A slap-in-the-face look at the criminal-justice system.
Three nasty criminal cases provide a long-serving trial deputy in the Los Angeles DA’s office with the chance to nimbly explain what really goes on in a courtroom.
Batt has put in 25 years as a deputy district attorney in LA, working everything from hot prowl to mayhem, robbery to murder. She tenders here some fruits of her hard-won experience as illustrated by three exceptional crimes she prosecuted: an all-night crime spree that included rape and robbery; a violent gay rape; and a vicious assault by a respectable citizen who claimed to be cleaning up the Hollywood streets. Concise, blow-by-blow recountings deliver both wicked circumstantial color (“They might have gotten away with the whole thing if they had just stopped after the raping, pillaging, and burning”) and, importantly, the meat of the prosecutorial process: Will the jury empathize with your witness or victim? When is a plea bargain likely? What about the inherent conflict of interest in multiple-defendant cases? Who is a good juror? Questions of due diligence and preparation also arise, and the author imparts telling details, e.g., that a greasy lunch can compromise jurors’ attention to an afternoon opening statement. Always, Batt is concerned with the process of law: “Failure to provide prompt and thorough discovery to the defense is unethical,” she notes, “and can result in a variety of sanctions.” Yet she is also attuned to the nuances of the courtroom, realizing that one judge’s homophobia compromised her case, and getting a surreal, creepy glimpse into the mind of another supposedly objective justice, who orders her to do something about her hair: “It’s too curly. I mean, for God's sake, you have these little golden-brown ringlets all over your head . . . it's simply too—uh—too distracting.” Though Batt is a prosecutor, her 25 rules for giving effective testimony could be used by either side.
A slap-in-the-face look at the criminal-justice system.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-55970-705-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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