Attorney’s Myopic Musings Don’t Do Justice to His Case

IN AMERICA’S COURT

How a Civil Lawyer Who Likes to Settle Stumbled Into a Criminal Trial

By Thomas Geoghegan

New Press

208 pages, $23.95

Thomas Geoghegan is a practicing labor lawyer whose previous work (“Which Side Are You On?”) won critical acclaim for its exploration of justice and unions. His newest book, “In America’s Court,” is a two-part tale of Geoghegan’s experience as a veteran Chicago civil attorney trying his first (and only) criminal case, followed by his opinions about our legal system’s failings and future.

Geoghegan had been needling a public defender friend for years, jokingly offering to help him on a criminal trial. One day, the friend asks Geoghegan to be “second chair” on an appeals case for a young man, Rolando, who was convicted of murder at age 15 and who has spent seven years incarcerated, waiting for this second chance to prove his innocence.

It’s not clear why the public defender would want Geoghegan to help; Geoghegan apparently has never really wanted to work on a criminal case. In fact, before the hearing, Geoghegan doesn’t bother to read the file nor in any other way prepare for the case.

Geoghegan is jocular, portraying himself as an adventuring pinstriped “Loop” lawyer, gallantly taking part in the case, which is held not in the nice civil courtrooms, he takes pains to point out, but at the unpalatable Chicago Criminal Courts Building that doesn’t offer a Starbucks. “If I stayed down here, what could I even drink? Coke?” Though he has practiced law in the city for more than two decades, he doesn’t know where the Criminal Courts Building is, and shows up late the first day, confused and helpless.

The main reason for wanting to help the public defender, Geoghegan tells us, is that as a civil attorney arranging settlements, he doesn’t feel he’s accomplishing anything meaningful. “When my cases don’t go to trial,” he laments, “I don’t have anything to show.” Yet for all his professed willingness to assist, he continually points out that he’s a very busy man and has better things to do than sit in this disgraceful building.

What follows is a blow-by-blow description, not so much of the trial but of Geoghegan’s wide-eyed reaction to it. The writing in this section is shoddy, as if the attorney used his Dictaphone to draft the book. “[L]et’s press the Pause button on Homer and go back to [the public defender] and how he told Rolando’s story,” he writes. (In an aside, Geoghegan mentions that lawyers tend to listen to audio books these days rather than read them, citing eye strain from overwork. “That’s why for a lawyer like me, a real story is too long to read,” he tells the readers of his story.)

During the voir dire jury selection process, he gives us his raw notes, those taken in court and those added later, about prospective jurors. These off-the-top-of-his-head comments add up to little.

Attempting to create dramatic scenes, Geoghegan relies heavily on ellipses, italics, stammering dialogue and exclamation points. For instance: “I saw ... I ... Well, I saw ... a cage, iron bars, something that as a lawyer I had never seen before, except on TV. And I was irked, because I knew I should have expected this.”

The tone is colloquial, as if he’s passing an afternoon with a beer. The story, he makes clear, is more about him and how he sees the world than about the fate of the young man in question.

Throughout the book’s first three-quarters, Geoghegan abandons his strengths as a writer and jurist, providing not a thoughtful examination of criminal court proceedings but a kind of bewildered “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” point of view. Would that he stayed true to his abilities.

The reader soon gets fed up with his rant, which is unfortunate because buried beneath his verbal wanderings are the real points of the tale: that America should consider ratifying the U.N. International Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by almost every country in the world; that we should honor the U.N. treaty we signed on the elimination of racial discrimination; and that we should turn away from our propensity for locking up underprivileged youths, a case for which he makes a valid argument.

The final section, “That’s Why You Go to Law School,” is engaging, giving insight into how our legal system operates today and how presidential appointments of judges affect the system. Here, Geoghegan outlines his dream of international law superceding many aspects of our national system.

In this slim segment, Geoghegan demonstrates his ability to explain the holes in our legal system, envision new ways of considering the law and work for these changes.

It’s a shame that one must wade through the bulk of the book to get to a place worthy of his talents.