Defending Jacob Quotes

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.

The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever.

An emotion is a thought, yes, an idea, but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body. Desire, love, hate, fear, repulsion - you feel these things in your muscle and bones, not just in your mind.

Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you

no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed

Predisposition is not predestination.

the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

...don't worry about how things look. People are going to think whatever they think. To hell with 'em. You can't worry about it.

We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls.

but good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones.

So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob.

I admit--no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed-

I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

So, if it's an axe weilding maniac reeking bloody havoc all over the neighborhood, exactly what are we going to defend ourselves with, our boners?" Callum to Jacob

A jury verdict is just a guess - a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote.

I have an idea that is is what enduring love really means, Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.

A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it. A single word or gesture, a tone of voice can conjure up so many remembrances.

The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance....

Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you.

But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels.

This is the best thing about men's friendships: most any awkwardness can be ignored by mutual agreement and, true connection being unimaginable, you can get on with the easier business of parallel living.

At seventeen, I knew: my entire childhood had been just a prelude to this girl. I had never felt anything like it, and still haven't. I felt changed by her, physically. I became a different person, myself, the person I am now. And everything that came after-my family, my home, our entire life together-was a gift she gave me.

It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these "soft" problems in the land of After.

You're staring.' 'You're my wife. I'm allowed to stare.' 'Is that the rule?' 'Yes. Stare, leer, ogle, anything I want. Trust me. I'm a lawyer.

I had a childish attraction to men of my father's generation, as if I still harbored a faint hope of being unorphaned, even at this late date.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe.

I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.

We’re not arguing. We’re discussing.” “You’re a lawyer; you don’t know the difference. I’m arguing.

Every father knows the disconcerting when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self...made real and flesh. He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person.

Try to relax," he suggested as another shiver rippled through me violently. "You'll be warm in a minute. Of course, you'd warm up faster if you took your clothes off." Edward growled sharply. "That's just a simple fact," Jacob defended himself. "Survival 101.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe. I think maybe something like that happens with kids. You see what you want to see.

The leopard in the zoo wanders to the edge of his pen and, through the bars or across an unjumpable moat, he stares at you with contempt for your inferiority, for needing that barrier between you. There is a shared understanding in that moment, nonverbal but no less real: the leopard is predator and you are prey, and it is only the barrier that permits us humans to feel superior and secure. That feeling, standing at the leopard’s cage, is edged with shame, at the animal’s superior strength, at his hauteur, his low estimation of you.

You have to follow your intuition. That is what expertise is: all the experience, the cases won and lost, the painful mistakes, all the technical details you learn by rote repetition, over time these things leave you with an instinctive sense of your craft. A "gut" for it.

All they got locked up in this hole is my body. That's all they got, my body, not me. I'm everywhere, see? Everywhere you look, junior, everywhere you go.

such a thing as too much attention?” “When you aren’t strong enough to defend yourself?” I ask, voice hard. “Yeah.

Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking,

Somewhere she had learned that if an interviewer remains silent, the interviewee will rush to fill the silence.

I don't want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn't the same as being right.

It turns out, you can get used to almost anything. What one day seems a shocking, unbearable outrage over time comes to seem ordinary, unremarkable.

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea -- the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who's been indicted.

The rest-the vast majority, tens of thousands of days-are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest. We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories...But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and 'The End' is never the end.

The truth is, the best win-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it.

On the whole it is certainly not necessary. Nothing can better defend us than nature itself, which has let certain flowers and leaves grow in a particular color and shape. People who do not find them beneficial, suitable for their special needs, which cannot be known, can easily walk right by them. But they cannot demand that the flowers and leaves be colored and cut in another way.

A hint of nonconformity was all he would risk.

Even the wettest violence, in the end, is cooked down to the stuff of court cases; a ream of paper, a few exhibits, a dozen...witnesses. The world looks away, and why not?

Studies have shown that fathers of murdered children often die within a few years of the murder, often of heart failure. Really, they die of grief.

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead

We both love him. I’m just saying, you can love your child and still see his flaws. You have to see his flaws, otherwise how can you help him?

School isn’t supposed to be dangerous. It’s not a place they should be afraid of. It’s their second home. It’s where they spend most of their waking hours.

efficiently the system worked. A courthouse is a factory, sorting violence into a taxonomy of crimes, processing

We must have seemed just like everyone else, which, when you get down to it, is all I ever wanted.

....I never expected to lose in court. In practice, I did lose, of course. Every lawyer loses, just as every baseball player makes an out seventy percent of the time he goes to bat.

My childhood ended that summer. I learned the word murder. But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that...You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to...see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you.

Before, she had this way of focusing on whomever she spoke to, so that you felt you were the most impossibly captivating person in the room; now, her eyes wandered and she seemed not to be in the room herself.

The truth is, the best won-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it.

both remembered how it all started, and even now, in the middle of my middle age, when I think of that shining young girl, I still feel a little thrill of first love, still there, still burning like a pilot light.

She did not want to go but understood that I was uneasy, that I felt spotlighted here, that I was not much of a talker to begin with -- chitchat in crowded rooms always left me exhausted -- and these things all had to be weighed.

This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

With the minivan in the air, rolling counterclockwise, the engine racing, Laurie screaming -- a fraction of a second, that's all -- Jacob would have thought of me -- who had held him, my own baby, looked down into his eyes -- and he would have understood I loved him, no matter what, to the very end -- as he saw the concrete wall flying forward to meet him.

Why risk the rare happy marriage-rarer still, a love marriage that endures-for something as common and toxic as complete, unthinking, transparent honesty? Who would be helped by my telling? Me? not at all. I was made of steel, I promise you.

In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest—the vast majority, tens of thousands of days—are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous.

Out popped Paul Duffy, in plain clothes except for a state police windbreaker and a badge clipped to his belt. He looked at me - I think by now I had dropped the bat to my side, at least, though I must have looked ridiculous anyway - and he raised his eyebrows. 'Get back in the house, Babe Ruth.

some point as adults we cease to be our parents’ children and we become our children’s parents

It is, of course, the last resort of a liar to challenge his inquisitor to call him a liar directly.

Predisposition is not predestination. We humans are much, much more than our DNA.

narcissistic personality disorder. This is the one you probably know something about. Its primary characteristics are grandiosity and lack of empathy.

NPD is not a chemical imbalance. And it is not genetic. It is a complex of behaviors, a deeply ingrained habit.

You can’t do it alone, that’s the thing. You have to remember there are other people out there who have gone through it, who know what you’re going through.

I used to wonder what it would be like if a magical amnesia descended and erased my mind completely, leaving only a body and some sort of blank self, all potential, all soft clay.

Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines.

no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but

Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.

Parents of murdered children have it worst, and to me the fathers have it even worse than the mothers because they are taught to be stoic, to “act like a man.

Grand juries serve for months, and they figure out pretty quickly what the gig is all about: accuse, point your finger, name the wicked one. A

(I am as conventional as white toast.)

understood that the actual reason courtrooms often have no windows is to prevent the parties from heaving lawyers out of them.

...no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed...

Somebody stitched three holes in a line across that boy’s chest and left nothing to indicate who or why.

But Ben Rifkin lay in a refrigerated drawer in the M.E.’s office while my son lay in his warm bed, with nothing but luck to separate the one from the other.

Anyway, the point is, I just think we flatter ourselves when we say we can engineer our kids to be this way or that way. It’s mostly just hardwired.

could make a decision about whether to call Dr. Vogel as a witness

It is a common architectural strategy to build courtrooms without windows, to enhance the effect of a chamber isolated from the everyday world, a theater for the great and timeless work of the law.

This is the best thing about men’s friendships: most any awkwardness can be ignored by mutual agreement and, true connection being unimaginable, you can get on with the easier business of parallel living.

They were chosen for their perfect ignorance of these things. That is how the system works. In the end, the lawyers and judges happily step aside and hand the entire process over to a dozen complete amateurs. It would be funny if it were not so perverse.

I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known. Laurie

At seventeen, I knew: my entire childhood had been just a prelude to this girl. I had never felt anything like it, and still haven't. I felt changed by her, physically. I became a different person, myself, the person I am now. And everything that came after-my family, my home, our entire life together-was a gift she gave me.

I did not speak. I have found in any Q&A, in court, in witness interviews, wherever, often the best thing you can do is wait, say nothing. The witness will want to fill the awkward silence. He will feel a vague compassion to keep talking, to prove he is not holding back, to prove he is smart and in the know, to earn your trust.

I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results. A jury verdict is just a guess—a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard.

But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that. You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to pace around and around it, see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you. You have to hold it inside yourself in secret for years, like the hideous stone inside a peach. How

I never argue,” Jacobs said. “That’s because you don’t know this kind of ignorance,” Rayber explained. “You’ve never experienced it.” Jacobs snorted. “Oh yes I have,” he said. “What happened?” “I never argue.” “But you know you’re right,” Rayber persisted. “I never argue.” “Well, I’m going to argue,” Rayber said. “I’m going to say the right thing as fast as they can say the wrong. It’ll be a question of speed. Understand,” he went on, “this is no mission of conversion; I’m defending myself.” “I understand that,” Jacobs said. “I hope you’re able to do it.” “I’ve already done it! You read the paper. There it is.” Rayber wondered if Jacobs were dense or preoccupied. “Okay, then leave it there. Don’t spoil your complexion arguing with barbers.

The towering lie of the criminal justice system—that we can reliably determine the truth, that we can know “beyond a reasonable doubt” who is guilty and who is not—is built on this whopper of an admission: after a thousand years or so of refining the process, judges and lawyers are no more able to say what is true than a dozen knuckleheads selected at random off the street.

keep me on the payroll, but I could not stay there, not as a charity case. Laurie might be able to go back to teaching, but we would not be able to pay the bills on her income alone. This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

I was greeted at the Magraths’ apartment door by a dumpy, pie-faced woman with a frizz of unsprung black hair. She wore black spandex leggings and an oversized T-shirt with an equally oversized message stamped across the front: Don’t Give Me Attitude, I Have One of My Own. This witticism ran six full lines, drawing my eyes southward over her person from wavering bosom to detumescent belly, a journey I regret even now.

Let us be practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law.… [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African savannah three million or so years ago. Now, let us agree that we may pronounce whatever laws we like for this clever little creature, still it would be unwise to pet him.

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—“the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.” That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.

In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention. -the mens rea, the guilty mind. There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea - "the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty." That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality.

Next to me was Jacob, this riddle Laurie and I had made. His size, his resemblance to me, the likelihood that he would fill out and come to resemble me even more - all this shattered me. Every father knows the disconcerting moment when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self, stand right up in front of you, made real and flesh. He is you and not you, familiar and strange.

stupid things. The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever; this was just a case of Stupid winning a battle. Considering the pressure Jake was under and the fact he’d been practically locked up in the house for months, and now the growing clamor as the trial approached, it was understandable. Could you really hold the kid responsible for every tasteless, tactless, brainless thing he said? What kid would not begin to act a little crazy in Jacob’s situation? Anyway, who among us would be judged by the dumbest things we did as teenagers? I told myself these things, I marshaled my arguments as I’d been trained to do, but I could not get that boy’s cry out of my head: “Stop, you’re hurting me.” And something in me tore open. I don’t know how else to put it. I still would not admit doubt into my thinking. I still believed in Jacob and, God knows, I still loved him, and there was no evidence—no real proof—of anything. The lawyer in me understood all this. But the part of

Does that sound awful to you? I hear the little voice in your head: Destruction of evidence! Obstruction of justice! You are naive. You imagine the courts are reliable, that wrong results are rare, and therefore I ought to have trusted the system. If he truly believed Jacob was innocent, you are thinking, he would have simply let the police sweep in and take whatever they liked. Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free—those “errors” we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in defendants’ favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge—do not even think about—because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail, eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable, even the best-intentioned cops are subject to failures of judgment and recall. The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking, and there was no way in hell I was going to trust my son’s fate to it. Not because I believed he was guilty, I assure you, but precisely because he was innocent. I was doing what little I could to ensure the right result, the just result. If you do not believe me, go spend a few hours in the nearest criminal court, then ask yourself if you really believe it is error-free. Ask yourself if you would trust your child to it.