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.

In courtrooms all across this city, Maya had seen people get verdicts they’d wanted, and she’d seen just as many get ones they didn’t. 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.