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MaryConway Stewart
MaryConway Stewart was a retired history teacher engaged in designing a program for amateur Latin and Classical Greek enthusiasts when she learned of an American student accused of...view moreMaryConway Stewart was a retired history teacher engaged in designing a program for amateur Latin and Classical Greek enthusiasts when she learned of an American student accused of vandalism and caned in Singapore in 1994. When she discovered that the Singapore media had no coherent account of the offense and many accounts of car vandalism by the locals in Singapore she assumed that the reporters were intimidated into covering this up, but over the next decade several criminal trials in her own city of Philadelphia were also marred not only by overly zealous prosecutors but by extremely irrational behavior by the prosecution, defense and media. Reasonable analysis of testimony and other evidence and mere common sense were entirely lacking. In the most recent of these cases, the riot trials in York, PA, all the evidence from the time of the killing in 1969 was missing from an authorized version in which a tragic accident became murder blamed on a neighborhood boys club - converted into a racist gang - and the entire 1969 York police force who became their accomplices. Two innocent men were convicted and a civil suit threatens to bankrupt the city and several former policemen guilty of being the first on the scene after the “murder” and arresting nobody.
This blatant irrational behavior led Mrs. Stewart to conclude that the human mind deals in strings of images and not in narrative logic in the course of criminal trials and that referees are needed who would be able to treat such trials as exercises in amateur detection and not as duels or morality plays.view less
Books by MaryConway Stewart
No Peace, No Justice: Press & Prosecution Create a Poisonous Myth an Intelligent Appraisal of the York "Riot" Trials