The Witness brings a new dimension to true crime literature. CSI has rolled-up the tape but the investigation isn’t over. Detectives cool their heels from pounding the pavement, but the interviews have just started. The crime is solved. The suspects – charged and booked – are left to contemplate their fate. However, one question remains: What is justice?
In the second stage of the trial, the jury is charged with the task of deciding a just and adequate penalty. Instructed to put aside their own experiences and put on the defendant’s shoes, they must arrive at an impartial decision based on the facts. Draper, piecing together shards of personal circumstances and life often swept under the rug of family shame or neglect, leads them through the defendant’s Life Path, from his birth to this murderous act. She reveals how the past casts a grave shadow over one’s future.
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Wanda Draper, Ph.D., professor emeritus of human development in the College of Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center, taught behavioral science to physicians in their psychiatry residency programs for twenty years. Dr. Draper has consulted nationally and internationally on child development and parent education. As an expert witness, she has testified in over a hundred capital murder trials and child custody cases about the relationship between childhood development and adulthood consequences. She studied at Texas Woman’s University, with additional studies at Harvard University and in Geneva, Switzerland. The author of seventeen books, she has appeared on television, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, and has been quoted in CNN News, USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Parent magazine, and Reader’s Digest.