Blog

‘Castle Doctrine’ Laws Provoke Heated Debate

By Maggie Clark, Stateline Staff Writer, Pew Center of the States

When Sarah Dawn McKinley, of Blanchard, Oklahoma, shot and killed a burglar breaking into her home on New Year’s Eve, she was spared prosecution by the state’s “castle doctrine” law, which protects people who defend themselves against intruders. Oklahoma has one of the nation’s most expansive castle doctrine laws — the law includes those defending themselves in either a home or place of business — but many states enumerate a similar protection.

In fact, according to the National Rifle Association, at least 30 states have some form of legislation protecting people from prosecution when they feel threatened by intruders to their property. In New Hampshire last year, legislators overrode Governor John Lynch’s veto when he objected to a castle doctrine bill that allows anyone to defend themselves if they are in their “dwelling, its curtilage, or anywhere he or she has the right to be.” Governor Lynch said the new provisions would increase “deadly violence,” but the legislature disagreed.

The year 2011 was a successful one for the castle doctrine in many parts of the country, with states enacting new laws and, as in New Hampshire, expanding earlier ones. In December, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed a bill expanding the castle doctrine to include a person’s right to use deadly or substantial force against someone who unlawfully and forcibly enters their “dwelling,” “vehicle,” or “place of business,” which Walker said would “deter future criminal intrusions as well as provide added legal protections for those who use force to protect their home or property.”

The Wisconsin State Bar Association, state prosecutors and state police were all opposed to the bill. In a memo to all assembly members, Gregory O’Meara, a past chair of the state bar’s criminal law section, wrote that the bill “changes Wisconsin law by providing a defense for irrational people armed with deadly force. Under its provisions, malevolent, reckless, or paranoid people who shoot trick-or-treaters or repairmen on their porch will be presumed to be acting in self-defense.”

At the national level, the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys argues that the right of self-defense and defense of property are well established in common law and don’t need to be legislated. They also worry that the laws create a presumption of innocence for the shooter, rather than encouraging prosecutors to use their discretion to decide how to proceed with a case.

Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association is advocating for castle doctrine laws in the 20 states that don’t have them, so that, in the words of NRA spokeswoman Stephanie Samford, “the law does not put victims in a place where they have to defend themselves against legal prosecution.”

While the laws do give a presumption of innocence to the castle doctrine shooter, police and prosecutors must still investigate and decide whether to file charges. In the McKinley case in Oklahoma, prosecutors have said they will not file charges in the shooting.

“Public Safety Beat” provides a quick analysis of recent public safety news in state government.

— Contact Maggie Clark at maclark@pewtrusts.org

©2012 The Pew Center on the States, a division of The Pew Charitable Trusts

Crime and Court News

January 11, 2012
MIT’s Agnes Suit, An Instrumented Aware Car and the Miss Daisy Driving Simulator

— MIT AgeLab’s Age Gain Now Empathy System

This suit was designed to provide insight into the physical effects of aging. The various components simulate the changes that occur naturally as we age. Put on this suit and you feel increased fatigue, reduced flexibility in joints and muscles, spinal compression, and difficulty with vision and balance.

Altogether, AGNES is more than just a suit. It is a method developed and constructed by exercise physiologists, engineers, and designers. We need to fully understand the needs of an aging population to design a future that is accessible and engaging for people of every age. AGNES is better way to see how a product, service, or environment is used and navigated by an older adult because it allows us to experience it for ourselves. AGNES is one tool that MIT uses at the AgeLab to study and improve life tomorrow. To learn more visit: agelab.mit.edu

AwareCar

The “AwareCar” is an instrumented vehicle built for evaluating new models and methods of monitoring driver state though physiology, visual attention, and driving performance in the field. The vehicle includes sensors to record data about the current state of the operating environment.

These tools can be used to trigger driver feedback systems that are under development. Sensing systems currently implemented include: six video cameras for environment and operator monitoring, measures of vehicle telemetry (velocity, wheel rates, lane position, radar), driver physiology (heart rate, skin conductance, respiration rate) and eye tracking.

The vehicle has been used in a variety of studies to assess: hands free cellular phone usage, driver health and wellness as well as functional methods of assessing changes in workload, arousal and stress with age.

Miss Daisy (Fixed-base Vehicle Simulator)

“Miss Daisy” is a driving simulator used for the evaluation of in-vehicle technology, cognitive distraction and disease and medication effects.

The simulator is constructed with the full cab of a 2001 Volkswagen Beetle and an 8’ projection screen functions using STISIM Drive for graphics display and model development. Sensors connected to the original equipment manufacturer accelerator, brake and steering wheel provide input to the simulation system. Feedback to the driver is provided through visual, auditory and motion channels. Programmed simulations include highway, rural, urban and desert driving. Studies have shown that behavior patterns measured in the driving simulator correspond with driving in real world situations.

January 10, 2012
The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux

by Kristin Nord

Annette Lemieux’s art has been on the global radar ever since the 1980s, when fresh out of college and serving apprenticeships for Jack Goldstein and David Salle, she became a darling of the Manhattan media.

Fifty major art museums own her work, as do many private collectors. She has garnered an impressive list of awards and grants, solo and group shows, and teaching fellowships and positions.

“Despite her having realized what would be a dream of success to most artists, the esteem in which Lemieux is held remains far from the level merited by her achievements,” art critic Robert Pincus-Witten writes in the catalogue accompanying her retrospective The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux currently on view at the Kalamazoo Art Museum. Pincus-Witten has been following her since she emerged as a leading picture theorist who rejected painting as her primary medium. He dubs her alternatively a “minimalist conceptualist,” as well as a feminist minimalist, “if there is such a thing.” Depicted in such terms, it is any wonder that an artist who has achieved so much continues to bewilder so many?

Blessedly it should come as a relief to discover that Lemieux’s art can be accessed at other levels. Yes, there are allusions to Joseph Beuys and Philip Guston and Marcel Duchamp, but there is also childlike delight, humor, and lots of word play. There is light and dark, in other words the crisp graphics and grids, triangles and globes of the conceptualist, and work laden with emotional content that remains humanist at its core.

To dip into the source of her art one might want to visit Torrington in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley where Lemieux spent her formative years. It is a blue collar city of immigrants, of ethnic parishes and failed factories, where children make snowmen after a winter’s storm, and many young people, including Lemieux’s father and cousins, enlist in the military after high school. Grief resurfaces in such towns on Memorial Day, with its parades still featuring the open cars for Gold Star mothers.

Lemieux’s was a hardscrabble life, with her divorced single mother working for a minimum wage at the local five and dime. St Francis of Assisi parochial school was rife with prejudice, so much so that in her official biography she lists burning her school uniform on graduation night as a major turning point.

A school counselor laughed out loud when she proclaimed her intentions to be an artist and quickly penciled her in for the secretarial track. In time a succession of mentors, convinced of her gifts and impressed by her work ethic, began to open doors, first at Northwestern Connecticut Community College in nearby Winsted and later at the University of Hartford. Lemieux, who speaks in a disarmingly deep and scratchy voice that seems out of scale for her 5 foot 4 inch body, no longer “felt weird”; “I had found my tribe,” she said.

With its close proximity to New York City and its energized faculty, Hartford was a hotbed of the leading conceptual artists of the day. Lemieux ate with gusto at the table of art history, studied and later apprenticed with Jack Goldstein and David Salle in their Manhattan studios. Salle helped put her work on the map, and soon a succession of solo and group shows followed.
(Amazon: The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux by Lelia Amalfitano, Judith Hoos Fox)

When a serious accident in her mid-20s forced her to give up the large conceptual paintings she had been making, she turned to found objects, initially believing “someone else’s story” was more interesting than her own. Over the next 30 years of her life as a professional artist and on the Arts and Sciences faculty at Harvard University (since 1996) she has continued to respond to the world around her, and to her own internal struggles as an artist in such varied ways that her work eludes easy categorization.

She paints, sculpts, manipulates found photographs and objects — she’s likely to spin us via a vintage school-room globe into a polka dotted galaxy, or line up a troop of helmets on wheels like fledglings being patterned along an intractable trajectory. There is stagecraft, mime, and performance art sometimes at work, embedded psychologically in her brick walls, hat molds and clotheslines. Crosses beam like beating hearts. Meanwhile the objects Lemieux selects have the capacity to block, move, or levitate. Grasp at the clues in the titles, Lemieux suggests; hold onto the mane for the ride.

Painting: The Seat of the Intellect, 1984: Oil paint on helmet; 11 x 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches. Collection of the artist. Photo: Ellen Page Wilson

January 9, 2012
A Puzzlement

by Joan L. Cannon

How do you react to those e-mails that order the recipient to forward them, often within a certain time frame, lest some dire event overtake you? They’re apt to suggest that if you do follow instructions, you may win a lottery or the Nobel Prize. Do you accept every opportunity to win an iPhone or a Dell computer or a $500 gift card? If you’ve fallen for the bait even once, you’ve discovered the price you’ll have to pay even to qualify. Someone is trying to sell you something, you may be sure.

When I think of the expanse of the Web, and the numbers of people who are reached by these enticements, I reel mentally. A host of disquieting thoughts about what the possible consequences to our country, our economy, our future might be if a significant majority who respond to these fake carrots dangled on glittering sticks follow them. How can we find out without getting a bite, which are vegetables and which are plastic?

It’s hard enough, even with a determination to delve deeper, to detach the whole truth from what information is available to us about corporations, political candidates, about unfriendly nations, about allies, about governments, about our neighbors both near and far. A biographical article, for instance, may not contain a single direct lie. It also may leave out a score of relevant facts that can reverse the impression a reader gets.

Equally disturbing are the people who claim to have all the information about public figures and institutions that is not common knowledge. They are often impervious to any assessments contrary to their own. It doesn’t matter what authority is presented unless it agrees with the authority they trust. This inability to see personalities or institutions clearly and from all sides makes for too many closed minds. Entrenched positions make compromise virtually impossible. If the argument is that loyalty at all costs is the mark of virtue, it seems to me that the inevitable is an impasse — that or a battle, if not a war.

A friend holds me to task regularly because he is convinced that even if I had read everything published about a controversial figure (read “politician” or “candidate”) I still wouldn’t have the wit to sift the facts from the nonsense. He has already decided what authorities he will accept and won’t even read others. Well, to each his own, I’m afraid. It seems as if even good intentions and some diligence will be poor props for one’s decisions.

Remember The King and I? Every day I feel more and more like the king — about far too many aspects of life: “is a puzzlement.”

©2012 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com

January 9, 2012
Do Viewers Want to See Beautiful Politicians? Physical Attractiveness Has an Effect on TV Exposure

The better the looks of United States Congresspersons, the more television coverage they receive, shows a new study from the University of Haifa recently published in the journal Political Communication. The reason behind this? Television journalists think their viewers prefer to see physically attractive people. “Physical appearance ranked third in the criteria for gaining television coverage, and ranked higher than seniority, position in Congress and legislative activity in this respect,” noted the authors of the study.

The study, conducted by University of Haifa researchers, Dr. Israel Waismel-Manor of the School of Political Science and Prof. Yariv Tsfati of the Department of Communication, asked 463 Israeli students to rank the physical attractiveness of Members of the 110th United States Congress (2007) based on the official photographs posted on Congress’s website.The authors chose that year for its distance from elections, which could otherwise influence media coverage. Israeli students were chosen for this, so as to eliminate the possibility of biases stemming from political views or previous knowledge of Congresspersons, both of which could influence an objective judgment of physical attractiveness. So as to determine that the Israeli assessment of ‘good looks’ is not culturally different from the American judgment, the researchers compared the Israeli ranking to a ranking given by 30 American students, to find a very high correlation between the two. Furthermore, to eliminate other possible biases, the researchers did not include in the survey politicians who were running for president, nor the Speaker of the House and the majority and minority leaders in the House and Senate. Features that affect media coverage, such as seniority in Congress, political standing (committee assignment and prestige), electoral invulnerability, political ideology, legislative and overall activity, communication effort (press releases), chamber of Congress, media markets, state size, age, gender and race were all controlled for this study.

The authors defined media coverage as an article or item that appeared during 2007 in which a particular Member of Congress speaks or is quoted. Television coverage was surveyed from the national television networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC and PBS). The radio coverage measure was comprised of all NPR news radio programs, while the newspaper measure includes all articles that appeared in USA Today, front to back.

The study shows that physical attractiveness has an effect on television exposure: the better looking the politician, the more TV coverage he or she gains. Yet no significant effect was found for radio or printed news coverage. Following congresspersons’ congressional activity and their state’s size, physical attractiveness is the third strongest predictor of TV coverage, scoring slightly higher than chamber of Congress, gender, tenure in office, bills sponsored and political standing. After weighting the various factors playing into media exposure, the study found that for every additional score on the ‘physical attractiveness index’ (a scale of 1 to 10), the politician’s television exposure rises by 11.6%.

The researchers have also managed to identify the possible mechanism underlying the attractiveness effect on news coverage. Earlier studies, the researchers explain, have suggested three possible reasons why good looks may effect media exposure: 1. that television journalists believe their viewers want to see beautiful people; 2. that good looks broadcast reliability and respectability, which are highly regarded attributes for journalists, leading them to interview better-looking individuals over others; and 3. that good looks heighten a politician’s self-confidence and subsequently these politicians invest more efforts in achieving media exposure.

“The fact that we found no connection between the Member of Congress’s media efforts and his or her television coverage rules out the third explanation. The data demonstrated that better-looking people tend to be more media-active, but at the end of the day it does not make a marked difference. The second explanation was also inconsistent with our current results. Had attractive people received more coverage because they were more trustworthy or eloquent (or because they were perceived to possess these characteristics), they should have received more news coverage on the radio and in the newspaper as well, not only on television. The fact that the association between physical attractiveness and news coverage was significant only for television news, and not for radio and print, favors the first explanation mentioned above, that television journalists cover better-looking Congresspersons in order to attract the attention of audiences,” said Prof. Tsfati and Dr. Waismel-Manor.

Photo: Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee; a 2006 picture.

January 7, 2012
Fed Reserve Governor Elizabeth Duke Suggests Some Some Housing Market Recovery Proposals

We are excerpting the Housing Proposals of Federal Reserve Governor Elizabeth A. Duke’s from her speech to the Virginia Bankers Association in Richmond on January 5, 2012:

sals to Support Housing Market Recovery
Back on US shores, I want to focus the remainder of my discussion today on the housing and mortgage markets, which are so important for the economic recovery. As I alluded to earlier, and as I am sure you are all very well aware, housing markets have shown little sign of improvement so far in this recovery. This stands in sharp contrast to the important role that the housing sector has typically played in propelling economic recoveries. During a downturn, reduced spending on durable goods — including housing — generates pent-up demand, which in itself helps sow the seeds of recovery. Once the cycle bottoms out, improving economic prospects and diminishing uncertainty usually help unleash this pent-up demand. This upward demand pressure is often augmented by lower interest rates, to which housing demand is typically quite responsive. Moreover, spillovers from increased housing demand — such as wealth effects from higher house prices, purchases of complementary goods such as furniture and appliances, as well as strengthening bank balance sheets — have, in the past, provided a powerful additional impetus to the recovery.

Thus far, however, the housing sector has not contributed to the recovery. In addition to the lack of any meaningful improvement in residential construction, the expansion has also been hindered by the steep descent of house prices. To date, house prices have fallen by nearly one-third from their peak, pushing home equity as a share of personal income to its lowest level on record and wiping out $7 trillion of housing equity. Further, this decline in housing wealth — and the associated hit to consumer confidence — has not only been a meaningful and persistent drag on overall consumer spending, it has also been enough to push nearly 12 million homeowners underwater on their mortgages, that is their houses are now worth less than their mortgage balances. Without equity in their homes, many households who have suffered hardships such as unemployment or unexpected illness have been unable to resolve mortgage payment problems through refinancing their mortgages or selling their homes. The resulting mortgage delinquencies have ended in all too many cases in foreclosure, dislocation, and personal hardship. Neighborhoods and communities have also suffered profoundly from the onslaught of foreclosures, as the neglect and deterioration that frequently accompany vacant properties makes neighborhoods less desirable places to live and may put further downward pressure on house prices.

The problems that led to the mortgage crisis and the potential policy solutions to those problems are numerous and varied. Even though time does not permit a full discussion of them here, I do believe that forceful and effective housing policies have the potential to significantly influence the speed and strength of our economic recovery. The Federal Reserve has already acted to reduce mortgage rates by purchasing longer-term assets, in particular through the purchase of agency mortgage-backed securities. Indeed, low rates combined with falling house prices have contributed to historically high levels of housing affordability. At the same time, rents have been rising, which should make homeownership a more attractive option relative to rental housing.

Despite this record affordability, home purchase and mortgage refinancing activity remains muted. The failure of home sales to respond to conditions that would otherwise seem favorable to home purchases indicates that there are other factors weighing on demand for owner-occupied homes. High levels of unemployment and weak income prospects are likely precluding many households from purchasing homes. In addition, some potential buyers may be delaying house purchases out of fear of purchasing into a falling market. Weak prices also contribute to the reportedly large number of purchase contracts that are canceled due to appraisals that come in too low to support financing.

Finally, many households are unable to purchase homes because of mortgage credit conditions, which are substantially tighter now than they were prior to the recession. Some of this tightening is appropriate, as mortgage lending standards were lax, at best, in the years before the peak in house prices. However, the extraordinarily tight standards that currently prevail reflect, in part, new obstacles that inhibit lending even to creditworthy borrowers. These tight standards can take many forms, including stricter underwriting, higher fees and interest rates, more stringent documentation requirements, larger required down payments, stricter appraisal standards, and fewer available mortgage products. This tightening in mortgage credit can be seen in the increase in the credit scores associated with newly originated prime and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage originations, which suggests that borrowers who likely had access to mortgage credit a few years ago are now essentially excluded from the mortgage market.

January 6, 2012
States Struggle With National Sex Offender Law

By Maggie Clark, Stateline Staff Writer, Pew Center on the States

Six years ago, Congress passed what is known as the Adam Walsh Act, aimed at protecting children from predators by collecting sex offender data in a national public registry and requiring those people listed in it to report their movements to law enforcement. Adam’s law required states to place convicted sex offenders in one of three tiers, based on the severity of their crimes. The act, named for a 6-year-old boy who was kidnapped and murdered in Florida in 1981, gave the states five years to comply.

The vast majority of states did not comply on time. As the five-year deadline of July 2011 was approaching, only four had met the terms of the law. The Obama administration issued new guidelines earlier in 2011 that gave states more discretion in implementing the act and clarified how to share information, and in the past year, 12 more states have become compliant. But most still are not, even though they will lose 10 percent of their justice assistance grants from the federal government in fiscal year 2012 as a penalty for inaction.

It’s not that states are uninformed about the law; it’s that they have substantial objections to it. Many see it as an unfunded mandate requiring them to spend millions of dollars collecting information and placing it in the national registry. They are reluctant to bear the cost of updating their own technology to register digital fingerprints, palm prints and DNA, and of paying for the additional time that law enforcement officers would spend processing sex offenders who appear before them in person.

Advocates for juveniles also complain about what would be a lifetime listing for some juvenile sex offenders, which they say goes against any commitment to rehabilitate juveniles, rather than punishing them for long periods of time.

Last month, Pennsylvania became the 16th state to sign on to the act, just barely averting the federal aid penalty. Pennsylvania changed its previous law to add juveniles to its registry and require out-of-state and homeless people convicted of sexual offenses to register with law enforcement. “We can hope that by making our laws tougher,” Governor Tom Corbett said in signing the bill, “we can spare others the pain and grief that has visited too many families.” Pennsylvania had about 11,000 registered sex offenders as of June 2011.

But many other states are continuing to voice their objections to what the federal law expects of them. Susan Frederick, senior federal affairs counsel at the National Conference of State Legislatures, expects states to continue to press Congress for more discretion about which offenders to place on the three-tiered national registry, and for how long. Currently the law requires that convicted sex offenders, including juvenile offenders, remain in the registry for anywhere from 15 years to life, depending on the severity of their crime.

January 5, 2012
Rating the Other Person’s Attractiveness and Perceived Interest

A new study co-authored by a University of Texas at Austin psychology professor suggests that self-deception may help men succeed in the mating game, while women will benefit more from effective communication.

David Buss, professor of psychology, and psychology graduate student Judith Easton, both of The University of Texas at Austin, conducted the research with Williams College psychologist Carin Perilloux, senior author of the study. The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

The research, conducted at The University of Texas at Austin, involved 103 female and 96 male undergraduates who were asked to rate their own attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 7 before participating in a “speed-meeting” exercise in which the students had three-minute, one-on-one conversations with five members of the opposite sex. After each conversation, they rated the other person’s physical attractiveness and perceived sexual interest. Participants were also assessed for their level of desire for a short-term sexual encounter with each person with whom they interacted.

Men looking for a “quick hook-up” were more likely to overestimate a woman’s desire for them, researchers found. Men who thought of themselves as attractive also overestimated a woman’s desire for them. Indeed, the more attractive the woman was to the man, the more likely he was to overestimate her interest in him.

Men who were actually considered attractive according to the women’s rankings did not seem to have this discrepancy in evaluating the situation. Interestingly, women tended to show a bias opposite that of most men — they consistently underestimated men’s sexual interest in them.

In terms of human evolution, it is likely that ancestral men who overestimated their appeal to women and pursued them — even at the risk of being rebuffed — were more likely to reproduce and pass along this tendency to “over perceive” to genetic heirs.

The research suggests that women should be as communicative and clear as possible, while men should consider that the more attracted they are to a woman, the more likely they are wrong about her interest.

January 5, 2012
CAP’s 20 New Jobs Ideas, Meeting the Jobs Challange

Here are 20 recent ideas from Center for American Progress’ policy teams to create middle-class jobs and promote an economy that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. Many of these ideas build on the ideas presented in their “Meeting the Jobs Challenge” initiative launched in 2009. Click on the links below to learn more about each proposal.

20 ways to create jobs

1. Upgrade our nation’s roads, bridges, and other basic infrastructure: 18,000 new jobs for every $1 billion invested.

2. Launch a rehab-to-rent program to turn tens of thousands of government-owned foreclosed homes into affordable rental housing, stabilize neighborhoods, and put construction workers back on the job: 20,000 new jobs a year.

3. Implement new EPA rules governing toxic emissions from power plants: 40,000 new direct jobs.

4. Protect health care reform, which will reduce health insurance premiums, expand coverage, and create jobs: 250,000 to 400,000 new jobs a year for the next decade.

5. Retrofit for energy efficiency just 40 percent of the nation’s residential and commercial building stock and unleash massive demand for domestic labor: more than 625,000 new jobs over a decade.

6. Extend emergency unemployment benefits to long-term unemployed workers hurt by the economic downturn: more than 700,000 jobs.

7. Expand the payroll tax cut for employees and extend it to employers through 2012: more than 1 million jobs.

8. Extend national service programs to provide young people with full-time positions in AmeriCorps, VISTA, YouthBuild, and the youth service and conservation corps: 60,000 new jobs.

9. Pass Home Star, Building Star, and Rural Star legislation to make homes and buildings energy efficient while supporting the hard-hit construction industry: 250,000 new jobs a year.

10. Reduce the nation’s dropout rate by half to add $9.6 billion in economic growth and $713 million in increased tax revenue: 54,000 new jobs.

January 4, 2012
Culture Watch Reviews: P.D. James’ Death Comes to Pemberley; Trollope’s Nina Balatka

In this Issue: P.D. James has written not just a sequel to the action of Pride and Prejudice: she has somehow absorbed Jane Austen’s style whole in Death Comes to Pemberley. What in lesser hands would be chutzpah of a rare order is in this case elegant proof that Baroness James deserves every ounce of her extraordinary literary reputation. Nina Balatka by Trollope is a welcome change of pace for most of us who aren’t ashamed to enjoy a romance, or in need of some entertaining preaching, even if it is to the choir.

DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY
by P.D. James,
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, © 2011; Hardcover: 291 pp
Amazon: Death Comes to Pemberley

The oeuvre of Jane Austen consists of just six published novels, three unfinished novels, and something called “assorted juvenilia,” i.e. mostly unpublished youthful efforts. Pride and Prejudice is arguably the best known and loved of the lot, with Sense and Sensibility and Emma close behind. Even if you didn’t have a high school English teacher wise enough to assign an Austen novel (probably hoping to create another generation of Austen fans), you are likely to have seen a film or television portrayal of at least one of the books.

During the nearly 200 years since her death, there have been a great many novels published “in the style of,” or “in homage to,” Jane Austen. There have even been a few bold souls who tried their hands at producing a sequel to one or another, with results that were invariably disastrous. It has seemed always that there is only one Jane. P.D. James, however, has written not just a sequel to the action of Pride and Prejudice: she has somehow absorbed Jane Austen’s style whole. What in lesser hands would be chutzpah of a rare order is in this case elegant proof that Baroness James deserves every ounce of her extraordinary literary reputation. Additionally, at the age of 90 she has lost none of her ability to orchestrate a complex and challenging plot. Couple that skill with her near-perfect ability to mimic Austen’s language while making it accessible to the modern mind and ear, and you have one delicious read.

That said, it is advisable not to plunge into James’s extension of the characters and setting of Pride and Prejudice without first re-reading the original, or perhaps spending an evening with a video of one of the excellent movie or television productions. Keeping straight all those Bingleys and Binghams and Bennets and Bidwells can become downright confusing, unless you’re a firm Austen fanatic who revisits the novels on a rotating schedule. And, judging by this reviewer, it’s still easy to lose track of who does what to or with whom. Many years ago, on my first reading, I actually made myself a little cheat-sheet chart of the characters, with connecting lines to denote relationships, and found myself resorting to it again, with this continuing story.

Baroness James has taken the time to write a Prologue to her book, detailing — for those who have not read, or have forgotten (how could they?) — the plot of Pride and Prejudice. That she managed to fit her précis into a mere nine pages, never mind doing so in the style of Miss Austen, is a remarkable tour de force. From then on, however, the book is all P.D. James. Death Comes to Pemberley takes place six years after Miss Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy were married. In that time, Elizabeth has firmly established herself as the mistress of Pemberley, Darcy’s huge estate. They have produced two sons, who are briefly but lovingly mentioned, and are being well looked-after by the personnel in the nursery.

Pemberley is a huge estate, and the cast of servants and retainers is also large. At the opening of the story, Darcy and Elizabeth and the servants are absorbed in preparations for Lady Anne’s Ball, an annual celebration originated by Darcy’s late mother, and continued by Darcy and Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s sister, Jane, and her husband, Mr. Bingley, along with Darcy’s cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, have come to stay at Pemberly for a few days, until after the ball. On the night before the event, they are enjoying an evening of music and pleasant conversation, but as the evening ends, they are interrupted by the arrival of a wildly-driven chaise bearing Elizabeth’s and Jane’s next-youngest sister, the unfortunate Lydia who is — to put it mildly — the kind of sister no one should have to endure, frequently given to excessive overstatement and high drama and foolish actions. In this instance, Lydia is hysterical, claiming that her husband, Lieutenant Wickham, has been killed in the woods as they approached Pemberley.

The Lady Anne Ball is, or course, cancelled, and the game’s afoot to find the murderer (not, oddly enough, of Lt. Wickham, who remains inconveniently alive). P.D. James’s pitch-perfect rendering of the customs and laws of the time lead us carefully through the ensuing plot, which is intricate and convoluted and fun to follow, and very much a glimpse into another time and culture.

It is possible or even probable that Death Comes to Pemberly won’t be universally loved by Jane Austen’s fans, but for those of us willing to bend a little, it provides one heck of an escape from life’s aches and pains and primary elections. And these days, that is no small achievement.

©2012 Julia Sneden for SeniorWomen.com

January 3, 2012