When a lawyer writes a murder-mystery novel I generally steer clear on the theory that dealing with the real thing makes the make-believe stuff seem tame by comparison. I've read some of Scott Turow's early popular work and may have read one of John Grisham's early, far-fetched novels later made into a movie starring Tom Cruise (?) having to do with a law firm in Memphis that's fronting for the Mafia. Right away that turned me off. If it took place on StatNisland, my home town, I might've believed it, except that the law firm would have linoleum floors, not carpets, and the antiques would be parked in the driveway on blocks with the engine on the lawn.
Scott Turow's small volume on the death penalty (he was on the commission set up to study and make recommendations after Illinois Governor Ryan declared a moratorium and later commuted the death penalty of everyone on death row. Too many of them turned out to be innocent. Turow explains what needs to be done to prevent so many false convictions in the future.
But when I saw that one of the most popular law novelists in the country, John Grisham, had turned his hand to writing up a real, true-to-life death penalty case, I thought I'd like to see how a real writer, someone who knows how to really sell a story writes.
If you've ever had a real life experience that you thought would make a good book or movie, you'll know how hard it is to write it up without getting bogged down in unnecessary detail, going down side-roads, and pointing out things the reader is going to realize anyway.
Grisham's book tells the tale of not just one person falsely convicted of the murder of a young woman in a small town, in Oklahoma, but it could be San Francisco or any other place where the police and prosecutors get the bit in their teeth and go off running until they've run some hapless person into the ground, only to have it come out later that they were on a wild-goose chase after all. In The Innocent Man, the man on whom fate frowned spent fourteen years on death row, was driven insane, attempted suicide more than once, and came with five days of getting the needle of no return.
If the book weren't written by a dedicated craftsman with the resources to travel all over the country and hire a law student assistant to work eighteen months keeping the transcripts and other documents sorted out, the story might be unreadable. As it turns out, the story is told in 356 pages, down from the 5,000 that Grisham says he could've written.
How does one of our most popular writers boil down years of bad road, innumerable court proceedings, and thousands of pages of transcript into 356 pages?
For one thing, he leaves off preaching and explaining how things should be. You are responsible for bringing this to the table. Grisham provides fact after fact after fact, one short sentence at a time, one little section at a time. It is wonderful to see how simply one can write of a long and complex legal matter without writing long and complex passages that put one to sleep. I couldn't put the book down. I read it on the bus and at the bus stops, my car having bit the dust and I being loathe to replace it, having discovered public transit and all the places in San Francisco that I used to drive by. Now I stop in Chinatown and pick up all sorts of delicacies I used to miss out on, not to mention the bookstores and movie palaces I'd have to make a special trip for. Now they're right on the route. But we were talking about Grisham, weren't we.
Read the book. Very few people actually know how screwed up our criminal justice can get, and the lengths it will go, or its major players, to avoid embarrassment, even at the expense of getting the wrong guy while letting the right guy go free. How can this be? How could this happen? Read it and weep. It happens way too much.
Here's the Random House site on the book, with links to various organizations which exist to help avoid getting the wrong guy, yet again.
We won't count on this happening any time soon, though, will we.
Cases like this let you know why we have lawyers, and if we didn't, we'd have to invent them all over again, despite what Shakespeare wrote about the first thing we do is to kill all the lawyers.
What do you think of this theory, which is that lawyers exist to bring sense to situations where the clients are crazy but are interacting with a legal system that is sometimes even crazier. Lawyers are buffer between two crazy worlds. Lord help it when the lawyers are driven to distraction.
I have a good friend, a psychiatrist who I met over a case when he testified on behalf of a client, over two decades ago. Clients in need of attention get referred to him, and the guessing game is how close my sizing up of the situation comes to what the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) claims after the five-hundred short answers, marked with a special pencil, are electronically read and scored by computer programmed by all sorts of experts.
"John," I tell him, "you have the advantage. You know going in that your patients are nuts. I have to figure it out for myself and I don't have your training."
Lay people were diagnosing craziness long before we invented psychiatrists, though, weren't they.
On a trip to Pergamum, Turkey, we visited an ancient medical site, a tunnel line with mosaic images. Disturbed patients were brought here and asked to interpret the figures portrayed in the images. An early Rorshach test, 3,000 years old.
As a wise man said, the only thing new under the sun is the history that you don't know. Clue: HST.