Accessibility! This was a battle for my soul. |
All my novels are about the ambiguities that lie beneath the sharp edges of the law. |
Americans became interested in what was going on in courtrooms because so much was being decided there. |
Americans stopped believing in the melting pot and in universal American values. |
As a graduate student and a writing fellow, innovation was all. As a trial lawyer, accessibility was everything. |
Brian Dugan's crimes -- and the murder of Jeanine was not the only one -- are horrific. But I hope that whoever ultimately decides Brian Dugan's fate bears in mind that he also had the moral courage to accept responsibility for a crime he alone committed, even though he knew that the blame had fallen elsewhere. In so doing he set in motion the chain of events that ultimately allowed two innocent men who had been sentenced to death to be restored to freedom. Dugan's evil deeds are extraordinary and repugnant, but his courage also was extraordinary. |
By lunch or early afternoon I'm pretty much done for the day as a writer. |
Criminal law in particular does indeed present human beings in extremis. You're always dealing with definitions of evil. |
De Tocqueville talked about the legalistic bent of American culture but, whatever that was, it became accentuated in the latter part of the twentieth century. |
Even killers recognize that some people are sort of programmed to do mayhem. |
For people like me, people of a certain privilege, the sixties were extremely important in shaping our sense of humanity. |
Generally speaking most of the people I saw who were irretrievably violent, were people who had had violence done to them as children. |
I always say that I don't criticize anybody's position on the death penalty because I've held all of them. |
I did not realize how bad, how desperately bad the plight of the black urban poor had become. |
I saw that universality had got to be the ultimate objective. |