Colonial Discourse and Gender in U.S. Criminal Courts : Routledge : 9780415899253 : 0415899257 : 04 Apr 2012 : The occurrence in some criminal cases of "cultural defenses" on behalf of "minority" defendants has stirred much debate. This book is the first to illuminate how "cultural evidence" ? i.e., "evidence" regarding ethnicity ? is actually negotiated by attorneys, expert/lay witnesses, and defendants in criminal trials. Caroline Braunmühl demonstrates that this has occurred, overwhelmingly, in ways shaped by colonialist and patriarchal discourses common in the Western world. She argues that the controversy regarding the legitimacy of a "cultural defense" has tended to obscure this fact, and has been biased against minorities as well as all women from its inception, in the very terms in which the question for debate has been framed. This study also breaks new ground by analyzing the strategies, and the failures, in which colonialist and patriarchal constructions of cultural evidenc