The U.S. Attorney General for the southern district of New York from 2009 until he was fired by Donald Trump in 2017 discusses the workings of the U.S. criminal Justice system from a uniquely insider’s perspective. He details many cases of wrongdoing from insider trading and political corruption to gangland murders and child kidnapping. The writing is easy to understand even if the issues and processes are not at times.
The author is an unusually reflective and principled man who agonizes over the decisions that confront prosecutors on a daily basis; he questions his own decisions frequently and capably conveys the vagaries of a flawed system. He discusses the ethics of plea bargaining with co-conspirators and the futility and dangers of torture as a technique to extract information, the lottery of jury and judge assignments, and the wide discretion allowed for both prosecutors and judges. The egotistical antics of the would-be famous judges who seek fame rather than the truth, a la Judge Judy, is illustrated in the description of the trial of Paul Manafort. Prosecutors are commonly caricatured as ruthless law-and-order advocates, not the very human conflicted moral philosophers wresting with the gut-wrenching decisions about what to recommend as a sentence for a child kidnapper when there are no right answers and all involved will be permanently impacted in some way. But, as depicted here, that is an unfair characterization and a Hollywood generalization. Before reading this I would never have used the words prosecuting attorney and moral philosophy in the same sentence except to disparage the former for the lack of the latter.
Of the limitations of the criminal Justice system, he notes: “The law is merely an instrument, and without the involvement of human hands, it is as lifeless and uninspiring as a violin kept in its case.”
A deep abiding faith in the Justice system is probably necessary to function as a prosecuting attorney and he certainly displays that; whether or not it is realistic is a different matter. By the author’s account the prosecuting attorneys are a uniformly selfless, altruistic lot, dedicated to the public good, which hardly seems likely. His claim that none of them can ever be intimidated even when their families receive death threats, is an unlikely assertion as they are flawed human beings like the rest of us.
I admire anyone in a complex professional field who can explain those complexities in language the general public can easily understand, and this book is a great example of that talent. A good read.
The Passionate Reader 