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Once in a while in this space I tackle the problem of explaining to my
readers the realities of crime fighting and crime investigating as opposed to the
impressions created by people who misrepresent the facts of the case. That’s a
tough word to describe what they do, and I don’t want it misunderstood to mean
that the misrepresentation is always, or even very often, malicious. Usually
it’s just done in the cause of creating a better story.
All this deep thought came out of an encounter I had with a book called “
Guilt By Association” by a lady named Susan Sloan. Until it showed up some way in
my house I had never heard of it, which meant that I had come close to
missing out on a masterpiece. This was what I gathered reading the excerpts on the
covers taken from the newspapers of New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, El Paso,
Orlando, Seattle, and countless others around the country. It “rang true”,
they said. It was “compelling”, “unforgettable”, “brilliant”, “harrowing”,
others said. Things went a little overboard at one point because the “
Greensboro Watchman” and “Book World” both said it was a “brilliant book that will
have your heart thumping and your hands gripping your seat”. Someone in the
publisher’s office didn’t notice this and printed the two quotes on the same
page.
I’m afraid all this enthusiasm says more about the ignorance of the
enthusiasts than it does about the qualities of the book. You see, it happens to be
preposterous. The premise on which the whole thing is based is fatally flawed.
Everything in the book comes out of the rape of the heroine in the first
chapter. It’s committed on her by a Harvard Law student (!) in Central Park in
near-zero weather (!) while escorting her home from a party. He isn’t just a
rapist, it seems he’s a sadist as well. He slaps her, yanks her by the hair,
punches her in the stomach, kicks her in the ribs and stomach, bites her, and
of course, rapes her several ways. He finishes up with a knockout punch to
her chin and leaves her to die.
She is discovered by a dog-walker while lying under a bush unconscious. She
is removed to a hospital and gets an emergency tracheotomy. The immediate
diagnosis is multiple contusions and fractures along with signs of abdominal
bleeding. The doctor calls in “an oral surgeon, an orthopedist, a urologist, a
neurologist and a gynecologist” who all agree “surgery should begin as soon as
possible”.
In spite of the efforts of the medical team, Karen, the heroine, runs a
temperature of 105 degrees, experiences pneumonia, and is treated with penicillin,
aspirin suppositories, and alcohol baths, to alleviate, among other things,
her fractured jaw, her cracked ribs, and her broken nose. This isn’t the whole
catalogue, but instead of including everything else, I’ll just mention her
ruptured spleen and let the rest go. Except for the hysterectomy. This girl is
spared nothing.
This is the kind of book usually known as a thriller and classified as
escapist reading. It’s got more horror in it than any individual story of the
Holocaust, but even so there are plenty of signals that we’re not to take it all
seriously. The girl recovers after years of trauma, and her assailant not only
graduates from Harvard Law, but gets to run for President! So the realism
gets a little vitiated as the story proceeds.
Even so, a book like this, which is really a “police procedural”, though an
extra gory one, is supposed to be plausible and not to abuse our understanding
of the law while grinding its way to its ultimate “stunning”, “chilling”
conclusion. But it does abuse it, as well as common sense and ordinary
intelligence.
This happens when Karen emerges from her coma and is interviewed by the
district attorney’s investigator. Naturally he asks her whether she could have
done anything that might have provoked the assault. He tells her he has
identified the “suspect” and gotten a different story from him, blaming the victim.
He finds it very significant that the man had given her a correct name and
address, rather than a phony to cover his tracks. He does not, however, mention
whether he had asked to see the clothes the fellow wore on the night, or
whether he had tried to find any witnesses to his condition then. In short, he
tells her, there isn’t any case and there won’t be any prosecution.
This is too much for the girl, and even for the author, who undermines her
whole story with the outburst she puts in the girl’s mouth, “You mean [the
jury] would say I made it all up? That I…went into Central Park by myself…and
lured some stranger into the bushes and begged him to rape me and beat me half
to death, and then tried to blame some nice innocent guy…?”
That’s the perfect answer. Juries, as they have just done in the Peterson
and Pelosi cases, do ask themselves who else was around to commit the crimes the
defendants deny even though they admit being on the scene. And where is the
district attorney so cautious he won’t prosecute an outrageous near-fatal
assault on a woman just because of the risk of a possible acquittal? There’s such
a DA in this book, but I didn’t believe in him and you will not either. DA’s
like to win and they like holding four aces, but they’re not as bad as Miss
Sloan makes them out to be.
So the plot twist here is preposterous and the book necessarily falls apart.
In real life the rapist would have been prosecuted and even if by some
anomaly he had beaten the case, he would have emerged with a reputation no better
than William Kennedy Smith’s, making him an unlikely candidate for the
Presidency. He would have lost to Howard Dean in a primary. (Why do I assume he was a
Democrat? Yeah. You’re right. That’s why.) Once again America dodged a
bullet.
Let’s hope that the next time the literary world gets together to puff a book
like this, that they first get themselves some education in the facts of life
as it’s really lived in the trenches. They could start by studying the Fifth
Amendment in order to cure themselves of the illusion that the presumption of
innocence applies to criminal defendants before they go on trial. I just saw
it misused again a letter to a newspaper about the case of a politician
accused of malfeasance in office in New York. Remember, it warned, he’s innocent
until proven guilty. No he’s not. He’s not guilty either. He’s in a state
of suspended animation, you might say. Anyone is free to presume anything they
like about him, but the only people in the world who have to presume him
innocent are the members of the trial jury when they’re sworn in to hear his case.
They must clear their minds of everything they know about him and listen
only to the evidence. That’s the meaning of the presumption of innocence. The
lawyers all know this. But they don’t want you to know it.
I will be celebrating Christmas, even though my Christmas piece a few weeks
ago was “How I Almost Got Thrown Off a Bridge for Christmas”. I’ve recovered,
so Merry Christmas!
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