Tuesday, November 1, 1994

The Advocate's Devil (November 1994): Taking the case of a professional basketball player accused of rape, a high-powered defense attorney is confident that he can win, but struggles with the morality of defending a client who may be guilty.  From the legal tactician who has represented such famous clients as Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson, and Michael Milken, comes a novel that goes far beyond the limits of the courtroom thriller to probe our deepest fears and asks the controversial legal question—What do you do if you are a defense attorney who suspects your client is guilty and dangerous?

Saturday, October 1, 1994

The Abuse Excuse: And Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories, and Evasions of Responsibility (October 1994): More and more criminal defendants are claiming a history of abuse to avoid accountability for their behavior. Harvard Law School professor Dershowitz (Chutzpah) views battered wife syndrome, "black rage," the "crime of passion" mitigation, sexual abuse syndrome and other defenses as "abuse excuses." In his blistering critique, Dershowitz sees such ploys and jurors' sympathetic responses to them as an abdication of individual and societal responsibility. Despite the author's attempt to link these 68 articles and essays under the broad theme of denial of accountability, this is a miscellany of his feisty views on such defendants as Michael Jackson, Erik and Lyle Menendez, John Demjanjuk, Woody Allen and William Kennedy Smith, as well as Serbian genocide, U.S. feminists' anti-pornography campaigns and Germany's lax prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Dershowitz, a consultant to the O.J. Simpson defense team, intimates that Simpson might have to use some variation of the abuse excuse-a glaring irony that blunts his book's impact.