Arthur Miller's play The Crucible (1955) is about the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century and the hysteria that resulted in the persecution of innocent people. The play was written during the McCarthy era, in which fears about Communism led to witch hunts and many people were condemned as Communists or Communist sympathizers without evidence.

In The Run of His Life: The People Versus O. J. Simpson (reprint edition, 1997), Jeffrey Toobin analyzes one of the most sensational trials of the twentieth century. Toobin argues that O. J. Simpson was guilty of the murder of his wife, Nicole, and her friend Ron Goldman, and much of the book is devoted to analysis of why Simpson was acquitted at the trial in 1995, despite the strong evidence against him. The reason, according to Toobin, was the racial divide in America that made the...