Colorful incidents and anecdotes effectively capture the performance art of trial lawyering.
An attorney recalls his courtroom experiences and laments the disappearance of criminal trials from the federal justice system.
There is at least one thing that a visitor to a federal courtroom is now very unlikely to see—a jury trial. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of criminal cases decided in the United States federal courts by a jury dwindled from 9.2% of all cases to only 2.1%. For veteran trial lawyer and debut author Katzberg, the “troubling reality” of the “vanishing trial” has implications not only for the criminal justice system, but also for American democracy. If the average citizen is no longer able to serve as a juror and “the effectiveness of the criminal defense function enshrined in the U.S. Constitution is meaningfully diminished, where does that leave the rule of law?” he asks in this provocative, lively combination of memoir and polemic that may have limited appeal to readers outside the legal profession. Katzberg is a well-qualified guide, having tried cases as both an assistant U.S. attorney in New York and a defense lawyer. The memoir portion of his book is laced with vivid episodes and vignettes from the “world we are slowly but surely losing.” “When done at the highest levels, trial work is performance art in the purest sense of the term,” he writes. He recalls such “old school” practitioners as the lawyer Jerry Lewis (“not the legendary comedian”), who “fearlessly used his distinct personality to dominate the courtroom” and would start cross-examinations by asking in a Brooklyn accent: “Are you a truteful poyson?” Katzberg points to two culprits in the demise of the jury trial—federal sentencing guidelines that have caused a steep decline in the number of defendants willing to risk a trial and technological advances that have tipped the evidentiary scales even more toward prosecutors. The author doesn’t address the substantial costs to taxpayers of jury trials—or whether America should follow the lead of countries like Switzerland and replace juries with judicial panels. But it’s hard to quarrel with his warning that “like the loss of the oceans’ coral reefs, the ongoing disappearance of federal criminal trials signals an increasing imbalance in our nation’s criminal justice system that must not be ignored.”
Colorful incidents and anecdotes effectively capture the performance art of trial lawyering.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64543-218-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Mascot Books
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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