Defending Jacob

by William Landay

“Sure.” She made a face: Duh!

Logiudice: You’re not the least bit troubled by the way you disposed of Jacob’s knife? Even now, knowing what happened?

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.

Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking, and there was no way in hell I was going to trust my son’s fate to it. Not because I believed he was guilty, I assure you, but precisely because he was innocent. I was doing what little I could to ensure the right result,

Jonathan Klein

At a minimum, Laurie felt, people ought to see that, whatever Jacob may have done, she and I were certainly innocent. It was a delusion I never shared.

we could hardly have picked a better judge that morning. Judge Rivera had been on the Superior Court bench less than five years but already she had a towering reputation in the district attorney’s office as a defendant’s judge.

Jonathan passed through the swinging gate in the bar, laid his briefcase on the defense table, and took a position beside Jacob. He put his hand on Jacob’s back, not for Jacob’s benefit but to make a point: This boy is no monster, I am not afraid to touch him. And more: I am not simply a hired gun doing my professional duty for a distasteful client. I believe in this kid. I am his friend.

There’s no reason to panic. It does not matter how big the DA’s team is, it doesn’t matter how strong the DA’s case looks, or how confident Logiudice seems. We are not outgunned. We do need to stay cool. And if we do, we have everything we need to win. Now, do you believe that?”

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—“the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.” That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions.

We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls.

call a plasterer. This was just last fall. Is

“Were you any good in high school biology?”

It did not matter that once she had held that baby boy in her arms and whispered in his ear, “Sh, sh.” At this point, nobody gave a shit.

As those first few months passed, the insult of Jacob’s trial gradually lost its power to enrage us. We had done all we could. This grotesque thing had happened to our family. We would always be known for it. It would be the first sentence in all our obituaries. And we would always be shaped by the experience,