William Landay’s brilliant new legal thriller, Defending Jacob, has created quite a buzz. It has been compared favorably with Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, which is pretty heady territory.
Like Turow, Landay is a former prosecutor. And like Turow, Landay issues an indictment of our criminal-justice system on several levels. Defending Jacob is not about a wrongful conviction. It is as much a family drama as it is a legal one, and it takes many dramatic turns before what one seasoned reviewer called its “astonishing” ending.
The novel’s central character is Andy Barber, an experienced district attorney in Newton, Mass., whose 14-year-old son, Jacob, is indicted in the murder of a classmate who had been bullying him. You can read about the drama that follows elsewhere. Better yet, you should read the book itself, although I’d advise you not to start it late at night.
What I’d like to highlight here is one passage as Barber considers his son’s prospects for justice. Coming from a former prosecutor, it is rather telling.
“Here is the dirty little secret,” Barber says. “The error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just the false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free — those errors we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in defendants’ favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge — do not even think about — because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail, eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable, even the best-intentioned cops are subject to failures of judgment and recall. The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking, and there was no way in hell I was going to trust my son’s fate to it.”
The journey to uncertain justice that follows is a long and painful one for Andy Barber and a reminder to the readers of his narrative that life is far more complicated than it is portrayed in the courtroom.
Wrongful Convictions Blog 