Crime of Sheila McGough (eBook)

Janet Malcolm (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
176 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-83057-9 (ISBN)

Infos

'[N]o other writer tells better stories about the perpetual, the unwinnable, battle between narrative and truth.' --The New York Times Book Review

The Crime of Sheila McGough is Janet Malcolm's brilliant expos of miscarriage of justice in the case of Sheila McGough, a disbarred lawyer recently released from prison. McGough had served 2 1/2 years for collaborating with a client in his fraud, but insisted that she didn't commit any of the 14 felonies she was convicted.

An astonishingly persuasive condemnation of the cupidity of American law and its preference for convincing narrative rather than the truth, this is also a story with an unconventional heroine. McGough is a zealous defense lawyer duped by a white-collar con man, a woman who lives, at the age of 54, with her parents, a journalistic subject who frustrates her interviewer with her maddening literal-mindedness. Spirited, illuminating, delightfully detailed, The Crime of Sheila McGough is both a dazzling work of journalism and a searching meditation on character and the law.

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"[N]o other writer tells better stories about the perpetual, the unwinnable, battle between narrative and truth." --The New York Times Book ReviewThe Crime of Sheila McGough is Janet Malcolm's brilliant exposé of miscarriage of justice in the case of Sheila McGough, a disbarred lawyer recently released from prison. McGough had served 2 1/2 years for collaborating with a client in his fraud, but insisted that she didn't commit any of the 14 felonies she was convicted.An astonishingly persuasive condemnation of the cupidity of American law and its preference for convincing narrative rather than the truth, this is also a story with an unconventional heroine. McGough is a zealous defense lawyer duped by a white-collar con man; a woman who lives, at the age of 54, with her parents; a journalistic subject who frustrates her interviewer with her maddening literal-mindedness. Spirited, illuminating, delightfully detailed, The Crime of Sheila McGough is both a dazzling work of journalism and a searching meditation on character and the law.

Textauszug

The transcripts of Trials at Law--even of routine criminal prosecutions and tiresome civil disputes--are exciting to read. They record contests of wit and will that have the stylized structure and dire aura of duels before dawn. The reader feels as if he has been brought to the clearing and can smell the wet grass, at the end, as the sky begins to show more light and the doctor is stanching a wound, he takes away a sense of having attended a momentous, if brutal and inconclusive, occasion. Trial transcripts have no author, but they read as if someone wrote them. Their plot revolves around two struggles. One struggle is between two competing narratives for the prize of the jury's vote. The other is the struggle of narrative itself against the constraints of the rules of evidence, which seek to arrest its flow and blunt its force. The word 'objection' appears in the transcript perhaps more frequently than any other, and betokens the story-spoiling function of the law. The law is the guardian of the ideal of unmediated truth, truth stripped bare of the ornament of narration, the judge, its representative, adjudicates between each lawyer's attempt to use the rules of evidence to dismantle the story of the other, while preserving the integrity of his own. The story that can best withstand the attrition of the rules of evidence is the story that wins.

The law's demand that witnesses speak 'nothing but the truth' is a demand no witness can fulfill, of course, even with God's help. It runs counter to the law of language, which proscribes unregulated truth-telling and requires that our utterances tell coherent, and thus never merely true, stories. This law--with its servants ellipsis, condensation, presupposition, syllogism--makes human communication possible. It also provides trial lawyers with endless opportunities for discrediting opposing witnesses. In the discourse of real life--life outside the courtroom--the line between narration and lying is a pretty clear one. As we talk to each other, we constantly make little adjustments to the cut of the truth in order to comply with our listeners' expectation that we will guide them to the point of what we are saying. If we spoke the whole truth, which has no point--which is, in fact, shiningly innocent of a point--we would quickly lose our listeners' attention. The person who insists on speaking the whole truth, who painfully spells out every last detail of an action and interrupts his wife to say it was Tuesday, not Wednesday, and the gunman was wearing a Borsalino, not a fedora, is not honored for his honesty but is shunned for his tiresomeness. In a courtroom, however, he would be one of the few people who could withstand cross-examination, who would not be caught in the web of one or another of the small untruths most of us mechanically tell in order that human communication be a swift, clear river rather than a sluggish, obstructed stream.

As I was rereading the transcript of a criminal trial held in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, in the fall of 1990, my attention was caught by an example of one such narrativizing untruth uttered by a prosecution witness named Frank Manfredi, as he was being questioned by the prosecutor, Mark J. Hulkower. Hulkower was eliciting from Manfredi the history of a business transaction that lay at the heart of his case against the defendant, a forty-eight-year-old lawyer named Sheila McGough. The exchange between Hulkower and Manfredi went as follows:
Q: Directing your attention to May 1986, did you have occasion at that time to become involved in a transaction for the purchase of insurance companies?
A: Yes.
Q: ...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.1.2013
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
• ISBN-10: 0-307-83057-8 / 0307830578
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-83057-9 / 9780307830579