The author’s determination to complete a case that at times drove him to despair and brought him to the edge of bankruptcy...
A celebrated criminal lawyer's tell-all memoir about the tumultuous years he spent defending supposed Florida "baby killer" Casey Anthony.
Anthony hired Baez in 2008 to defend her against allegations of child neglect of her daughter, Caylee. At the time, Baez, assisted in this memoir by Golenbock (Glory in the Fall: The Greatest Moments in World Series History, 2010, etc.), was just a "rookie lawyer" who had only been admitted to the Florida bar in 2005. What seemed like "just another case" quickly emerged as a possible murder trial. Complicating matters was the fact that investigators caught Anthony telling elaborate, and ultimately untrue, stories about her life that made references to a host of imaginary friends and acquaintances. Consequently, on the basis of unsubstantiated evidence Baez believes Orlando police leaked to the media, the legal system sought to convict the young mother “in the court of public opinion.” Using her apparent untrustworthiness as its point of departure, the prosecution proceeded to build a case against Anthony based on appearances rather than truth. It claimed that Anthony had done nothing but party for a month before finally admitting that her daughter was missing; that the smell inside Casey's car came from human remains rather than the decaying pizza remnants actually found in the vehicle; and that hair discovered in the trunk came from Caylee's dead body. Sensing that the case was not as simple as the prosecution had made it seem, Baez slowly gained Anthony's trust and pursued hunches that she was not only innocent, but also the victim of sexual abuse.
The author’s determination to complete a case that at times drove him to despair and brought him to the edge of bankruptcy is admirable, but the meticulous detail occasionally verges on excruciating.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-193785638-0
Page Count: 423
Publisher: BenBella
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
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
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