Source : the age
By Tom Ryan
FICTION
Presumed Guilty
Scott Turow
Hachette, $32.99
All but one of Scott Turow’s 14 novels are courtroom dramas. Known collectively as “the Kindle County legal thrillers”, they deal with crime and the rules of conduct in the courtroom. But they’re also about the legal system, its practices and pitfalls, and its value in any civilised society.
His bestselling debut Presumed Innocent (1987) introduced two key characters who have reappeared in his subsequent work. One is defence attorney Alejandro “Sandy” Stern; the other is fellow attorney Rozak K. “Rusty” Sabich. Stern has defended Rusty twice on murder charges, both laid by antagonistic District Attorney Tommy Molto. First, after he’s accused of the murder of a female colleague in Presumed Innocent, and then after his wife dies in mysterious circumstances at the start of 2010’s Innocent.
Stern is only mentioned in passing in Presumed Guilty; Rusty is the central character. Now 77, he believes his best years are behind him. The former prosecutor and appellate court judge now regards himself as a man of leisure. Home is a house on the shore of Mirror Lake in rural Skageon (the locations in Turow’s novels are all fictional derivations of real places). He’s living with Bea, the new woman in his life, and loving fishing, being a grandfather and lunching every Wednesday with a retired colleague.
But then he’s drawn into the same kind of situation as the one that arises in Presumed Innocent, with family traumas again lying at the heart of the matter. A beautiful young white woman has been murdered and Rusty finds himself acting on behalf of the accused: the African-American youth who’d been her lover. So this time he’s stepped into Stern’s role as defence attorney.
This book could also be called Presumed Innocent, just as the original could be called Presumed Guilty. In both, the theatre of the courtroom is a recurring motif, the characters’ personal lives constantly overlapping, or colliding with, the roles laid out for them there, everything pivoting on the issue of who’s putting on the best show. And, once again, Turow’s mastery of the genre is evident: the riveting give-and-take between attorneys and witnesses; the judicious withholding of information from the reader that’s then revealed in their ensuing exchanges.
Attorney-turned-author Scott Turow.Credit: AP
However, this time he’s focusing on other ways of thinking about that process, to do with how an accused’s innocence or guilt is assessed. On the one hand, the presumption of innocence has to be a founding principle for any fair trial: the accused must be regarded as innocent until the prosecution can show otherwise “beyond a reasonable doubt”. The “burden of proof” always lies with it. On the other, though, the title refers to how, in contrast to the judicial system’s principles, someone is presumed to be guilty according to far less reliable methods.
It could be because of what Rusty refers to as “confirmation bias, the readiness with which law enforcement views evidence in a light that makes it fit their case”; a situation that often leads to the overlooking of alternative suspects. Or it could be because of prejudices held against someone because of their race, criminal history or social standing, all of which become pertinent in Presumed Guilty.
Unlike the books featuring Stern, the ones with Rusty all have him as their narrator. And it’s hard to escape the impression that lawyer-turned-writer Turow, while still recognising his character’s flaws – he’s a decent human being but far from perfect – is also speaking through him.
Rusty spends a lot of time musing about the implications of courtroom strategies and the failings of the system. Yet, at the same time, he insists on its importance: “Sorting wrong from right, the law’s most basic task, dignifies our lives, sets a path that most of us who aspire to see ourselves as good people try to follow.”
Likewise, while Turow’s fictions have always been pervaded by an ambivalence about the legal system, his heroes are men in love with it; in love with the rules governing the courtroom long-established by their predecessors in the field of the law; in love with the honourable history embodied in them, the architecture of the buildings, their interior design and even their furnishings.
Presumed Guilty sits comfortably alongside his earlier work. Like Presumed Innocent it’s both a whodunit with a sting in the tail and a page-turner with a point.
