criminal trial, Sadakat Kadri traces the development of criminal justice from the marbled courtrooms of Athens, past the torture chambers of the Inquisition to the judicial theatres of seventeenth-century Salem, from 1930s Moscow and post-war Nuemberg to the virtual courtooms of modern Hollywood. / Kadri is a brilliant young barrister working at the chambers to which other book-writing lawyers like Helena Kennedy and Geoffrey Robertson belong / Kadri won the Shiva Naipaul/Spectator Travel Writing Prize in 1998 (judged by William Dalrymple and Caryl Phillips) / In the UK, as the Blair Administration attempts to truncate the right to trial by jury , an examination of its history and importance could not be more timely / In the US, post 9/11, the Bush administration deemed entire categories of people to be subject to indefinite detention without trial, while several legal commentators and politicians have argued for the abolition of the right to silence and the legalisation of torture by the state -- a process illegal in the West since the 18th century. Our consitutional landscape is melting away. This book focuses on the role played by secrecy and publicity in the trial process -- the trial as a force for validating violence and of restraining it. / Very human-driven narrative and very serialisable. Easily adapted to extracts. / Competition: Charles Nicholl, Alain de Botton, Christopher Hitchens, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Michael Ignatieff, Philip Gourevitch, Helena Kennedy, Steven Pinker, Oliver Sacks
Half-Finnish and half-Pakistani, Sadakat Kadri was born in London in 1964 and studied history and law at Cambridge and Harvard universities. As well as being a member of the New York Bar and a tenant at London's Doughty Street Chambers, he is a travel writer whose Cadogan Guide to Prague was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook award and who won the Shiva Naipaul/Spectator Prize in 1998. As a barrister, he has represented several prisoners on death row in the Carribean, prosecuted one African dictator and challenged the legality of a military dictatorship in Fiji. He now lives in London.
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