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BOOK REVIEW:
Defending Jacob
by William Landay Review By Jules J. Mermelstein, Esq. author of Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue
W
illiam Landay’s novel, Defending Jacob, is written so creatively with twists one does not see coming, that it has been turned into a new AppleTV show. As I do not have access to AppleTV, I cannot compare the two. The main character is Andrew Barber, the First Assistant District Attorney for a community in Massachusetts. Throughout the novel, the main character is talking directly to the reader as if he were telling the story, sometimes commenting that he’s “getting ahead of the story.” If he is not relaying the story, then we are seeing court transcripts. One of the court transcripts we see throughout is of a grand jury. Until very near the end of the novel, the reader is unsure for whom or for what crime the indicting grand jury has been empaneled. The transcript involves another assistant district attorney and Andrew Barber as the witness. The main story revolves around the murder of a fourteenyear-old boy. Andrew Barber, as First Assistant, assigns the case to himself. The boy was in the same grade as Mr. Barber’s son, Jacob. As you can probably tell from the title, although Mr. Barber believes a local child sex predator is the guilty party, evidence is uncovered that indicates Jacob might have had something to do with it. Mr. Barber is put on paid leave, Jacob is charged, and the assistant DA we see in the grand jury transcript is put in charge of prosecuting Jacob. I mentioned earlier that Mr. Landay included twists that one doesn’t see coming. To indicate how much one doesn’t see them coming, one of those twists is very similar to one of the events in my own novel and I did not see it coming. Knowing that Mr. Landay was an assistant district attorney before becoming a novelist, one might suspect he has something to say about criminal justice. One would be correct. Here are some quotes from the novel that do not reveal the plot, but strike a note of truth.
12 SIDEBAR
From page 96: Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just 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. Similarly, and more succinctly, from page 8: A jury verdict is just a guess – a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. Mr. Landay was also not kind to prosecutors, his former profession. From page 4: That is the Prosecutor’s Fallacy – They are bad guys because I am prosecuting them… And about district attorneys bragging on their won-lost record – from page 243: The truth is, the best won-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it. The judge in his son’s case is one who is often consulted for commentary on legal issues, but someone that Mr. Barber does not have a great deal of respect for. On page 249, the judge is described thusly:
