Defending Jacob

by William Landay

We had always avoided shopping there because of ...

This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so

ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

vivacious, actressy manner of a woman who

It is the happy lot of defense lawyers to see the good in people. No matter how wicked or incomprehensible the crime, no matter how overwhelming the evidence of guilt, the defense lawyer never forgets his client is a human being like the rest of us.

The priest may be a pedophile, the cop a crook; the

loving husband and father may harbor a filthy secret. Of

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.

will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide.

The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required

training, time, and a properly controlled...

We are not measured by simple won-lost records. The truth is, the best won-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it.

The word bureaucrat has a negative connotation, but we do need bureaucracies, after all, and it is good bureaucrats that make them go.

have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of

a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.

They shuffled in, rubbernecking the courtroom like tourists wandering through Versailles.

Jury pools usually skewed slightly blue-collar and underemployed, since these were the people more likely to respond to a summons.

This too was good for us, I decided. We wanted smart, coolheaded jurors, people with the brains to understand a technical defense or the limitations of scientific evidence, and the balls to say Not guilty.

In the end, the lawyers and judges happily step aside and hand the entire process over to a dozen complete amateurs. It

We parents often talk with ridiculous bravado when it comes to our kids. We swear that we can take any abuse, beat any challenge. No test is too great. Anything for our kids. But no one is bulletproof, parents least of all. Our kids make us vulnerable.

She never stopped defending Jacob, never stopped analyzing the chessboard, calculating every move and countermove. She never stopped protecting him, even in the end.

Without empathy, anything is permitted. Morality becomes very subjective and flexible.

This is the best thing about men’s friendships: most any awkwardness can be ignored by mutual agreement and, true connection being unimaginable, you can get on with the easier business of parallel living.

For all we have learned, the fact remains that we do not understand in any meaningful way why people do what they do, and likely never will.”

Life goes on, probably too long if we’re being honest about it. In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest—the vast majority, tens of thousands of days—are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them.

We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest.

We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories, as I am doing here. But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgetta...

I took over the grocery shopping, since Laurie would not risk running into the Rifkins at the market again, and I picked up the wifely habit of planning the week’s dinner menus in my head as I shopped (pasta Monday, chicken Tuesday, hamburgers Wednesday …).

Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you.

Laurie got very brown very quickly, as she always has. To my middle-aged eyes she looked insanely sexy, and I began to wonder if the website did not have it right, after all: she looked more and more like the hot soccer mom in the ad. She was still the best-looking woman I ever saw. It was a miracle that I got her in the first place and a miracle that she stayed with me as long as she did.