Heavy going at times, but nonetheless an eye-opening indictment of a myopic criminal-justice system.
The arrest, trial and conviction of four sailors accused in the 1997 rape and murder of another sailor’s teenage wife.
Wells (The War Within, 1994, etc.) and Leo (Law/Univ. of San Francisco; Police Interrogation and American Justice, 2008, etc.) spent six years following the case and eventually helped secure high-powered legal representation to assist the appeals of the Norfolk Four: Danial Williams, Joseph Dick, Derek Tice and Eric Wilson. They argue that the men were accused on the flimsiest of evidence and then bullied by police interrogators into giving false confessions. (All four waived their Miranda rights during questioning.) The fact that the suspects reaffirmed their participation in the brutal crime during subsequent questioning and court proceedings doesn’t help the authors’ argument, but the fact is that no physical evidence linked them to the crime. Moreover, another more likely suspect, whose DNA was the only match recovered from the scene, later confessed to killing 18-year-old Michelle Bosko alone. Readers may balk at the lengthy police interrogations detailed here, as well as the ever-changing accounts of the crime provided by the various suspects. The authors’ impressive research too often bogs down in textbook legalese and repetitious crime details, and their involvement in the case may actually have hindered them from providing a more clear-eyed, entertaining narrative. Still, their assertion that Norfolk, Va., detectives were more interested in clearing the case than in actually solving it seems well founded. Indeed, searching desperately for a match to the lone DNA sample found at the crime scene, the police eventually charged a total of seven suspects with the killing before being forced to release three of them. Wilson, convicted only of rape, was released in 2005. Williams, Dick and Tice remain in prison serving life sentences. Whether it was guilt or näiveté that put them there is for the reader to decide.
Heavy going at times, but nonetheless an eye-opening indictment of a myopic criminal-justice system.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59558-401-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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. Marylanddecision. 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 Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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