The Holdout

by Graham Moore

Maya used the opportunity to surreptitiously rub the blood on her hands onto the metal cuffs. She was corrupting any sample of blood they would take. Who knew who else’s DNA was on these handcuffs? Any forensic data gathered from her hands would now be useless in court.

“The way I explain it to my clients,” she said, “is that if they tell me they were at Disneyland, I can’t go into court and argue that they were on the moon.” 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.

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.

She wanted to say that the only thing worse than being wrong was having a bottomless need to prove that you never were.

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.