Quotes from William Landay

Why risk the rare happy marriage-rarer still, a love marriage that endures-for something as common and toxic as complete, unthinking, transparent honesty? Who would be helped by my telling? Me? not at all. I was made of steel, I promise you.

In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest—the vast majority, tens of thousands of days—are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous.

School isn't supposed to be dangerous. It's not a place they should be afraid of. It's their second home. It's where they spend most of their waking hours.

I never expected to lose in court. In practice, I did lose, of course. Every lawyer loses, just as every baseball player makes an out seventy percent of the time he goes to bat.

The truth is, the best won-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it.

This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

Studies have shown that fathers of murdered children often die within a few years of the murder, often of heart failure. Really, they die of grief.

We both love him. I'm just saying, you can love your child and still see his flaws. You have to see his flaws, otherwise how can you help him?

Out popped Paul Duffy, in plain clothes except for a state police windbreaker and a badge clipped to his belt. He looked at me - I think by now I had dropped the bat to my side, at least, though I must have looked ridiculous anyway - and he raised his eyebrows. 'Get back in the house, Babe Ruth.

She did not want to go but understood that I was uneasy, that I felt spotlighted here, that I was not much of a talker to begin with -- chitchat in crowded rooms always left me exhausted -- and these things all had to be weighed.

efficiently the system worked. A courthouse is a factory, sorting violence into a taxonomy of crimes, processing

both remembered how it all started, and even now, in the middle of my middle age, when I think of that shining young girl, I still feel a little thrill of first love, still there, still burning like a pilot light.

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—"the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty." That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.

I have in mind an experiment. Take an infant—regardless of ancestry, race, talent, or predilection, so long as he is essentially healthy—and I will make of him whatever you like. I will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide. The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required is training, time, and a properly controlled environment.

Also, it must be said, I had a childish attraction to men of my father's generation, as if I still harbored a faint hope of being unorphaned, even at this late date.

A jury could only declare my son 'not guilty', never 'innocent'.

I could not help seeing in Laurie the ghost of her younger self, the teenaged girl with a lovely, full, heart-shaped face. I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known. Laurie

He yearned for the words. It was an affliction, this constant clutching for words. It felt as if he had been excluded from a conversation.

could make a decision about whether to call Dr. Vogel as a witness

Why risk the rare happy marriage—rarer still, a love marriage that endures—for something as common and as toxic as complete, unthinking, transparent honesty?

I was greeted at the Magraths' apartment door by a dumpy, pie-faced woman with a frizz of unsprung black hair. She wore black spandex leggings and an oversized T-shirt with an equally oversized message stamped across the front: Don't Give Me Attitude, I Have One of My Own. This witticism ran six full lines, drawing my eyes southward over her person from wavering bosom to detumescent belly, a journey I regret even now.

Predisposition is not predestination. We humans are much, much more than our DNA.

Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines.

Alex and Laurel have three young kids, too, aged seven, nine, and eleven. I find these spoiled children more insufferable every time I see them. At this rate, I expect that very soon my nieces and nephews will be suitable only to be sewn up in a burlap bag with a wolverine and tossed into the nearest river.)