A former prosecutor's bold, if rather wooden, memoir of fighting sexual predators. It's not irrelevant that Vachss is married to novelist Andrew Vachss, who's an Çminence grise throughout these pages, giving the author tough advice, leaving her notes of encouragement on their breakfast table. Alice Vachss strongly shares the hatred of sexual criminals that energizes her husband's thrillers—but what she doesn't share is his way with words: She's a monotonic writer, and, for all their inherent drama, the many cases she describes here from her decade spent prosecuting sex crimes in N.Y.C.'s Queens County unfold flatly; moreover, she tells us little of her years before law school, making this more the memoir of a crusade than of a life. Even so, Vachss embeds hard-hitting messages in her case- histories: that ``rape [is] a choice,'' not an irresistible compulsion; that serial sexual offenders don't reform; that too many judges and cops side with the accused in rape trials. Tales of various prosecutions—of a father who'd raped his daughter from her youth until her 30s; of the rapist who claimed Vietnam-induced stress as his defense; of the local civic leader, a Boys Club director, who preyed upon kids he was supposed to help—offer intricate reconstructions of how Vachss built her cases, with some interesting legal lore salted on: the importance, in order to win a case, of having a ``Good Victim'' (i.e., an appealing one); the effect of dress on a jury (in summations, Vachss wore ``black and white...No gray areas. No excuses''). And all this played against a background of infighting among the political hacks of Queens- -infighting that finally got the toe-stepping author fired. Not gripping, but an effective blow in the war against what Vachss calls a ``self-absorbed sociopathic beast'': the rapist.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42435-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
Categories: TRUE CRIME
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"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
Categories: TRUE CRIME
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Categories: TRUE CRIME
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