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He was obviously a working-class kid determined to get for himself what so many others had simply been handed.
I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results. A jury verdict is just a guess—a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote.
Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free—those “errors” we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in defendants’ favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge—do not even think about—because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail,
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The human element in any system is always prone to error.
actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—“the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.”
the law punishes intentional crimes. It presumes every act is intentional, a product of free will. If you did it, it is assumed you meant to do it. The law is very unforgiving of ‘yes but’ defenses. Yes, but I had a hard childhood. Yes, but I have a mental disease. Yes, but I was drunk. Yes, but I was carried away by anger. If you commit a crime, the law will say you are guilty despite these things. But it will take them into account when it comes to the precise definition of the crime and when it comes to the sentence. At that point, anything that affects your free will—including a genetic
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An emotion is a thought, yes, an idea, but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body. Desire, love, hate, fear, repulsion—you feel these things in your muscle and bones, not just in your mind. That is how this little heartbreak felt: like a physical injury, deep inside my body, an internal bleeding, a nick that would continue to seep.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe. I think maybe something like that happens with kids. You see what you want to see.
They had nothing in common except their glaring lack of qualifications for the job. It was almost comical how ignorant they were of the law, of how trials worked, even of this case, which had been splashed all over the newspapers and evening news. They were chosen for their perfect ignorance of these things. That is how the system works. In the end, the lawyers and judges happily step aside and hand the entire process over to a dozen complete amateurs. It would be funny if it were not so perverse. How futile the whole project
I always wonder...
“One split second and”—he snapped his fingers—“snap. It only takes a second to lose your temper. And that is all you need, a second, an instant, to form the intention to murder. In this courtroom it is called malice aforethought. The conscious decision to kill, however quickly the intention forms, however briefly it is in the murderer’s mind. First-degree murder can happen just…like…that.”
“The meaning of a stipulation is that the defense concedes that a fact is true without the prosecutor having to prove it. Both parties agree to the truth of this fact, therefore you may take it as true and proven.
omg i live for novels w/ courtroom scenes
Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you.
Books are essentially a private medium, for both the artist and audience—imagined by a writer in a lonely room, then reimagined by a reader in the quiet of her own thoughts.
A book’s essential purpose is to be opened by a single reader and read in silence, to slip into her thoughts quietly.
