The Holdout

by Graham Moore

Being innocent often made it harder to construct a good defense. Innocent people always wanted to shout out what really happened from the rooftops—but sometimes the best defense, legally speaking, wasn’t the truth.

Infidelity was the refuge of romantic weaklings.

She’d been one of those random capitalization people. (Husband? Physical? Important? What was the train of thought that had led her to capitalize those words?)

Anyone would look like a villain in a catalogue of only their worst decisions.

Jae had one wish for his own kids—three girls and a boy, four through fourteen—it was that they would learn to think like the people they wanted to be.

But the verdicts had nothing to do with truth. No verdict ever changed a person’s opinion. Juries weren’t gods. The people who went into those courtrooms looking for divine revelation came out bearing the fruits of bureaucratic negotiation.

You had to really care about someone to fight with them this hard. You had to deeply care about someone’s opinion to be this offended by how totally wrong they were.

When the villains are so clear, we can tuck ourselves into bed at night knowing that we’re nothing like them. But what if it’s not so clear? What if it’s more complicated than here’s some heroic non-racist white people and here’s some villainous racist white people? What if, for me, the most pressing questions are not about how ‘racist’ you think you are or can prove that you aren’t.

“You’ll see, when you have kids. It doesn’t matter what they’re guilty of. You protect them.”