Cruel Justice
By Patricia D. Benke
Reviewed by Ina R. Bort
From the New York Law Journal
August 31, 1999
Now here was a book with potential. The author is a judge — an appellate judge, mind you, with over 100 opinions to her credit. The story is timely, almost realistic: the arrest of an innocent man, an overzealous prosecutor bent on putting him behind bars, having let the last high-profile criminal get away. And the legal issues that the novel implicates could not be more thought-provoking, among them the following: can a defense attorney representing two clients charged with the same crime introduce the confessions of one to exonerate the other without running afoul of his ethical obligations?
Yet somewhere along the way (i.e. page one), something goes horribly wrong with Cruel Justice. The author, while no doubt a respected member of the California judiciary, should stick to The Law and avoid The Novel like The Plague.
Benke manages to condense the entire criminal case allegedly at the heart of this novel (according to the book jacket, always a highly reliable source) into no more than 15 or so pages. No exaggeration. While such brevity is essential to opinion writing (not to mention highly appreciated by those of us who spend hours reading decisions), it cannot possibly suffice in the fiction-writing context. Benke leaves no room at all for the development of either the plot or her characters. The result is a superficial story bound to leave its readers cold. Even in August.
It is unclear why the author is in such a rush to get the story over and done with, anyway, since it is not as if she devotes the remainder of the book's 200-plus (thankfully wide-margined) pages to anything of substance. Instead, these consist of unconnected digressions about peripheral characters who do nothing to move the plot along.
What plot there is seems to center around Deputy District Attorney Judith Thornton, the only attorney in the office who seems to understand that it is poor practice to press charges against a man who is clearly innocent. That man is Tom Russell, arrested for the sexual assault of his own daughter. His case file includes no DNA report, victim's testimony or other scrap of evidence that connects him to the crime. Nevertheless, Aaron Mercer, the fiendishly ambitious prosecutor on the case (and a workplace harasser to boot!), will "stop at nothing" to get Russell behind bars. Elections are coming up, the D.A. himself is paranoid about his "soft" reputation, and Mercer is ripe for appointment to the bench. Russell's case seems to provide Mercer the perfect proving ground.
But Judith will not stand by and watch Mercer destroy the life of Russell and his family. Indeed, Judith will — you guessed it — "stop at nothing" to make sure that Russell goes free. While the Russell case is solely Mercer's responsibility, Judith does some digging around and figures out (within two or so paragraphs) who is the real perpetrator of the assault on Russell's daughter: a fellow named Arthur Whalley.
Once she has done so, Judith pulls some strings to ensure that both Russell and Whalley are represented by the same court-appointed counsel, Alan Larson. In so doing, Judith burdens Larson with a rather interesting dilemma, barely explored by Benke, unfortunately. Larson is confronted with the decision of whether, and how, to introduce the evidence of Whalley's guilt at the Russell trial. Yet due to a series of plot twists too ridiculous to mention here, Larson is ultimately spared the responsibility of making this determination.
It is a shame, really, that the author did not do more with either this issue, or the issue of Russell's arrest and the consequent divisiveness in the D.A.'s office. The latter is clearly a topic of nationwide relevance today. In fact, a front page article in a recent Monday's New York Times was entitled: "Dismissed Before Reaching Court, Flawed Arrests Rise in New York." That article tells of "waves of people arrested but never found to have broken the law," and explains that "prosecutors last year tossed out 18,000 of the 345,000 arrests made in the city... more than double the number of four years before." And a follow-up article the next day, also in the Times, explained that "former prosecutors and courthouse lawyers said the rise might signify a decline in the validity of arrests... as officers struggle to keep arrest totals high in an era of declining crime."
Certainly a judge, called upon with regularity to determine the sufficiency of evidence of guilt, would seem well-positioned to provide insightful commentary on the issue. Benke may have plenty such commentary to provide, but she hass left it out of Cruel Justice.
Perhaps the author should be commended for her brave foray from behind the bench into the world of fiction-writing. On the other hand, she may have been better off recognizing her limitations and contemplating the shadow that a book like this might cast upon her otherwise respected status. Even Pierre Leval, in one recent essay, said: "I am a judge. I know nothing about the theories of narrative..."
