Attornies getting the last word

First, good news. I chal­lenged myself to fin­ish eight books in the month of Jan­u­ary, and I hit my tar­get. Short­ly before eleven PM on Jan­u­ary 31^st I fin­ished read­ing the eighth book of the month. That num­ber eight is sig­nif­i­cant because two years ago in 2008 I only com­plet­ed sev­en books dur­ing the entire year. In Jan­u­ary I beat that num­ber in only one month. That means I can do it if I set aside the time.

I don’t plan to con­tin­ue at this pace. Four or five books in a month seems like plen­ty. One of the sac­ri­fices I made in order to com­plete my Jan­u­ary chal­lenge was that I set aside my book reports. Now I have to catch up on the last four books I fin­ished in 2010 so far.

The title of the fifth book, Ladies And Gen­tle­men Of The Jury: Great­est Clos­ing Argu­ments In Mod­ern Law, was enough to pull me in. I don’t think I was even look­ing for some­thing like this. It caught my eye and I looked at the descrip­tion and thought it looked fas­ci­nat­ing. Read­ing court cas­es can of course be dull and unin­spir­ing, but these were cas­es cher­ryp­icked for their sig­nif­i­cance and enter­tain­ment val­ue. In this book are the clos­ing argu­ments from the Nürem­berg tri­als’ chief pros­e­cu­tor, Clarence Dar­row’s defense argu­ments from the Leopold and Loeb case (rather exten­sive argu­ments for a guilty plea, but Dar­row saved his clients from the noose), and Vince Bugliosi’s state­ment for Charles Man­son’s pros­e­cu­tion. Dra­mat­ic and com­pelling cas­es if there ever were any.

I found the orga­ni­za­tion of the book to be a bit dry. The edi­tors pro­vid­ed con­text and com­men­tary before each of the state­ments tak­en from the tran­scripts which, while use­ful and infor­ma­tive, was not par­tic­u­lar­ly com­pelling and even con­tained spoil­ers and quo­ta­tions from the state­ments that fol­lowed. In some cas­es, they pro­vid­ed insights into strat­e­gy that height­ened the expe­ri­ence of read­ing the state­ments. In oth­ers, the com­men­tary served only to give away key points of the state­ment before I’d even start­ed reading.

Once I got into the state­ments though, I was hooked. These were sum­ma­tions meant to put com­plex legal con­cepts and seem­ing­ly end­less exhibits of evi­dence into human con­text, and make the case clear­ly and rel­a­tive­ly concisely.

Though by far not the most impor­tant of all the cas­es, I was most sur­prised read­ing the defense’s sum­ma­tion of The State of Cal­i­for­nia v John DeLore­an. The feds had video tape on DeLore­an and it’s a video I haven’t seen, but by the end of the clos­ing argu­ments, I was con­vinced DeLore­an had been framed—or at least entrapped. I came away from that talk­ing to myself: «Are you seri­ous? You real­ly think he was inno­cent?» I might have a dif­fer­ent opin­ion if I’d seen the whole tri­al, but there’s no doubt that DeLore­an’s defense team was sharp and Don­ald Re is a con­vinc­ing orator.

There’s a dual sto­ry to every clos­ing argu­ment, and that may be what makes these so com­pelling. First is the sto­ry of what actu­al­ly hap­pened, which is nec­es­sar­i­ly obscured by time and dis­tance. The oth­er sto­ry is the sto­ry of the attor­ney con­vinc­ing a jury to see the facts as she or he is pre­sent­ing them. These dra­mas are inter­de­pen­dent; one cant see the one with­out hear­ing the oth­er, and has to eval­u­ate the lat­ter in order to form a belief about the first. This dual nature makes for engag­ing read­ing, though prob­a­bly the most potent aspect is the almost com­mon­place nature of court pro­ceed­ings. The man­ner in which our courts work is vital­ly impor­tant, because any of us could end up maneu­ver­ing through the sys­tem, and with very real consequences.

Ladies And Gen­tle­men Of The Jury isn’t a text­book and it won’t inform you about the way the sys­tem works, but it does some­thing relat­ed, which may be more impor­tant on some lev­el: it tells the sto­ries of the way the sys­tem is sup­posed to work.