The Holdout

by Graham Moore

Better, she’d argued, that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent be wrongly punished.

Innocent people always wanted to shout out what really happened from the rooftops—but sometimes the best defense, legally speaking, wasn’t the truth.

And yet, if Maya had internalized one truth from the doubt surrounding Jessica Silver’s death, it was that no one was safe from their fellow citizens. Anyone could be killed; anyone could be suspected. Anyone could find themselves at the end of a long line of bad decisions and feel they had no other option but to do something terrible.

Los Angeles was either an inspiring tribute to civilization’s ability to withstand an infertile soil, or the withering edifice of a generation’s best-laid plans to grow something that should not live.

There was something kind of grand about the idea that only in this courtroom could these randoms assemble. All it took for people in Los Angeles to speak to their neighbors was for one of them to kill another.