I loved the premise of this and the idea of how the social system doesn’t work for everybody. People get incarcerated for years for crimes they didn’t commit. But this book drags on. It features every testimony in the case, which is mostly the same thing being said over and over again about what happened. I started to just skim thru it for the last parts of the book. Every witness told the same story, which is great to hear in a court case but really boring for a book.

Thank you to the publisher and for NetGalley, which provided me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

I just finished Judicial Soup, by Shannon Bohrer. I’m not completely sure whether I want to say that it is a book about a wrongful conviction or whether I should say that it purports to be such a such book. So I won’t commit to either position at the present time.

In order to put this review into context, I have to explain my own background. I am a former attorney, who had worked for the public defender‘s office. While I have not practiced law in a long time, I am very interested in books about the flaws of our legal system, constitutional law and the US Supreme Court. So, I should be the target audience for this. A book about a wrongful conviction has someone like me in mind as its reader.

This book was extremely thorough in covering the trial testimony. I can’t imagine any book doing a better job in that regard. On that basis, up until the final couple of chapters, I was certain that I was ether going to give this an A or an A+.

The defendant in this case was an ICE agent. As the author pointed out very early in the book, if a law enforcement agent can be falsely convicted, it could happen to anyone. Meanwhile, after a discussion at the beginning of the book about what happened to lead to his arrest, along with a discussion of the author’s personal involvement in the case as an expert witness for the defense, every chapter then was about the trial. In between each chapter, there was an entry entitled Chapter whateverA, which briefly told the story of a person exonerated after being falsely convicted.
There was a bench trial, which means that the defendant chose to have the case decided by the judge, rather than a jury. That was a strategic decision by the defense, out of a fear that a jury would be predisposed against a law enforcement officer. I almost certainly would not have agreed with that strategy, in most circumstances. But, I’m open to the idea that since it was being tried in the District of Columbia, a DC jury might be so liberal that it is the rare jury that would be predisposed against an ICE agent.

I knew coming into reading the book that the defendant would be convicted. I was told, by the author, at the start that the false conviction wasn’t a result of one single thing, but a cumulative matter. So, after the conviction, I was expecting the chapter(s) that told how the conviction was overturned and why it was a false conviction. Those chapters never came. The defendant was never exonerated. And, honestly, as a former defense attorney, who understands the standard for reversing a verdict on the grounds that it was factually wrong (as opposed to legal errors made by the judge), I don’t see how this defendant could prevail on the argument of it being factually wrong. He got a trial in which the judge, serving as the trier of fact, did not believe him and believed that the state proved their case beyond a reasonable. At the end of the book, I was left with the idea that what we have here is a man convicted because the judge, who was in the room to assess his credibility, did not believe his story. The fact that an expert witness, who was paid to work for the defendant, believed his story carries absolutely no weight.

When I was in law school, I was correctly described by a friend as “being farther to the left than even Earl Warren”. And that assessment was not only true at the time, but it becomes even more true the more that time passes. So, when a book can’t convince me that this was a wrongful conviction, I don’t know what chance it has of convincing others.

When it comes to a grade, as I said, I was expecting throughout almost the whole book to give it an A. That’s how good the coverage of the trial testimony was. But, now that I have finished it and I realize that I no longer consider this a book about a wrongful conviction, I must lower my grade. I will choose to be generous today and only downgrade it to a B. I’m not convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that is deserves a B, but that’s not really the right standard to use. I just feel that downgrading it all the way to a C would feel too punitive. Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a B equates to 3 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This was a wonderful book. I never learned so much about the judicial system from one source. If you believe in the system, or even if you don't, you should read this book.