NONFICTION - Feb. 26, 1995

THE ABUSE EXCUSE: And Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories, and Evasions of Responsibility by Alan M. Dershowitz (Little, Brown: $22.95; 341 pp.). Attorney Alan Dershowitz has taken a lot of heat over the last year for coining in his newspaper column the term abuse excuse, a strategy employed by criminal defense lawyers to try to convince judges and juries that the accused was driven to crime--the defendant, too, is a victim. Exhibits 1 and 2, naturally, are Lorena Bobbitt and the Menendez brothers, who claimed to have been sexually abused (and very likely were) by at least some of their victims. Lorena Bobbitt was acquitted of mayhem and found temporarily insane for cutting off her husband’s penis, and spent a grand total of 45 days in a psychiatric hospital; the trial of the Menendez brothers ended in a hung jury, despite the fact that the double-murder of their parents seemed well-planned and executed in cold blood, complete with cover-up (a retrial is in the offing). That’s old news, of course; what makes “The Abuse Excuse” (a collection of Dershowitz’s recent columns) interesting is the large number of not-so-famous cases cited by the Harvard Law professor in which courts accepted, or at least condoned, similarly pseudo-medical arguments. The orthopedic surgeon acquitted of drunken driving by claiming that her abuse of a state trooper, and her especially intoxicated state, was the result of premenstrual stress syndrome; the civil suit filed by a woman alleging that a book on recovering from sexual abuse “falsely induced her to believe that she had been molested”; the “urban survival syndrome,” in which a lawyer achieved a mistrial by contending that his African-American client was justified in killing two unarmed adversaries, likewise African-American, because the neighborhood in which they lived was ruled by the law of the jungle--”Kill or be killed.” Dershowitz’s overriding point is that acceptance of abuse excuses harms everyone, and particularly the group to which the defendant belongs, because it creates stigmas--in the last three cases, says that women are indeed less reliable due to raging hormones, that people are not responsible for their actions following exposure to certain ideas, that African-American communities are inherently violent--and acceptably so. Dershowitz does go overboard at times--he’s happy to write in partisan terms about the cases of two clients, actress Mia Farrow and spy Jonathan Pollard--but on the whole this is a lively and articulate wake-up call. Best of all, perhaps, there’s only one essay on O.J., written before Simpson hired him.