In the hours before Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrived in court on Friday morning, rumors flew that prosecutors might drop the case against the former director of the International Monetary Fund. As first reported in the New York Times, prosecutors disclosed to Strauss-Kahn's lawyers on June 30 that the woman accusing him of trying to rape her in his hotel suite had lied to investigators on a number of occasions and that her credibility had come into question. Judge ...

I've never been a big fan of Stieg Larsson's work. I know, I know: that's not a popular opinion. And I do acknowledge that haunted hacker Lisbeth Salander is a compelling character. But a 24-year-old woman with the body of a tween whose idea of a good time is donating anonymous sex to older men? There's a little too much of the fantasy gamine about her. That's not what I want my daughters to grow up thinking a powerful woman ...

Claude "Butch" Jones would seem an unlikely client for the Innocence Project, a legal foundation that has freed 254 men and women through DNA evidence since 1992. Jones was not, in the broadest sense, an innocent man. He was an alcoholic and an armed robber who once, while serving time in Kansas for murder, doused another inmate with lighter fluid and, in the words of his own defense attorney, "torched him." When Jones was executed by the state of Texas, ...

The aging bosses seated at the defense table in the packed federal courtroom in lower Manhattan look harmless enough to be spectators at a Sunday-after noon boccie game. Anthony Salerno, 75, the reputed head of the Genovese crime family, sits aloof and alone, his left eye red and swollen from surgery. White-haired Anthony Corallo, 73, the alleged Lucchese family chief, is casual in a cardigan and sport shirt. Carmine Persico, 53, is the balding, baggy-eyed showman of ...

Court on Thursday, June 2, started in typical Rod Blagojevich style. The former Illinois governor arrived and signed autographs in front of the Dirksen Federal Building. The day, however, ended in blistering fashion. "Mr. Blagojevich, you are a convicted liar, right?" U.S. assistant attorney Reid Schar boomed into the courtroom late that afternoon. And in response, Blagojevich flung back a yes — over his lawyer's objections. The long-awaited cross-examination was under way, and like two caged animals posturing to ...

The case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has shocked both sides of the Atlantic and much of the world. The official charges filed against him in a New York City court include: two counts of criminal sexual act in the first degree; one count of attempted rape; and one count each of sexual abuse in the first degree, unlawful imprisonment in the second degree, sexual abuse in the third degree and forcible ...

Socrates, the famed Greek philosopher, made a rare public appearance on May 12, in the Ceremonial Courtroom of Manhattan's Federal Courthouse. In fact, he took the corporeal form of famed defense attorney Benjamin Brafman, currently representing embattled IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was highly animated in his defense against the millennia-old impiety and corruption charges levied against the Athenian. Fortunately, there was not a toga to be seen in the audience. The court was in session on a ...

As white and Negro Freedom Riders continued their rolling assault against segregation last week, they produced some profound results in South and North alike: In Washington, Attorney General Robert Kennedy urged the Interstate Commerce Commission to start enforcing the vaguely worded federal ban on segregation in restaurants, waiting rooms and toilets at interstate bus terminals. The ICC in 1955 outlawed segregated seating in interstate buses. But that rule is rarely obeyed in the South, and the ICC has acted against only one offending bus line, which ...

The incident was over in a matter of minutes. But two weeks after the beating of a black motorist by Los Angeles policemen was videotaped by an eyewitness, it had led to arrests, probes by local, county and federal organizations and a Justice Department review of law-enforcement violence across the nation. It began with wailing police cars chasing a motorist through the night, cornering his car in a Los Angeles suburb and surrounding the driver as he stepped into the ...

Rodrigo Rosenberg became a household name in Guatemala after he posthumously accused the President and First Lady of ordering his Mother's Day murder last year. His words, left behind in a video taped days before he was shot to death on a tree-lined boulevard, sent tens of thousands of protesters into the streets and sparked youth-led reform movements. But the case that once seemed powerful enough to topple a presidency came to a bizarre end on Jan. ...