A Lawyer Incapable of Her Own Defense

The writer Janet Malcolm has made her specialty the limits of language. How does the story a person tells about something relate to what actually happened? How close can a biographer ever get to his subject? How does the telling of a story change the very nature of its subject?

Malcolm has investigated these puzzles in subjects as varied as the relationship between the late poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and the privileges and traps of journalism. Now, in “The Crime of Sheila McGough,” she has taken on an odder and perhaps even more difficult subject, a tangled tale of a lawyer who claims to have been framed by the federal government and wrongfully imprisoned.

The lawyer is Sheila McGough. In 1996, Malcolm received an unsolicited letter from McGough relating the details of her case and her complaint that the U.S. Department of Justice had framed her. Malcolm decided to look into the case. McGough, then 54 and out of prison, was still living, as she had for years, with her parents in Alexandria, Va.

It proved extraordinarily difficult to get McGough’s story from her. Unlike most people, she didn’t pick and choose from the facts of her situation in order to tell a coherent story. Instead, as it were, she told everything together in a rush, the facts bouncing off one another in a perfect jumble of incoherence. Malcolm came to believe that this trait of McGough’s, which she clung to fiercely, defying all attempts to make her tell her tale in a straightforward way, directly contributed to her legal plight.

In brief, McGough’s circumstances were the following: As a recent graduate of law school, she made her living defending minor criminal clients in state court in Alexandria. She happened onto a charming con man, Bob Bailes, and was soon, in 1986, defending him in federal court for swindling, though she had never tried a case in federal court before.

McGough lost. “[Famous Washington lawyer] Edward Bennett Williams himself could not have won an acquittal,” Malcolm concluded after reading a transcript of the trial. Bailes went to prison.

McGough continued her dogged legal defense of him as if he had never been convicted. He was brought to trial again, this time for insurance fraud in North Carolina, and McGough fought back on his behalf so hard that it took the government four years and 50 witnesses to, again, prove a case of fraud against him.

Exasperated and suspicious, the government prosecutors decided that McGough had not only defended Bailes but also had participated in the fraud with him. When they brought her to trial, she did not testify in her own behalf, for she would not run the risk of doing anything that might be construed as disloyalty to her client. She was convicted.

As Malcolm looked into this story, she became convinced that McGough had indeed been framed. She had brought it on herself in part because she was tenaciously and maddeningly devoted to the interest of her client, and her client alone. She refused to recognize him as a con man and get on with her lawyerly life.

She refused also to tell her story to Malcolm in an intelligible way that would exculpate her--refused, as McGough put it, to “play the violin.”

“What Sheila had condescended to do for her indigent clients,” Malcolm concludes, “she would not stoop to do for herself. She would not play the violin to get a good deal for herself from a journalist. . . .”

Malcolm continues: “Over the months of writing the book, my admiration and affection for her have grown. She has settled into my imagination as an exquisite heroine. And the heedless selflessness that propelled her downfall has thrown into relief the radicalism of her vision of defense law as a calling for the incorrigibly loyal.”

Nevertheless, Malcolm doesn’t talk to her much anymore. McGough’s obsessiveness about her case and Bailes’, Malcolm implies, is too much to bear.

“I know,” Malcolm concludes in her oddly interesting and finally persuasive little book, “that she still lies drowning in dark, weedy water--and that I must come up for air.”