Casper, Jonathan D. 1942-2006
(Jonathan David Casper)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 2, 1942, in Tacoma Park, MD; died of pneumonia, March 3, 2006, in Evanston, IL. Educator, political scientist, and author. Casper was a political scienceprofessor whose central area of interest was the criminal justice system, especially as it pertained to the criminally accused. With a B.A. from Swarthmore and a Ph.D. from Yale University, he joined the Yale faculty in 1968 as an assistant professor. He then moved on toStanford University in 1972, followed by teaching positions at theUniversity of Pennsylvania and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1985, he was hired by Northwestern University. Here he would serve as a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research and hold administrative posts as chair of the political science department and associate dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. As an expert on the American criminal justice system, Casper combined a knowledge of the law with psychology, anthropology, and other social science disciplines to study how defendants are treated in the courts. He worked to understand better how juries perceived accused criminals, for example, and attempted to see the system through the defendants' eyes. Remaining at Northwestern until his demise, Casper was the author of American Criminal Justice: The Defendant's Perspective, Lawyers before the Warren Court, andThe Politics of Civil Liberties, all published in 1972.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, March 14, 2006, section 2, p. 11.