‘The Laws of Our Fathers’
by Scott Turow
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.95
Scott Turow’s new courtroom drama is a 500-page clunker that keeps you hoping until the end for a signature plot twist that might catapult an otherwise tedious book into the realm of great popular literature.
No such luck. Unfortunately, there just isn’t much here to keep you awake nights.
This is surprising because Turow, the author of several bestsellers, including “Presumed Innocent,” is famous for devilish courtroom thrillers that draw on his background both as a federal prosecutor and a partner in a large Chicago law firm. Turow usually combines thoughtful writing with surprising plots. But not here.
In a way, you know what “The Laws of Our Fathers” is like from the moment you open the cover, which emphasizes its focus on the 1960s. Set in Kindle County – the Chicago-like locale of all Turow’s novels – it revolves around a trial for the murder of June Eddgar, the ex-wife of a prominent state senator, who was gunned down near a gang-infested high-rise housing project.
Sonia “Sonny” Klonsky, a character who first appeared in Turow’s “Burden of Proof,” is now the judge presiding over the bench trial – which means that she, not a jury, will decide the guilt or innocence of Nile Eddgar, the son who is accused of plotting the contract killing of his mother. To compound Sonny’s difficulty, virtually everyone involved in the trial knew each other in California in the 1960s, when all were deeply involved in the era’s antiwar protests, riots, campus bombings and hippie life.
Feels like a `Big Chill’
The trial, in fact, is a “Big Chill” reunion of sorts, and the novel relies heavily on flashbacks. Twenty-five years earlier, Judge Klonsky was a college student half-heartedly dating fellow student Seth Weissman, who was desperately in love with her. Weissman provided day care for young Nile Eddgar, the son of faculty revolutionaries Loyell and June Eddgar.
Weissman’s flamboyant African-American friend, Hobie Tuttle, drifted in and out of the Eddgars’ campus underground. But the fabric of these friendships was shredded when Weissman ran from the draft, Sonny refused to join him, the Eddgars were expelled from the faculty, and the FBI began to close in.
More than two decades later, this group reconvenes for a trial in which the charges against Nile are supported by the damning testimony of his father, now a state senator, and Ordell Trent, a drug-dealing gang leader known as “Hardcore” who admits to conspiring with Nile.
Nile, meanwhile, is represented by – surprise! – none other than Hobie Tuttle, now a respected defense lawyer. Tuttle savages the prosecution’s key witnesses with withering cross examinations any lawyer would love, but at the same time he angers Judge Klonsky with his unethical tactics.
Rekindling in Kindle?
Weissman, now a nationally syndicated columnist (who writes for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer), flies into Kindle County to cover the trial. Divorced and recovering from the traumatic death of his young son, Weissman seeks to rekindle his relationship with Sonny Klonsky. She struggles to keep the trial on course, amidst the tangled history of the group and the glare of publicity, while confronting her own feelings for Weissman.
This might have been the foundation for a gripping climax, but Turow resolves the murder trial more than 100 pages before the end of the book, leaving readers in suspense, awaiting one of his patented jaw-dropping plot twists. I’m still waiting.
Instead, a lengthy anticlimax resolves the Klonsky-Weissman relationship, and the reader is left with something which – given Turow’s sparkling literary history – is perhaps more surprising: a dud.
Year: 1996
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New Turow `Thriller’ Is A Dud
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Grisham’s Latest Smokes Out Deceit Of Tobacco Trial
‘The Runaway Jury’
by John Grisham
Doubleday, $26.95
John Grisham, the Old Faithful author of legal thrillers, has cranked out his latest – and one of his best – just in time for summer. Grisham has amassed millions of fans, and sold millions of books, despite frequent criticism that his plots often are absurdly unrealistic.
With “The Runaway Jury,” however, Grisham turns a sharp corner, providing his most credible plot and his most intriguing mystery to date. The novel is a gripping page-turner, exquisitely timed to coincide with rising public concern over smoking and tobacco.
Grisham sets the stage in a Mississippi Gulf Coast town where the widow of a lifelong smoker is suing a cigarette manufacturer for her husband’s untimely death from lung cancer. Armed with a team of high-profile lawyers, each of whom has ponied up a million dollars to fund an all-out assault on the tobacco industry, she is fighting for that crucial first victory that presumably will open the floodgates to a torrent of lawsuits against industry giants.
The tobacco defendants are equally well-armed with slick lawyers, high-priced jury consultants, discreet private investigators and ample cash, all furiously employed to hold back an onslaught of litigation. As in real life, Big Tobacco has won every trial to date, and it has no intention of losing this one.
With such high stakes on both sides of the courtroom, both teams work endless hours preparing for their clash. Both develop detailed dossiers on the potential jurors, probing their backgrounds, investigating their lives, and concocting elaborate theories on jurors’ likely attitudes toward smoking, tobacco and litigation. Consultants on both sides pull down millions in fees for opinions based on potential jurors’ facial expressions, body language and posture.
Worse, each side attempts to influence, bribe, even extort jurors to vote one way or the other. The architect for Big Tobacco’s defense is Rankin Fitch, who has “fixed” juries in prior cases when necessary and arrives for the trial with such preparations well in hand. Unfortunately, Fitch, his clients, and the anti-tobacco plaintiffs are all thrown off balance by the one juror – Nicholas Easter – who remains a mystery to all investigators and consultants.
Things are further complicated when a woman identifying herself as “Marlee” contacts Fitch and demonstrates inside knowledge of the jury – and a ruthless willingness to negotiate. As each of these opponents maneuvers for position, the jury seethes at the trial’s stately pace, the judge struggles to keep the proceedings on track, and the stakes inexorably rise.
Jurors often report feeling like pawns during complex litigation, and Grisham captures this feeling of helplessness with remarkable precision. Grisham’s jury, manipulated by the mysterious Easter, engages in minor acts of rebellion, causing the judge, courtroom staff and all the lawyers to chew their collective fingernails and reach for the antacid.
Unfortunately, “The Runaway Jury” features some of the potholes for which Grisham is famous. Most of the characters are shallow and undeveloped. For example, the attorneys – usually the stars of courtroom dramas – are little more than background shrubbery here; their conduct, motives and ethics all could have provided depth and color, but Grisham opts for the easy approach of drawing them as cynical, cliched cutouts. And Grisham’s ultimate twist – not to be disclosed here – is a bit predictable, though it could easily have been more provocative and devilish.
Grisham and all of his books, moreover, could benefit immensely from an infusion of humor, a quality sorely lacking in this self-important potboiler.
But even with these nits, “The Runaway Jury” is far and away Grisham’s most addictive courtroom thriller. He packs the book with distilled nuggets of testimony and arguments about tobacco-company liability for smoking-induced cancer deaths – an effort that could easily have sunk the book in a mire of detail and posturing. Instead, it adds a crucial texture of realism that immeasurably helps the novel.
Grisham’s publisher has opened sales of “The Runaway Jury” with 2.8 million copies in print, and it is virtually assured of being a summertime blockbuster and airport-rack staple even before its eventual paperback release. Hollywood is sure to follow, with Tom Cruise and Demi Moore waiting to learn their parts.
And Big Tobacco, long accustomed to the threats of Congress, the courts and the Food and Drug Administration, might finally have met its match. -
Shapiro, Dershowitz Add To O.J. Pile
‘The Search for Justice’
by Robert Shapiro
Warner Books, $24.95
Two new additions to the rapidly swelling O.J. Simpson trial library have recently arrived in bookstores.
The first, Robert Shapiro’s “The Search for Justice” (Warner Books, $24.95), provides an account of the trial by one of O.J.’s lead defense lawyers.
The second, Alan Dershowitz’s “Reasonable Doubt” (Simon & Schuster, $20), takes a more academic approach, using the trial as a vehicle to address criminal law more generally.
Shapiro’s is, in many ways, one of the most straightforward books about the trial published to date. Shapiro shuns the pseudo-autobiographical approach used by O.J. prosecutor Christopher Darden in his recent O.J. memoir, “In Contempt,” and instead focuses on the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and the trial of O.J. Simpson for those murders.
The Darden book is the No. 1 nonfiction bestseller; the more recent Shapiro book is No. 8.
Shapiro’s book is far from a classic. It does, however, have an appealing immediacy, taking the reader along from the day Shapiro was hired to represent O.J. to the day of the former football star’s acquittal. Although the book is a largely anecdotal account of the arrest, investigation and trial, Shapiro weaves throughout plain explanations for many of the criminal procedures designed to protect citizens from unjust convictions.
Shapiro’s book contrasts sharply with another recent O.J. memoir, by co-counsel Alan Dershowitz. In what has to be
Dershowitz’s 100th book, the Harvard Law School professor and sometime lawyer provides a tedious 200-page lecture on the principles underlying criminal procedure.
O.J. called Dershowitz his “God forbid” lawyer because he was responsible for appealing any conviction that might have resulted from the trial. Because no appeal occurred, he had a relatively minor role in the case. Whatever Dershowitz’s skill at appellate briefing, his book is dry, ponderous and taxing. Staying awake beyond Page 20 requires substantial effort.
Shapiro, by contrast, keeps his description of the so-called “Trial of the Century” lively with detailed descriptions of O.J.’s cell, his communications with his lawyers, and the increasing bickering between the “Dream Team” members hired to represent him. Shapiro was O.J.’s first, and principal, lawyer, hired even before Simpson’s arrest.
Shapiro hired all of the other defense attorneys. He considered, but rejected, the infamously self-promoting Wyoming lawyer Gerry Spence. Nonetheless, Shapiro takes almost all of his hires to task for their trial performance, calling Carl Douglas “pedantic” and “boring” and F. Lee Bailey a “grandiose loose cannon” who had reportedly “lost his fastball.”
Shapiro skillfully describes the tension that developed between himself and Johnny Cochran, including Cochran’s last-minute scheduling of defense strategy meetings while Shapiro was out of town.
Astonishingly, Shapiro notes that he tape-recorded the conversations between himself and Cochran in their car as they rode to court in the mornings, but he offers not a word of explanation about why he did so. It is striking evidence of the chilled, even hostile, relationship between the defense lawyers during the trial. By the end of the trial, Shapiro’s wife, disgusted with the conduct of the defense lawyers, refused to appear in court or sit behind the defense table.
Shapiro notes throughout the book the glare of publicity, complaining about it on one page but proudly noting his celebrity dinners on the next. He mentions dining with Connie Chung, Norman Mailer, Martin Landau, Warren Beatty, and an engagement party for Larry King. In one passage, Shapiro describes a post-dinner conversation with Chung in which she “jokingly” offers to sleep with Shapiro in exchange for an exclusive interview with either Shapiro or Simpson, professing to have “cleared it” with her husband.
Shapiro, like Darden and Dershowitz, criticizes Judge Lance Ito for his indecisiveness, and Ito’s televised interview during the trial. However, he defends the television broadcast and mutes his criticism, perhaps in recognition of his ongoing career as a lawyer in Los Angeles County.
Although Shapiro has harsh words about lead prosecutor Marcia Clark, he reserves his sharpest barbs for his partner on the case, Cochran. He complains about Cochran’s “incessant baiting” of Darden, Cochran’s “bodyguards” from Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, and Cochran’s methodical efforts to inject race into the trial. After the verdict, Shapiro criticized Cochran for “dealing the race card from the bottom of the deck.”
Throughout his book Shapiro makes great efforts to distance himself from his own trial team, as if to claim victory, yet at the same time disclaim responsibility for the racial strategy and negative public reaction to the trial and its outcome. It is, of course, a balancing act doomed to fail at the outset.
However, Shapiro’s failure is at least passingly engaging and occasionally enlightening. Dershowitz’s treatise is merely mind-numbing. -
‘In Contempt’: Darden’s Anecdotal View Of The O.J. Trial
‘In Contempt’
by Christopher A. Darden with Jess Walter ReganBooks/HarperCollins, $26
O.J. Simpson is a name that once evoked memories of heroic acts on the football field, but now conjures distinctly different images.
For many lawyers, his very name brings into focus an embarrassment of a trial, so out of control that it smeared an entire system of justice.
For many in the African-American community, the name evokes memories of a bungled investigation and a racist cop from a notoriously bigoted police department.
But for others, O.J. Simpson is nothing more than a fallen hero, almost certainly guilty of a brutal double murder, but set free by a terribly misguided jury drawn from one of the most racially divided cities in America.
One of the more interesting characters to emerge from the O.J. trial – and virtually the only one to survive it with his integrity intact – is Christopher Darden, the 39-year-old African-American lawyer who served as the co-prosecutor in the O.J. trial.
Darden arguably had the most difficult role of anyone in the nearly year-long trial. In his just-released autobiography, “In Contempt,” Darden details his role as a black man, prosecuting a black hero, in a trial not only racially charged but grotesquely sensationalized.
Darden notes in his acknowledgments that his goal had been to write a “book that would remain on bookshelves and in libraries for the next hundred years.” Measured against that somewhat pretentious standard, Darden falls short.
The book is largely an episodic account of the O.J. trial, without any serious focus on larger issues, as if Darden were unsure of exactly what he wanted to say. By any other measure, however, the book is a successful and interesting anecdotal account of the trial from someone with a spectacular vantage point.
Written with Jess Walter, a journalist and author from Spokane, “In Contempt” is styled as an autobiography. The first third of the book peels back the layers of Darden’s life, his large family, and his childhood in California. He takes particular care to highlight his troubled older brother, Michael Darden, always two steps ahead of Chris – experimenting with drugs and the fast life while insisting his little brother stay behind. Michael later contracted AIDS, and Darden weaves his relationship with his dying brother throughout the book.
But this is primarily an O.J. memoir. While the book touches on most of the notable events of the trial itself, it does not even attempt to chronicle the trial’s details, dissect the errors by the parties or the court, or make any larger points about law or justice in America. Instead, Darden veers from anecdote to anecdote and unleashes his anger at the bungled investigation, the racial strategy employed by the defense lawyers, and the misguided conduct of the trial itself.
Found evidence
Darden reveals that – long after O.J.’s Bronco had been seized and searched – he stumbled upon a blood-stained towel in the back of the vehicle that the police had overlooked.
He also noted other key pieces of evidence that were lost: a three-page set of notes on domestic abuse apparently written by O.J. himself that was shredded by an O.J. associate before they could stop her and an eyewitness who saw O.J.’s infamous white Bronco run a red light near Nicole Brown’s house just after the crime, but who destroyed her own credibility by selling her testimony to a tabloid before the trial started.
Darden reserves his harshest words for Judge Lance Ito. Darden recounts Ito’s sexist treatment of lead prosecutor Marcia Clark, including Ito’s offensive “joke” in one side conference with Cochran and Darden over a pair of panties in the background of a photograph. Judge Ito commented that “you couldn’t ask Marcia because she doesn’t wear any.”
Darden notes the irony of Ito’s frequent but toothless threats to remove the cameras from the courtroom, while at the same time posing for pictures with boxes of mail he was receiving from admirers.
Startling behavior
Perhaps the most stunning revelation is a meeting in Ito’s chambers in which a juror complains that he had wanted to attend a UCLA football game. Ito, apparently oblivious to the blatant impropriety, asked defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran if he could help. While Darden watched in amazement, Cochran leaped at the chance to provide a gift to a sitting juror.
For tabloid fans, Darden describes his friendship with Clark, forged under nearly impossible conditions. But he refuses to directly address the question of whether the relationship was deeper than platonic friendship. His disingenuous coyness is enough to raise an eyebrow, but this book provides no direct answers to those interested.
Throughout, Darden returns to his brother’s unsuccessful fight against AIDS, his declining health, blindness and death. It is a provoking metaphor for the O.J. trial or the criminal justice system more generally, but one that Darden indifferently offers and then ignores.
Since the trial’s conclusion, Darden has retired from the practice of law and now teaches part time at a law school. His retirement may well provide a more telling comment about his faith in American justice than anything in this book. -
A Closer Look At The War For California’s Redwoods
‘The Last Stand: The War Between Wall Street and Main Street Over California’s Ancient Redwoods’
by David Harris
Times Books, $25
California’s redwood forests began growing more than 2,000 years ago – centuries before Columbus set sail, before the Dark Ages began. Neither Wall Street, nor its famed takeover artist Michael Milken, remotely existed.
Yet by some curious twist two millennia later, the fate of these ancient forests somehow ended up the subject of a highly leveraged hostile takeover and a classic battle between corporate America and its environmental antagonist, Earth First!
The Pacific Lumber Company, operated by the Murphy family in the tiny Northern California town of Scotia since 1904, seemed in its prime a highly unlikely target of environmental protests. It was notable not only for its huge stands of virgin old-growth redwoods, but also for its relatively benign approach to forestry. Long before it was fashionable, the company abandoned clear-cutting, instituted selective logging and limited the total cut to the growth during the same year – in other words, sustained forestry.
All that came to a rather screeching halt in 1985, when the firm came to the attention of a Texas-based conglomerate, Maxxam Inc., and Maxxam CEO Charles Hurwitz. To Hurwitz, Pacific Lumber was grossly undervalued: All one needed to do was borrow money to finance a takeover, then pay back the loans by selling off divisions and liquidating the forest, yielding a tidy profit in the process. Assisted by financing from Michael Milken, Hurwitz and Maxxam set out to do just that.
They met remarkably little resistance at first. But then, enraged by the highly accelerated logging of old-growth, the environmental movement began confronting Pacific Lumber. Earth First! activists staged large-scale protests, sit-ins on trees, and other acts. The battle reached its peak with a car-bombing attack on two leading Earth First! activists, a crime never solved.
“The Last Stand” hardly takes a neutral stand on all of this. David Harris, overwrought and breathless, builds the story in David-and-Goliath terms; in his world, the bad guys are irredeemably evil, and the good guys can do no wrong.
Well, maybe. There certainly isn’t much to be said in defense of unsustainable cutting of virgin old-growth, particularly when dictated by corporate conglomerates trying to fund their own hostile takeovers. But Harris – like Sen. Slade Gorton on the opposite side of the fence – doesn’t even try to imagine a middle ground. Worse, his approach leaves one longing for the sound of Goliath hitting the ground, but that fall, at least in this case, never comes. As Harris well knows, the war is still being played out.
Nonetheless, “The Last Stand” is an arresting portrait of the redwood battle at its high-water mark. For entirely different reasons, the book is likely to cause both sides of the timber dispute to grind their teeth. That alone is a considerable accomplishment.