UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

A Case of Murder on the Appalachian Trail

H. L. Pohlman

A compelling study of the legal issues surrounding a shocking crime of violence

On May 13, 1988, Stephen Roy Carr, a so-called mountain man living in Michaux State Forest in south central Pennsylvania, shot two female hikers while they were making love at a campsite near the Appalachian Trail. Rebecca Wight died at the scene. Claudia Brenner, despite five bullet wounds, survived to testify against her attacker.

In this book, H. L. Pohlman reconstructs the dramatic story of this widely publicized murder case and traces its disposition through the criminal justice system. Drawing on interviews with participants as well as court records, he closely examines competing interpretations of the evidence. Was the attack a hate crime? A sex crime? A class crime? At the same time, he shows how a broad range of substantive and procedural issues—from the rights of the accused to evaluations of potential mitigating circumstances—can influence the assessment of culpability in homicide cases.

Much of Pohlman's analysis centers around two fundamental and related questions: To what extent did the adversarial system facilitate or hinder the discovery of the "whole truth" in the Carr case? And was justice served? He concludes by revisiting the ongoing debate over the nature of the American criminal justice system and the legitimacy of its ultimate sanction—the death penalty.

"A death-penalty trial is lent a fascinating air by its very low-profile, routine nature in Pohlman's careful, revelatory delineation of the legal process.
"Here is a lucid narrative of a typical murder trial, written to give the average citizen a tase of how our legal process works when not turned by the media glare into a prurient sideshow. This case concerns the murder of one young woman and the shooting of another while they were camping in central Pennsylvania. There was no doubt as to the murderer (he confessed), but there certainly is about the extent to which he was responsible for his actions. The question of the jury's impartiality is raised by the fact that the victims were gay: would this rural, conservative, religiously inclined venue deal the death penalty to a local mountain man for his violence against two out-of-state lesbians? Truth and justice fade behind a fog of legal maneuverings that Pohlman, remarkably, illuminates without putting the reader to sleep: lawyers' battles regarding evidence disclosure and jury selection, a question of the defendant's diminished capacity and a 'Twinkie'-style defense, and questions about the degree of nuance in categories of criminal guilt. Pohlman also does a good job portraying the human weaknesses of the lead players, from the district attorney, for whom 'avoiding the anziety of 'Godlike' decisions was more important . . . than avoiding the infliction of a punishment that in his own opinion had no legitimate purpose,' to the savvy judge who nonetheless displays outrageously misplaced confidence in the defendant's understanding of what is happening to him at his plea-bargain session.

"Pohlman ably spotlights tough legal nuts (does the adversarial judicial system facilitate or hinder the truth; are the conflicts raised by this legal process inimical to fairness and propriety that, while hardly new, are so fundamental to our notion of justice, they strike reflective chords every time they are raised."

Kirkus Reviews

"The Whole Truth ? is a thought-provoking account of a senseless crime. It will provide those troubled by our country's imperfect criminal justice system much to think about."
Legal Times
"An unusual and provocative view of both the workings of the criminal justice system and its social context. In particular, Pohlman's probing of the cast of characters exposes the complexities of decision-making that emerge in a criminal investigation, in a prosecution of this magnitude and in the defense of a person accused of murder and facing the possibility of the death penalty. . . . The Whole Truth? is a bit reminiscent of A Civil Action in the way it takes one case as a compelling and dynamic artifact of our legal system and, even more generally, our culture. "

Janet Rifkin, University of Massachusetts Amherst

H. L. Pohlman is professor of political science at Dickinson College. He is editor of Political Thought and the American Judiciary, published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Legal Studies
264 pp., 6 illustrations
LC 98-28300
$50.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 1-55849-165-1
$24.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-166-X
1999
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