I started Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow three times. The first time I stopped reading was because I was distracted by a shiny new offering from my library. The second time I put the book aside was because I really wasn’t enjoying it – the sexism, racism and homophobia exhibited by the characters hasn’t aged very well. The salacious details of the victim’s brutal rape and murder, the slut-shaming and the references within the story to pedophilia put me off, too, as did the connection between politics and the law in the United States – but more on this later.
The third time I started reading Presumed Innocent was after finishing Lady Audley’s Secret, which I enjoyed but found to be long-winded. I figured Presumed Innocent the third time around would be a comparatively fast read and I was right.
The story began with the narrator, Rusty Sabich, the Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney in the Office of the Kindle County, on his way to the funeral of Carolyn Polhemus, a Deputy Prosecuting Attorney from his office.
Rusty’s nose got out of joint at Carolyn’s funeral when he learned she had a teenage son, something he hadn’t previously known, giving the reader an inkling that Rusty and Carolyn had recently had an affair. Instead of attending her burial, however, Rusty returned to the office to work on the case, at which time the reader learns how she was killed. For the faint of heart, the method was nasty and there is a lot of detail.
Rusty and Carolyn’s affair was quickly confirmed, as was the fact that he was married and had a young son – but he’d fallen in love with Carolyn, whom he described to his psychiatrist after they’d broken up as sexy, with torrents of blonde hair, a tiny bottom, huge bust and long red fingernails. Carolyn was also hardworking and smart, and Rusty went to pains to describe how wonderful she had been in a recent child abuse case they worked on together, and unfortunately for me, he also described in great detail the cruel and gruesome particulars of the crime itself.
This story was published in 1987, which explains some of the dated ideas, although I wondered if these annoyed me so much because they all still exist. I was amused by other reminders that the book was of that time though, including the example of the police department’s special services having only one computer, which they had to share as it was under another section’s jurisdiction. The computer was capable of running checks on fingerprints, but it was also used for payroll so investigations had to wait their turn! Not only that, results on the fingerprint checks usually took up to ten days to be returned because there was a queue of other people waiting to extract information from that one computer. Staff also smoked at their desks, took long lunches and spent days looking up records on microfilm. My, how times have changed.
I couldn’t get my head around the idea of a Prosecuting Attorney being elected. In Australia we have what’s called a separation of power, in that the legislature (government) deal only with the making of laws, the executive (police) deal only with enforcing the law and the judiciary role is to interpret the law (the court system). Politics are separate from the judiciary, and in my opinion, for good reason. I was outraged that in Presumed Innocent, the Prosecuting Attorney spent 14 hours a day campaigning to be re-elected instead of doing his actual job. Courting finance for his political campaign also took time and effort, while the various departments aligned themselves with one or another candidate, assisting or hampering the murder investigation as they saw fit.
Rusty’s boss lost the election and almost before he could congratulate his successor, Rusty was arrested for Carolyn’s murder on what I thought was fairly circumstantial evidence, finding himself dependent on his former opponents, the Defense lawyers, to prove his innocence.
On page 179 I had a sudden idea of what must have happened and told my husband what I suspected. I was right, the story played out exactly as I had suspected. However, it was at this point that I got interested in the story as it shifted into the courtroom. I recently got out of doing jury duty and was glad to do so, since many of the local court cases in my area are sexual assault cases and the like, so you can imagine how happy I was when I received notice the day before I was due to attend that I would not be required! The author’s skill and experience of the law was used to great effect in this section, as he explained through the story how a jury was assessed and selected, and how a trial was run, lost or won, without me noticing until I’d finished the book that I’d actually learned a great deal about the theatre of a courtroom.
There were plenty of twists and turns to come in the courtroom but what I most enjoyed during this section was the exploration of each character. The judge, the Prosecuting Attorney and his off-sider, Rusty’s long-suffering wife and tormented son, even Carolyn’s lost son all had a story and an axis of their own, and all of these had some bearing on Rusty’s story. I particularly liked Rusty’s lawyer Sandy Stern, a man whose intelligence was frightening.
Rusty was an interesting character. I liked him even though he wasn’t always a good guy and I wanted him to be found not guilty of murdering Carolyn, even though as an unreliable narrator, the reader doesn’t learn what actually happened to Carolyn until the end of the story (unless like me, you have a lightbulb moment on page 179).
Scott Turow leads the reader in the directions he wants them to go, much like I suppose a good lawyer in a court room leads a jury to believe what they want them to believe. The storytelling was good enough for me to overlook the much of the nastiness and the gorier details that I felt had been included for shock value, but I don’t see myself watching the film, (even though it stars Harrison Ford) although I might eventually read another of the books in this series, since I’m reasonably certain I’ve already got another on my bookshelves.
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