THE GUILT PROJECT

Drawing insight from a career defending “the most loathed of the loathsome,” a California appellate attorney looks at crime and punishment under our sex laws.

By definition all of the author’s sex-offender clients are legally guilty. Once apprised of the particulars of their felonies—to spare the queasy, especially lurid details are confined to appendices—many readers will decline to consider them further. But Place (La Medusa, 2008, etc.) expands the notion of guilt, examining its other dimensions—factual, ethical, moral—and asks whether we’ve allowed dubious science, conflicting cultural messages and out-of-control political passions to distort our sex laws. How is it, she asks, with the spotlight never brighter on preventing sex crimes, there are seemingly more offenders than ever? “We have pimps,” she writes, “because we want whores. Just as, sometimes, we make victims because we want perpetrators.” The current crusade for conviction valorizes science—DNA and polygraph testing—in place of the “acts of individual thought and logic” the law requires for judgment about sex crimes. Moreover, there’s money to be made in anything related to sex, whether in the privatization of prisons, in the newspaper series covering the latest local outrage, or in the cable-news shows—Place dismantles Dateline: To Catch a Predator—which flirt with entrapment and form uncomfortably close relation with law enforcement. Where the law has traditionally focused on conduct, not character, we enact rules that permit evidence of prior offenses and statutes that increasingly infantilize women and make no allowances for the messy and complicated fact patterns that frequently lead to rape. We make no protest as judges sanctimoniously impose grossly disproportionate, 1,000-year sentences for sex offenses. And so it goes. In a sex-soaked culture, our law becomes ever more draconian. Place detects something desperate in all this, and in richly allusive, frequently witty prose, she asks important questions about what it is exactly we want from our criminal laws.

A sophisticated, brave look at a topic that too often provokes merely panic, prejudice and posturing.