A captivating, emotionally intense investigation of the complicated relationship between truth and the justice system.
Criminal-defense attorney Smith (Law/Georgetown Univ.) describes her attempt to liberate a wrongfully imprisoned woman.
The author was a second-year law student in 1980 when she met convicted felon Kelly Jarrett under the auspices of New York University’s free Prison Law Clinic. Smith’s narrative portrays a sweet Southern girl ensnared by the New York penal system. North Carolina native Kelly was 21 in August 1973, when she took a trip to Utica, N.Y., with gay buddy Billy Ronald, whom she let use her car while she was dallying with a new girlfriend. Naïve, unsuspecting Kelly had no idea that Billy Ronald was a career criminal, she subsequently told her lawyers. Two and a half years later, she was arrested after an eyewitness positively identified Kelly as present at the scene of the robbery and brutal murder of a teenaged gas-station attendant in Utica. Offered a reduced sentence if she pleaded guilty to robbery, Kelly staunchly insisted on her innocence and refused; she was convicted as an accomplice to murder and got life in prison. The author worked on Kelly’s appeal while at the Prison Law Clinic, but lost touch after graduating. In 1993, now a full-fledged public defender, Smith met Jean Harris, who had been serving 12 years for murder in the same jail as Kelly and urged the lawyer to contact her former client. After their reunion, Smith became an amazingly tireless advocate, making it her personal mission to free Kelly via executive clemency. Her dense narrative weaves Kelly’s plight with theories on innocence and “the truth,” case studies, a discussion of the significance of criminal defenders and an examination of the various ethical dilemmas they face. Kelly’s case was one of many criminal convictions contingent upon a “single, shaky eyewitness,” she reminds us; new policies have since been drafted to lessen the likelihood of false identifications. Kelly was finally released in 2005, after 28 years, six months, in jail.
A captivating, emotionally intense investigation of the complicated relationship between truth and the justice system.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-230-60528-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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