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May 9, 2023
Who To Believe!
Is our justice system in the business of determining what is true or false? Do our courts really determine who is guilty or innocent? Does our criminal justice system punish those who violate, and protect and restore the rights of the violated?
As a ...
Is our justice system in the business of determining what is true or false? Do our courts really determine who is guilty or innocent? Does our criminal justice system punish those who violate, and protect and restore the rights of the violated?
As a former prosecutor and now professor of law, Deborah Tuerkheimer has spent her career studying how law and culture interact, and is a leading legal authority on violence against women, domestic violence, and sex crimes.
In her recent book Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers she examines how our cultural values shape how law is written and executed, and also how our laws determine why we believe some and not others - and why we care so much about some, and so very little about others.
In this episode Deborah breaks down how the “credibility complex” not only dictates how justice is meted out, but how the justice system, just like our culture, orients to the pain of the powerful, and disregards the pain of the powerless. And how, in a world where women as a class are subject to the greater power of men as a class, ‘justice’ becomes a tenuous matter.
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Deborah Tuerkheimer
Professor of Law & Author
Deborah Tuerkheimer is a former prosecutor specializing in domestic violence, and a legal expert and leading authority on sexual violence crimes. She is a professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law where she teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law, evidence, and feminist legal theory.
Deborah Tuerkheimer is the author of Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers published 2021, in which she provides a framework to explain the “credibility discount”—our dismissal of claims by certain kinds of speakers—primarily women, resulting in justice denied for victims of sexual violence.
She is also a co-author of the casebook Feminist Jurisprudence: Cases and Materials and the author of numerous articles on sexual violence and domestic violence. Tuerkheimer earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard College and her law degree from Yale Law School. She served for five years as an Assistant District Attorney in the New York County District Attorney's Office, where she specialized in domestic violence and child abuse prosecution. In 2015, Tuerkheimer was elected to the American Law Institute, an esteemed group of judges, lawyers, and legal scholars dedicated to the development of the law.