Court tales make an arresting read

Steve Galpern, Special To The News

Friday, August 8, 2003

I'm addicted to Law & Order. Not the concept so much, but the television show depicting the work of New York City's police and prosecutors who fight crime while making pithy wisecracks.

I've stayed loyal through two spin-offs, some really bad acting by Ice-T and an annoying know-it-all/genius character played by Vincent D'Onofrio. But I drew the line at the newest spin-off, Law & Order: Crime & Punishment, a documentary look at prosecutors trying real cases in San Diego.

It's too real.

Real trials aren't as entertaining as television, it turns out. Real lawyers, defendants and victims are too busy with the tedious yet deadly serious legal process to make pithy comments all day long and it's easy to get a queasy feeling while enjoying watching other people's tragedies.

So fortunately, for law-and-order voyeurs, Gary Delsohn has written The Prosecutors: A Year in the Life of a District Attorney's Office. His book manages to explain the tedium while extracting maximum drama from the criminal cases and the prosecutors who tried them in Sacramento County in 2001.

If you can get past the author's slight touch of Stockholm syndrome that colors his admiration for the people in the district attorney's office and his tough-guy writing style, The Prosecutors offers an insightful look into the people's side of the criminal justice system.

Delsohn is a Sacramento Bee reporter (and former writer at the Rocky Mountain News) who spent a year following cases that crossed the desk of the city's district attorney's office. He begins with the Bread Store trial, a botched robbery that turned into a murder when Rick Brewer, an ex-con who had previously held up the same location, fired three shots from a "Mossberg pistol-gripped twelve-gauge shotgun" into store manager Jason Frost after discovering that all of the money from the day's receipts had been deposited in a floor safe.

He focuses primarily on the head of Homicide and Major Crimes unit and the two prosecutors who spent up to five years immersed intellectually and emotionally in the case. Yet he also delves into police investigatory process, defense tactics and defendants' backgrounds and the anguish of members of the victim's family, who were forced to relive the horror of their loved one's death on a daily basis at the trial.

The Bread Store case, he argues, is "emblematic of the hazards prosecutors must navigate when they try murders anywhere in America: using a snitch; felony murder where the guy who drives the getaway car is just as guilty as the triggerman; dealing with self-serving testimony from accomplices; the fragility of juries; personal animosity among attorneys; arguments about the death penalty; evidence not fully disclosed."

Delsohn weaves the progression of the Bread Store case throughout a series of other cases that occupied the district attorney's office throughout 2001 - including a man who videotaped himself hanging his girlfriend from the rafters in a garage; Nikolay Soltys, a Ukrainian émigré whose murder of his six family members (including his pregnant wife and 3-year-old son) captured national attention; and the revival of a 1975 murder investigation of Myrna Opsahl, a Sacramento mother of four who was killed during a Symbionese Liberation Army bank robbery involving Patty Hearst.

The legal stories that follow these sensational crimes should be strong enough to stand on their own, but unfortunately, as Delsohn finds himself freed from the objectivity required of daily journalism, he launches into his own version of a literary crime spree that readers may find distracting. It's one thing to quote the candid and often vulgar language used by prosecutors on a daily basis, but it's another to use the same style in writing about them.

Journalists are tough guys when they relentlessly pursue their stories, not when commenting on the fortitude of their subjects' testicles or their ability to break others'.

Furthermore, as the title of the book suggests, this is not an even-handed story.One might assume that the ethical obligations of defense lawyers prevented Delsohn from attaining access to their clients, but the author's tone suggests that he doesn't consider this an enormous loss. You don't need to be a card-carrying member of the ACLU to detect the leanings of someone who writes about the investigation of the rape and murder of a 12-year-old-girl as being different from "the typical scumbag-murdered-by-scumbag caper that takes up so much of the system's resources."

Delsohn is best while describing the intricacies of the prosecutors' cases, the internal office politics, the drama of the courtroom, and the pain and suffering of the victims of crime that you never get from watching TV. As the Bread Case ends and the defendants are sentenced, his description of the scene exemplifies the way in which he brings criminal trials to life.

"It feels as if the air has been sucked from the room," he writes. "Everyone in it seems to have tears in their eyes: the bailiffs, the court reporter, everyone in the audience. The judge isn't crying, but he appears to be drowning in all this grief. These rooms have heard countless tragic stories over the years, but there's little to compare with the emotional release that comes after a long, tension-filled murder trial when the family of the murder victim finally speaks."

Steve Galpern is a freelance writer living in Denver.