| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : MAY 24, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
Legal Puzzler THE CRIME OF SHEILA McGOUGH By Janet Malcolm Knopf 164pp $22 The crime of Sheila McGough consisted of her unswerving loyalty to an unworthy legal client. At least that's how journalist Janet Malcolm sees things. Almost equally to blame for McGough's felony conviction and three-year prison sentence was her irritating ''inability to tell a story,'' a necessity if she was to persuade others of her lack of complicity in one of that client's criminal schemes. Malcolm lays all this out in The Crime of Sheila McGough, a superbly written, provocative book/essay that ponders such disparate phenomena as the nature of truth and the rise of jury-selection experts. McGough was a novice, self-employed lawyer who, in 1986, agreed on the basis of a collect phone call to represent a talented ''con artist'' named Bobby Bailes. He was adept at labyrinthine swindles, heavy with fake documents. In time, Bailes would be convicted of giving false information to a bank to secure a loan. Later, he was found guilty of a ''scheme to defraud,'' involving the sale of insurance companies whose 19th century charters allegedly let them operate free of government regulation. Numerous would-be buyers, who felt the lack of a government tether was equivalent to a license to print money, flocked to this scheme--and one got bilked for $75,000. But the innocent McGough never saw anything wrong in Bailes's operations. Malcolm labors to get to the bottom of all this--and to discover whether McGough had been complicit in Bailes's misconduct. But the author is really after bigger, more philosophical game. As in such previous books as The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm's sights are trained on a profession that claims to be interested in the Truth. That earlier book offered the notion that, when reconstructing a story, journalists inevitably betray their sources. Here, focusing on the law, Malcolm observes that truth is not really valued in the court, since the whole truth is ''messy, incoherent, [and] aimless'' and ''does not make a good story.'' Instead, she says, the law pits ''competing narratives''--or edited bits of truth--in a struggle for ''the prize of the jury's vote.'' But McGough, Malcolm believes, was incapable of forming such a narrative, even when her freedom depended on it. ''To my simplest question,'' the author writes, ''she would give an answer of such relentless length and tediousness and uncomprehending irrelevance that I could have wept with impatience.'' Often in the book, the reader encounters writing that is at once muscular and cerebral. An office building is said to be ''of utter, almost insulting bland ugliness''; its Muzak plays ''with a kind of satiric extra-chipperness, as if somehow sensing it had found its true audience: no one.'' After interviewing numerous parties to the litigation, Malcolm concludes that McGough might have avoided her plight had she simply spoken up at trial on her own behalf--something she refused to do out of allegiance to Bailes. But Malcolm's two main points are somewhat at odds: If McGough is so deeply unable to construct a story, how could her testimony have done anything other than bewilder jurors? Never mind--Malcolm's facility with words is enough for two. BY HARDY GREEN To read a letter to the editor about this story, click here. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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