The Holdout

by Graham Moore

He was going to be one of those cops who did the “ma’am” thing with her, wasn’t he? Maya hated the “ma’am” thing. Not because she was thirty-six, which she had to admit was probably “ma’am”-worthy, but because it was such a transparent attempt to make her seem stuck up.

“We all endeavor to learn from our mistakes, don’t we?”

There wasn’t a cause in this world so pure that someone couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable.

There are rules in this world. I don’t mean the law—fuck the law. I mean rules about being a human being.

The world had begun to feel like a zero-sum game. Rising tides had never lifted all boats, she knew that; but now, to the extent that one rose, another seemed to roll off and crash on the shore. It was the unsparing physics of cause and effect: The wake of one boat became the wave that dashed another.

In our system of law, the jurors are called the sole arbiters of fact.

Being the ‘sole arbiters of fact’ means that only you can say what the salient facts are. Which ones are important, and which ones are noise.

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.

“One-way streets are one of the most effective tools local governments use to preserve racial segregation.”

one-way streets can be a powerful force in urban planning. Which streets funnel traffic into which other streets defines the contours of neighborhoods.

How many times, in the United States, had murder charges been brought against a defendant when there wasn’t even a body? The defense attorney had actually posed this question to one of the testifying detectives and then provided the answer: 480 times…since 1800.

the membrane between their secret world and the one outside broke.

Los Angeles had been built on a desert, just an afternoon’s drive from Death Valley. So in the 1930s, the city had planted tens of thousands of the lush trees, all imported from Mexico.

anytime you said “studies have shown,” people believed whatever you put after.

“Acquittals can’t be vacated. It’s a basic Fifth Amendment principle.

this was how he’d become a billionaire. Not by exerting his will on others, but by organizing others into exerting their wills on one another.

She understood what it was like to have argued for so long that the result of the argument no longer mattered—the only thing that provided any relief was not being right, but showing that from the very beginning you had been right.

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.

“The road to hell,” Trisha said sadly, “is paved by white people trying to help.”

I knew I shouldn’t be texting with a student, but I got off on the attention. How pathetic is that?

jury’s votes were like Tolstoy’s families: All “guilty” votes had to be alike in reasoning. But all “not guilty” votes could be for different reasons and still reach the same result.