‘Chief: My Life in the LAPD’
By Daryl F. Gates with Diane K. Shah
Bantam Books, $22.50
Daryl F. Gates, the soon-to-be-retired chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, is not a man to mince words. From Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, on down, Gates takes issue in no uncertain terms with virtually everyone who ever disagreed with him. It is hardly a surprise: If one thing is clear from his just-published autobiography, it is that Gates and his mouth are no strangers to controversy.
The book, as one might expect from an autobiography, paints a sympathetic picture of Gates’ career and promotions from rookie police officer to head of the force. Gates explains well the difficult position police often find themselves in: serving a public that often seems neither to understand nor care about the constant danger threatening the police.
But Gates, too, fails to appreciate the view of a public that holds its public servants to a high standard. Gates, for example, notes with a smirk that the Los Angeles Police Department continued to bug private homes “for our own edification” even after the California Supreme Court declared it an unlawful search and seizure in the ’50s. And he concedes that his controversial policy of harassing patrons of questionable “massage” parlors probably was “bordering on civilly improper practices, if not restraint of trade.” But he “refused to back down.”
Gates also proudly notes his use of military vehicles and near-use of grenade launchers and fragmentation grenades in his near-literal version of the “war on drugs.” He describes how he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that, in his view, casual drug users “should be shot.” In a subsequent Los Angeles Times interview he was asked, “Chief, you really didn’t mean that we should take casual drug users out and shoot them, did you?” “Yeah, Ron,” he replied, “I did.” Gates then expresses astonishment that anyone would be upset by the comment.
Gates also describes his running feud with Mayor Bradley, most liberal politicians and, especially, the American Civil Liberties Union, which he describes as “self-serving hypocrites.”
The book apparently was written after the Rodney King beating but before the jury rendered its acquittal of the defendants. Gates devotes a couple of short chapters to the incident, expressing horror over the officers’ conduct and detailing the ensuing eruption within the city government.
Describing an incident that occurred just after his appointment as chief, Gates, after making it clear that one of his officers was at fault, gratuitously notes that “taking the blame is part of being the boss.” He describes part of his job as “to take the heat for it.”
Curiously, these same sentiments are notably absent from his discussion of the Rodney King controversy. Far from it, he makes it clear that he would not accept responsibility, nor allow Bradley to force his resignation. Rather, he battled the Police Commission over the issue for nearly a year before finally submitting his resignation. By that time, he notes, “11 months after Rodney King, harmony in the city had finally been restored – at least for the moment.”
If only things had been that simple.
Category: Reviews
-
A Man In Blue Who Isn’t Afraid To Fight
-
Case Against `Junk Science’
‘Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom’
by Peter W. Huber
Basic Books, $23
The plaintiff had a minor accident: falling from a streetcar. She sued the city not for her bruises but for breast cancer. A distinguished “expert” testified that the accident was the “direct cause” of the cancer. The jury awarded $50,000. Elsewhere, an “expert” helped a psychic who claimed she lost her powers after undergoing a CAT scan won a million dollars from a jury.
Peter W. Huber, a conservative scholar, cites these and dozens of other examples in his new book “Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom” (Basic Books, $23).
In the book, Huber argues that “junk science” has invaded the courtrooms of America, misleading gullible juries into awarding absurdly high verdicts and forcing safe and important products and drugs off the market. Vice President Quayle’s Competitiveness Council has joined in the attack on “junk science,” and President Bush has even signed an executive order requiring government lawyers to present only “reliable expert testimony.” (One wonders what sort of expert testimony the Justice Department was using before it had the president’s guidance on the issue).
Huber argues, paraphrasing Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, that the best test of certainty we have is “good science.” Unless accepted by the scientific mainstream, he argues, all such “junk science” should be excluded completely. What Justice Holmes actually said was that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” There is remarkably little explanation in Huber’s book why such patently goofy “junk science” is not easily and immediately squashed by an overpowering display of “good science.”
And some of Huber’s examples prove the opposite point: Some radiation once thought benign is now universally recognized as devastating. Theories that at first blush seem outlandish or unusual are not infrequently later accepted as scientific dogma. And no, a jury’s verdict is not the final word on scientific truth, and yes, a jury can make a mistake.
But Huber mistakes the role of a scientist and a jury: a scientist’s task is to discern the truth; a jury’s task is to sift disputed evidence and allocate blame on a “more probable than not” standard.
Huber, though, admits to none of this complexity. Like Chairman Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the table, Huber seems oblivious to the subtler gradations of rhetoric. But if you can ignore all the arm waving, the book is hilarious. Huber is a superb and genuinely funny writer who turns this somewhat arcane topic into interesting and compelling reading. -
‘The Man to See: Edward Bennett Williams’
‘The Man to See: Edward Bennett Williams’
by Evan Thomas
Simon & Schuster, $27.50
Edward Bennett Williams, one of the best known trial lawyers of our time, characterized the ideal client as “a rich man who is scared.” Williams had plenty of them: mafia don Frank Costello, former Treasury Secretary and Texas governor John Connally, President Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters Union, the Washington Post – even junk-bond king Michael Milken.
Williams recognized that taking every case to trial was not necessarily the best defense: “Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a brilliant thing to say.” Whether by delaying, cajoling, bargaining, or simply wearing down the prosecution, Williams often got his clients off without even entering the courtroom.
This new biography of Williams, by Newsweek’s Washington Bureau chief Evan Thomas, covers his life and times thoroughly and is a pleasure to read. It is packed with stories of Williams’ notorious trials and lively wheeling and dealing, both in and out of the courtroom, as well as his later fame as owner of the Washington Redskins and Baltimore Orioles. Thomas carefully notes the inconsistencies in Williams’ positions and carefully points out the flaws in the man that many consider the ultimate trial lawyer.
Brendan Sullivan, Williams’ protege, once indignantly defended his right to object in the Senate hearing investigating his client, Oliver North, by declaring, “I am not a potted plant.” It’s a claim Edward Bennett Williams never needed to make. -
‘Praying for Sheetrock’
‘Praying for Sheetrock’
by Melissa Fay Greene Addison-Wesley, $21.95
“Praying for Sheetrock” is a beautifully written first book by an ambitious young lawyer who set out to change the world 15 years ago by working in a rural Legal Services office in an obscure Georgia backwater: McIntosh County. What Melissa Fay Greene found was an astonishing pocket of the world, seemingly untouched by the civil-rights movement and still controlled by a corrupt white sheriff and his courthouse gang.
Sheriff Poppell did not rule through force, but through patronage. When a truck crashed on the interstate, he would spread the word and stand by quietly while the poor harvested the shoes, candy bars, or whatever unfortunate cargo was lost. He was involved in drug smuggling, prostitution, and gambling, but most of all, he enforced the segregated status quo. Greene details the black community’s awakening and overthrow of the sheriff, assisted in part by Legal Services lawyers.
She tells the story through the eyes and voices of the community, with poetic and striking portraits of the county, its people, and its politics. She could have stopped with a romanticized version, untouched by human weakness, but Greene opts to tell also of the downfall of the most prominent black activist. He succeeded in overthrowing the sheriff and was elected to the County Commission, only to succumb to temptation and be convicted of corruption. It’s messy and inelegant, just like life. That, I suppose, is about the highest praise one can give to a portrait of a community in change. -
‘Hilary’s Trial: The Elizabeth Morgan Case: A Child’s Ordeal in America’s Legal System’
‘Hilary’s Trial: The Elizabeth Morgan Case: A Child’s Ordeal in America’s Legal System’
by Jonathan Groner
Simon & Schuster, $21.95
“Hilary’s Trial” is a profoundly disturbing examination of the most explosive and widely publicized custody battle of our time, the fight over Hilary Foretich by her physician parents. It involved litigation in two states, dozens of hearings and, ultimately, an act of Congress.
Jonathan Groner, an editor of Legal Times journal, paints a very different picture from that widely presented by Dr. Elizabeth Morgan, Hilary’s mother, who contends that her ex-husband, Dr. Eric Foretich, sexually abused the child. Groner notes that almost no doctor ever backed up the abuse claim, but Morgan was hardly deterred – she simply fired the doctor and hired another and another, until she found one willing to state that Hilary might have been abused. Virtually every court to hear the abuse claim rejected it, as did the custody judge, who ordered visitations to continue; rather than comply, Morgan had her parents steal away Hilary. Morgan was held in contempt, imprisoned, and only freed by a misguided Congress. She now lives with her parents and Hilary in New Zealand.
This book was needed to balance a record that so far – especially in the national media – has portrayed Foretich as a calculating child abuser. Groner clearly believes that Hilary has been the victim of an unjust vendetta by her mother, against her father. One can only hope that a little girl in New Zealand named Hilary will one day read it and understand. -
Chasing Shadows
Three new books illustrate differing perspectives on historical inquiry, each by examining a different murder case in our nation’s history. The similarity ends there, however, for each approaches the task in markedly different ways.
Simon Schama’s “Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)” (Knopf, $21), marks a departure for the author of “Citizens,” a revisionist interpretation of the French Revolution, and “The Embarrassment of Riches,” a sweeping history of The Netherlands during its golden age. In contrast, Schama focuses his new book on two relatively obscure historical events to illustrate the limits of historical knowledge, the inherent bias of contemporary sources, and the uncertainty pervasive in any attempt to discern historical truth.
He uses two “tales” to make his point. The first involves English General James Wolfe, who was killed while winning the battle of Quebec in 1759. Schama tells of Wolfe’s dramatic final days from several perspectives, and working from a variety of sources, he illustrates patriotic fiction in the making.
His second, and somewhat more coherent “tale” tells of the mysterious and gruesome death of George Parkman, whose dismembered remains were discovered at Harvard Medical College in 1849. Professor John Webster, a distinguished chemistry professor was arrested and, in one of the most sensational criminal trials of the 19th century, was convicted and eventually executed for the murder.
Webster’s desperate attempts to avoid conviction, and his obvious anguish as he considered the plight of his penniless wife and three daughters, contrast with his popular portrait as an arch villain. In the end, the murder appears to have been less an act of savage calculation than Webster’s burst of anger over Parkman’s relentless pursuit of a debt; it triggered an accidentally overwhelming blow – and an unsuccessful attempt at coverup.
But even this is uncertain, as Schama “dissolve(s) the certainties of events into the multiple possibilities of alternative narrations.” In a poignant passage, he describes his visit to Webster’s home more than two centuries later: “One day, of course . . . (t)he pilasters will surrender to the bulldozer. Windows haunted by the white faces of three girls anxiously scanning a catcalling crowd will be smashed to shivers; the entire fabric of history pulverized to dust and expelled into the air.”
That, of course, is his entire point: the pulverization of history by the passage of time. As Schama concludes, “historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness . . . We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.”
The contrast could hardly be greater with the second book, historian Gerald McFarland’s “The Counterfeit Man” (Pantheon, $22.95). In it, McFarland tells the “true story” of the Boorn-Colvin murder case that made headlines in the early 1800s.
The case involved the mysterious disappearance of Russell Colvin after a violent argument with his brothers-in-law on their farm in Vermont. Known for his frequent disappearances, Colvin was not seriously missed until several years later. The Boorn brothers were eventually convicted, one sentenced to die and another sentenced to life imprisonment.
Only at the last moment were the convictions overturned when “Colvin” suddenly appeared and town residents confirmed that it was, in fact, the real Colvin. Doubts, however, have persisted through the years, though McFarland has few. While he purports to tell “the true story,” his “startling new solution” amounts to little more than the theory that the accused brothers-in-law hired an imposter. The theory is neither new nor startling, but more fundamentally, McFarland admits to none of the doubt or uncertainty that is the entire point of Schama’s work.
The third book, “The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin” (Algonquin, $17.95), avoids both Schama’s uncertainty and McFarland’s blind faith by reconstructing a 17th-century New England murder as a novel.
The 1640 rape and murder of a young woman, her husband’s abandonment of his lawsuit against the most likely suspect, and the suspect’s disappearance all provide ample grist for author Robert Begiebing. He offers a tightly written and engaging novel with dramatic portraits of life in pioneer New England.
These three books – to quote Schama – “play with the teasing gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration.” But only Schama admits his own limitations and addresses the complexities of historical research. -
Ex-Reagan Aide Defends Political Agenda
‘Order & Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution – A Firsthand Account’
by Charles Fried
Simon & Schuster, $19.95
“Order & Law” is one of the best accounts of the inner workings of the Reagan administration, as seen by Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who served as solicitor general from 1985 to 1989. In that capacity, he directed the elite group of Justice Department lawyers who represent the United States government before the Supreme Court.
Fried attempts to accomplish two goals: to respond to his critics and to recount his accomplishments. He succeeds in the latter; he fails in the former.
As solicitor general, Fried wholeheartedly embraced the “Reagan Revolution,” and he spends a considerable amount of time articulating his version of the administration’s conservative legal “philosophy” – with some pointed mischaracterization of “bad faith” liberalism along the way. Because of its frequent appearances before the Supreme Court, the “S.G.’s office” has long had a special relationship with the court, yet historically, its effectiveness has largely stemmed from its reluctance to advance rhetoric for political purposes.
All that changed, according to Fried’s critics, during the Reagan administration. Far more than any of his predecessors, Fried looked to political, not legal, sources for his arguments. While some argue that the solicitor general should represent the ongoing U.S. government, not simply the political agenda of the current administration, Fried disagrees.
He derisively notes the career lawyers in the S.G.’s office who seemed “more interested in protecting their `special relationship’ (with the court) than in arguing their `client’s’ position.” To Fried, the solicitor was nothing more nor less than the administration’s spokesman before the high court.
For example, Fried explicitly sought to have the court overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, despite the near hopelessness of his argument. The position was argued not to convince the court, but for political, public-opinion reasons.
He also reveals more than he intends in describing his conflict with the Justice Department over “federalism.” Fried eloquently demonstrates the hypocrisy of much states’-rights rhetoric by describing the argument not as a matter of principle but as a dispute over which route would be more effective in achieving a political goal: deregulation. Power should be returned to the states, Fried argued, unless they adopted liberal regulatory schemes.
“Order & Law” finally is an odd and revealing mixture of legal philosophy and political history. To “movement conservatives,” diehard liberals or anyone interested in the nuts-and-bolts of representing the federal government before the Supreme Court, it also is essential reading. -
Prosecuting The North Case
“Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer’s First Case: United States vs. Oliver North”
by Jeffrey Toobin
Viking, $22.95
If you were ever interested in what the Oliver North trial was really like, then look no further: “Opening Arguments” is your book.
Author Jeffrey Toobin, fresh out of Harvard Law School, went to work for special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh in 1986 and eventually helped try the case against the former Marine lieutenant colonel in the Iran-contra investigation. His book recounts his struggle to come to terms with the meaning of life as a prosecutor.
The book almost did not get published. As a prosecutor, Toobin had to maintain confidentiality, a responsibility confirmed in writing when he took the job. Although the Bush administration approved Toobin’s manuscript, the Office of the Independent Counsel – his boss, Judge Walsh – did not. After months of negotiation, Toobin and his publisher finally won a lawsuit allowing “Opening Arguments.”
The book does not reveal new secrets about Iran-contra, but it does describe life inside the independent prosecutor’s office. And while that disclosure is questionable itself, it nonetheless is a fascinating look at one of the most tangled trails of deception in our government. Toobin also illuminates the gross error committed by Congress in holding public hearings and granting immunity before the criminal trial – for little apparent reason other than congressional preening before the camera.
The only way Congress could override any Iran-contra defendant’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination was to grant immunity from being prosecuted on the basis of their own forced testimony. As a result, prosecutors had to demonstrate their ignorance of the public hearings, a nearly impossible task, as demonstrated by the eventual reversal of North’s conviction. Walsh currently is seeking to have North’s sentence reinstated by the Supreme Court.
Toobin carefully weaves underlying events with a description of the prosecution’s problems, making the story at once accessible and disturbing. He is at his best, though, in vividly retelling the courtroom drama itself: The story fairly crackles as chief prosecutor John Keker, like North a Marine veteran of Vietnam, faces off against defense counsel Brendan (“I am not a potted plant”) Sullivan.
In Keker’s cross-examination, he brilliantly turned North’s evasive and self-serving answers against him in a way that befuddled Congressmen had never seemed able to do in their earlier hearings. For example, North testified that he “felt like a pawn in a chess game being played by giants” when ordered to hold a deceptive briefing for congressmen.
Keker then carefully led North through his training at the Naval Academy, forcing him to admit that he was instructed to refuse unlawful orders: “You were trained that if an order is unlawful, you can’t say something like, `Oh, I felt like a pawn in a chess game among giants,’ right?”
In a broader sense, though, this book is not about the scandal itself or even “a young lawyer’s first case”; it really is about what constitutes a crime.
Toobin makes clear where he places blame for the entire Iran-contra affair: Ronald Reagan. But whether a crime was actually committed – the point of the entire prosecution – turns out to be a bit more complex. Starting with a broad and ominous conspiracy charge against North, Walsh eventually was forced to pursue only narrow criminal charges: obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, shredding documents, defrauding the government, and theft. He only obtained convictions on the three most obvious: lying, cheating and stealing.
In the end, Toobin concludes that only those deserve the crime label. Arrogance is not a crime, “Nor is a reprehensible policy in Central America or an inept attempt to free American hostages. Only crimes are crimes.”
Broader judgments, he decides, involve distinctions which are personal, idiosyncratic and individualistic – and recognizing the difference between “moral as opposed to criminal responsibility will preserve the integrity of both.”
But is it really just personal morality or “philosophical difference” that condemns foreign-policy conduct explicitly forbidden by law? Toobin’s rush to his conclusion confuses problems of proof – endemic to any litigation, criminal or otherwise – with defining what is and what is not criminal conduct.
Simply because prosecutors were unable to obtain untainted evidence to convict North on the larger charges does not mean that his conduct was not criminal. It means only that each sphere of the government should stick to its assigned role: Congress to enact the law, the president to execute and obey that law, and the criminal-justice system to prosecute violations.
When the roles get confused and the president ignores the law while Congress feebly attempts to enforce it, true prosecution is impossible. That’s the real lesson of Iran-contra, and President Reagan and Oliver North are hardly the only villains. -
Acute Legal Conflict — Personal Professional Relationships Are Examined
`The Burden of Proof”
by Scott Turow
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.95
He finds her body in the garage. Alejandro “Sandy” Stern, the brilliant defense attorney introduced in Scott Turow’s superb 1988 best seller, “Presumed Innocent,” arrives home preoccupied with the defense of his brother-in-law, who is being investigated for insider trading. Expecting to be greeted by Clara, his demure wife of 30 years, Stern instead is confronted with her suicide in the garage.
So begins “The Burden of Proof,” Turow’s riveting second novel. Rather than seeking to duplicate his success in “Presumed Innocent” with another whodunit murdery-mystery, Turow instead tackles a more complex and challenging theme: the limits of personal and professional relationships.
Turow uses Stern’s investigation of both his wife’s death and his client’s professional conduct to examine fundamental questions: How well can you ever know another person? How binding is a lawyer’s duty to his or her client? Or a husband’s duty to his wife? Or a father’s to his three grown children? The plot of “The Burden of Proof” is thoroughly engaging, though not as devilishly surprising as Turow’s first novel.
Stern was the attorney in “Presumed Innocent” who defended Rusty Sabich, the Kindle County prosecutor accused of a brutal rape and murder. Apart from passing references (to tell us, for example, that three years have passed and that Sabich has become a judge), the new book has nothing to do with events of the first. Newcomers to Turow need not fear.
In “The Burden of Proof,” Stern struggles to defend from indictment his sister’s husband, Dixon Hartnell, the wheeler-dealer head of a commodity-futures trading house and a man with whom Stern has had a long, uneasy relationship. Simultaneously he struggles to accept his wife’s suicide.
Puzzling over Clara’s private life, he reexamines what he thought he knew, arriving at what he believes to have been her reasons for taking her life, only to have each delicately constructed rationale collapse in the face of another unexpected development. Stern gradually comes to realize how little he actually knew of his wife or her inner turmoil.
Turow, himself a Chicago lawyer, is most successful in probing the complexities of the lawyer-client relationship. He masterfully revolves the familial and client entanglements to reveal new perspectives on the limits of a lawyer’s ability to defend his or her client – questions complicated by Stern’s string of sexual liaisons in the aftermath of Clara’s death and an ethically questionable flirtation with the prosecutor opposing him in the Hartnell case.
Indeed, at least for the lawyers reading this novel, one of its pleasures is the accuracy and care with which the limits are drawn and the principles explained. Seeking to trace ownership of an account in Hartnell’s brokerage firm, the prosecutor subpoenas documents from Hartnell, who, fearing further warrants, places certain sensitive documents in a safe he delivers to Stern’s office. When Stern himself is subpoenaed to produce the safe containing confidential information about his client, the conflict becomes acute.
Without disclosing the slam-bang finish – rest assured, there is one – Sandy Stern ultimately discovers that his tidy world is not as it has seemed. Both mysteries – Clara’s death and Hartnell’s dealings – suddenly dovetail, undermining all of Stern’s original assessments of people and prior events. Stern’s ethical obligation to defend his client zealously is suddenly placed in opposition to his duty as a husband and a father.
The conclusion of “The Burden of Proof” is surprising, almost too clever. Here, as in a few other places, the plot becomes a bit implausible as Turow struggles to tie loose ends together. Although it fails to match the sheer suspense of Turow’s first effort, “The Burden of Proof” is nonetheless a disturbing examination of moral complexities, and a worthy and compelling novel.