Books About Legal Cases

Alan Dershowitz praises these accounts of momentous legal cases

1. The Leo Frank Case. Leonard Dinnerstein. Columbia University, 1968
Great trial accounts read like novels but are as documented as scientific papers. "The Leo Frank Case" meets this criterion. The reader can feel the bigotry toward the Jewish defendant, Leo Frank, who in 1913 was accused of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl who worked in the pencil factory he managed. But Leonard Dinnerstein, ever the historian, mutes what must be his true level of anger at this overt prejudice. Not surprisingly, Frank was convicted and sentenced to death; surprisingly, after the trial, the lawyer for a black prosecution witness announced that his client, not Frank, had committed the murder. A few days before leaving office, Georgia Gov. John M. Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life, but a vigilante mob (including two former superior court justices) dragged Frank out of prison and lynched him. The vigilantes were photographed, but a grand jury refused to indict. A mob also descended on the governor's home but was dispersed by the Georgia National Guard. After his term ended, Slaton fled the state, not returning for several years. Eventually, Frank's innocence was proved by an eyewitness, and Georgia issued an apology in 1986 -- for the lynching, but not the false conviction.

2. Summer for the Gods. Edward J. Larson. Basic Books, 1997    345.7302 L
This book about the Scopes trial is an excellent counterweight to the distortion -- made famous by the play and movie "Inherit the Wind" -- that the case was a simple clash between good and evil. The reality was more complex. Yes, schoolteacher John Scopes was prosecuted in the 1920s by the state of Tennessee for teaching evolution, but the textbook he used was filled with racist pseudo-science. "Civic Biology" assured white, segregated high-school students that, among the "five races" of man, "the highest type of all, the Caucasians, [are] represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America." The book also proposed involuntary sterilizations of the "unfit." No surprise, then, that William Jennings Bryan, an egalitarian, would be outraged at this attack on the morality and religion that had formed the basis of his political career. Nor was Bryan the know-nothing Biblical literalist of "Inherit the Wind." For the most part, he got the better of Clarence Darrow in the arguments over the Bible, though not in the argument over banning evolution.

3. The Rosenberg File. Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983.  345.0231 R

Great trial books can shatter myths. The liberal myth about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: They were innocent of passing secrets to the Soviets and were victims of an unfair trial. The conservative myth: The Rosenbergs were guilty and the trial fair. Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton -- through interviews with the Rosenbergs' own defenders and with KGB defectors, and through the use of hard documentary evidence -- prove that Julius Rosenberg was guilty, Ethel was innocent (at least legally, if not morally) and both were victims of an unfair legal process that included ex parte communication between the judge and prosecutor. The authors also prove that the FBI knew Ethel was innocent but believed that, by threatening her with execution, the bureau could coerce her husband into revealing the names of other spies. When the gambit failed, the FBI felt it necessary to carry out the threat, even if that meant executing an innocent woman. Although a neoconservative ideological bent occasionally colors the fluid writing and flawless research, this is an eye-opening work of history.

4. History on Trial. Deborah E. Lipstadt. Ecco, 2005   940.5318 L
"History on Trial" is Deborah E. Lipstadt's compelling first-person account of her experience as the defendant in a libel suit brought in 1996 by British author David Irving, who was unhappy that she had described him in print as a Holocaust denier. As I wrote in an afterword for the book, the trial was a rare instance in which "truth, justice and freedom of speech [were] all simultaneously served." What was at stake in the case transcended Lipstadt's reputation and fortune. Her antagonist sought to put the Holocaust itself on trial. This worried survivors, concerned that their history was being subjected to a judicial test, with standards of evidence and proof that did not always produce truth. Moreover, under British law, truth was not necessarily a defense to defamation. Through the determination of Lipstadt and the brilliant legal work of her lawyer, Anthony Julius, especially his devastating cross-examination of Irving, the court ruled that she had written the truth -- Irving is indeed a Holocaust denier -- and that he had not been defamed. The verdict also helped to expand the right of truthful free speech in Britain.

5. Until Proven Innocent. Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson. Thomas Dunne, 2007   364.1532 T
"Until Proven Innocent," an account of the Duke lacrosse case, should be ranked high among works that disprove the notion that those charged with serious crimes are invariably guilty and that those who are acquitted somehow beat the system. Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson pillory not only the prosecutor in the supposed sexual-assault case -- he was eventually disbarred after charges against the three players were dropped before going to trial -- but also the president of Duke University and those on his faculty who were willing to sacrifice innocent students as a bizarre form of racial reparation. The Duke case demonstrates how contemporary political correctness, run amok, can deform the legal system just as dramatically as other prejudices have in the past.

Mr. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. His latest book is "The Case Against Israel's Enemies" (Wiley, 2008).
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W88