law | Reading 1000 Lives

The Murder Rule
By Dervla McTiernan
William Morrow — May 2022
ISBN: 9780063042209 — Hardcover — 304 pp.

Hannah Rokeby reads an article in the popular press about The Innocence Project at the University of Virginia and the founder behind it, attorney/professor Rob Parekh. A program set in place to check and correct imbalances in the US legal system, The Innocence Project fights to prevent or overturn wrongful convictions and related injustices. But, Hannah is a bit skeptical about Parekh’s motivations, and she is particularly alarmed to see the project’s current poster case: fighting for the release of Michael Dandridge, a man convicted of rape and murder. Parekh and his team seem convinced of Dandridge’s innocence. But Hannah is aware of a relevant past history that no one at the Innocence Project could possibly know. Hannah knows this man is a monster.

As the novel opens, Hannah is working on her first steps of an elaborate plan to earn a coveted spot with the ace team of students working closest to Parekh on the high-profile Dandridge case. She will do anything that is needed to achieve that. And then she will destroy any hope that Dandridge has of seeing freedom.

McTiernan writes this page-turning legal thriller in a way that slowly reveals Hannah’s plans and motivations. A diary kept by her mother serves as the catalyst for Hannah’s radical actions, and the reader sees the contents of these pages in chronological order interspersed with chapters from Hannah’s point-of-view. Written when her mother was around the age Hannah now is, the diary testifies to how her mother’s life became debilitated and turned to alcohol to give Hannah the familial life she now has.

I don’t want to reveal more about the plot to avoid the surprises of a good mystery/thriller, but I can talk a little bit more about the central theme of the novel and why it resonated for me. The Murder Rule is all about story, what we choose to believe as the truth, and what we view with skepticism. Having just sat on a jury in a murder trial myself (even as I read this novel), I can’t think of any considerations more important than these within the law, justice, and punishment. Hannah herself sums up the human tendency to run with assumptions and accept false narratives:

“We, I mean people, all of us, we love a story. We want a hero. We want a bad guy. We want a beginning, a middle, and an end. And life is more complicated than that but we love it when we’re served up a story and sometimes if we don’t get it, we make it for ourselves. We believe only the facts that suit the story we like and we ignore everything else.”

The Murder Rule reveals how true this is, in ways unexpected for all of its characters, both primary and secondary. McTiernan actually plays with this from the very opening of the novel, which is presented as an email exchange between Hannah and Parekh. The text of those emails, with no other context, heavily implies that Parekh is guilty of sexual misconduct, and other offenses linked to that. However, once Hannah and Parekh meet we find additional information that this is actually not the case. We didn’t have the whole story yet to really make the correct judgement.

Hannah’s personality is an aspect that I adored about the novel. Though extreme and misguided in ways that could lead many readers to find her unsympathetic or dislikable, I found traits of her character to show, at heart, a tenacity for justice and loyalty. There is a complexity here of someone doing horrible things, for the right reason – or the utterly wrong reason, that shows the complexities and possible errancy of human decisions. Now, consider that ordinary people make exactly such decisions every single day in court rooms when deciding the fate of other people. This complexity is the heart of the Innocence Project in the novel (and the real one in life.) Still not perfect, it’s an added check to a generally imperfect system.

The title of the novel is another layer of complexity to what otherwise might be read as a simplistic legal thriller. It refers to the Felony Murder Rule, a legal doctrine whose merits Hannah and another character discuss in the novel. How this doctrine relates to the plot of the novel is a little less obvious. Directly, I don’t know as it is. However, in its general sense as a matter of ‘transfer of intent’ it is most certainly relevant. The Murder Rule revolves around the delicate uncertainties of agency and intent in crime, not just murder, but broadly.

For reasons of plot, once the diary text by Hannah’s mother has been fully revealed, chapters stick to Hannah alone, with one glaring exception: a chapter near the close fo the novel written from the point-of-view of a male secondary character who works with Hannah on Parekh’s team for the Dandridge case. The consistency and pattern of the novel could have been aided by finding some way to work around this bit of plot that Hannah is not present for. It’s a minor point, but such architecture and consistency bears some aesthetic import for me at least.

The other negative thing I would have to say about the novel is that it is a sort of missed opportunity to get into the social justice that the Innocence Project and its ilk provide. The characters of the novel don’t really allow exploration of the political or sociological issues relevant to this topic at all. McTiernan could have delved into that more without sacrificing the deeper legal ethics she goes into generally or the entertainment of a well plotted and paced thriller.

Nonetheless, The Murder Rule provides a good amount for a diverse audience to chew on. It’s sure to be enjoyed by readers who are looking for an easy summer thriller to read in leisure, but it’s also a story whose deeper themes invite some optional introspection and consideration.

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Force
By Radley Balko
PublicAffairs — 2014
ISBN: 9781541774537 — Paperback — 528 pp.

This is a title that went onto my to-read list when it first came out, but it took years and a happenstance coming across the book at Burning Books to get a copy, and then awhile of it sitting in a pile before deciding I really needed to get into it. Despite those 8-or-so years, the relevance of the title has hardly diminished, becoming perhaps more important, focusing on issues that are germane to front page headlines in today’s New York Times.

The title of Balko’s books is somewhat incomplete. Thought he militarization of civilian police serves as a major focus of the book, it’s more broadly a history of, and commentary on the third and fourth Amendments of the Constitution of the United States of America. For those who don’t remember the particulars of this part of the Bill of Rights, these are:

Amendment III: No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Balko begins by discussing the colonial and revolutionary context of these amendments, with emphasis on the third that seems so irrelevant to us today at the surface level. He discusses how the amendments both relate to the common law Castle doctrine, and explains why these were considered so fundamentally important both then at the time of the writing of the Constitution, and now.

He then traces the concept of civilian policing through history, quickly getting to its use in the United States and focusing in a series of chapters on the decades from the 1960s to the 2000s. The starting point of the 1960s corresponds to the political introduction of the “War on Drugs” to the nation, as well as violent events that led to the development of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams.

The tie-in of targeted amplification of drug prosecution (particularly minor offenses that have no victims) and SWAT (increased militarization of policing) corresponds to the gradual, systematic erosion of civil liberties related to the Castle doctrine and the pair of Constitutional amendments. With mind-boggling and frightening implication, Balko relates how systems of policing have violated, or circumvented, protections against individuals in their homes, degraded the supposed protections supplied by warrants. Worse, politics have instituted a system whereby police departments are perversely rewarded for feeing this self-perpetuating machine of terror, and have even been penalized for actual fighting of crime with results.

The most obvious injustice that Balko brings up with anecdote again, and again (showing it is an acute symptom of societal, or institutional, disease) is the no-knock warrant that became created and justified to allow police to enter private residences with no warning, with impunity, violence, and little oversight or consequences for their actions. All that was needed became a the mere suspicion that drugs may be present, and that warning of entry to the home could, maybe, result in drugs being disposed of.

Balko shows how often this has been abused with horrendous consequences due to ignorance and errors. Misidentified homes, wrong addresses, poor or dishonest informants and intelligence, etc. I lost count of how many innocent people’s lives ended because their home was suddenly invaded by dark-clad paramilitary forces. And nothing would change, it would only increase.

Alongside this, Balko also addresses how police SWAT teams became increasingly used for situations where they were not required – for example, peaceful protests. Or police departments in areas of the country with no record of violent crime for over a hundred years got themselves a SWAT team and battle tanks. Simply because the money was made available, and this is America.

What may astound many readers of this is how pervasively the political will for this extended through the decades and broadly across party lines. Conservatives who introduced ideas for being tougher on crime were later stunned that their misguided legislation had grown beyond intent, misused to now not target criminals, but attack civil liberties. They recanted, and regretted their initial ideas. But it is too late. Liberals who fought for the rights of poor people don’t want to be painted as being soft on crime. So they support/introduce bills to increase funding or giving authority to police. And it comes back to bite them.

Sadly, the failure of the Supreme Court through the decades in protecting the Constitution equally becomes clear. And, it makes one realize that the recent erosions of Constitutional protection (and future that this current court is likely to take) is not that atypical.

The NYT article I mentioned earlier is actually about how President Biden is issuing an executive order in response to what occurred to George Floyd (and the many, many other similar travesties of justice. This order demands reductions in police use of the ‘choke-hold’ and reductions in the use of ‘no-knock’ warrants. Ironically, Balko reveals that one of the biggest political names in the past decades who has personally driven legislation leading to increased police abuses like the above was Senator Joe Biden.

The birth of SWAT and police excesses were ultimately born from fear of maintaining control of a population that could arm itself with weapons and armor that an ordinary citizen could not take on. Recent events remind us that continued access to such weapons and bodily armor by the general population will only further fuel the fear and the arguments in some eyes that police should do more to protect, and that civil rights should be sacrificed. Balko’s text reminds us just how vigilant we need to be, and perhaps even work more directed and effectively towards reversing the general trends of our democracy.