Legal Research

We've taken a bit of a blogging hiatus lately due to my shoulder surgery, vacations, and the law librarians' national meeting.  I've been catching up on my current awareness reading and saw an interesting article in the NY Times about a defense motion to bar the introduction of a list of books read by the defendant in prison from a homicide trial.  The defendant, Steven Hayes, is a "career thief" who was arrested outside the home of the Petit family in Chesire, Connecticut, several years ago.  When police entered the Petit home, they discovered that three members of the Petit family had been murdered. Hayes has been charged with the homicides and a number of related felonies.  His death penalty trial is scheduled to start this September, and his defense team filed a motion requesting that the books that Hayes checked out of the prison library during his incarceration prior to the killings not be allowed as evidence in the trial.  The defense indicated that some of the books contained material that could be considered "criminally malevolent in the extreme" and jurors might be unduly prejudiced if they knew that Hayes had checked these books out of the prison library prior to the alleged homicides.

No one has disclosed which books are on the defendant's prison library checkout record, but the defense motion is now resulting in some scrutiny of CT prison library contents.  The article states that State Senator John A. Kissel of the Connecticut Legislature?s Judiciary Committee was "troubled by the suggestions about Mr. Hayes?s prison reading."  Senator Kissel declared that he would send a "letter to corrections officials demanding to know what books were available to inmates."

If this article on the American Library Association website is accurate, "true crime" and "crime fiction" are some of the most heavily-requested materials within prison libraries (also check out this "most wanted" jail library book list from a library school).  Should prisoners be allowed to read fiction and non-fiction materials that contain graphic depictions of crimes? How do you define what constitutes a "graphic" depiction of crime?  What about classics like "Crime and Punishment"?