Quotes from William Landay

We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.

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.

But Ben Rifkin lay in a refrigerated drawer in the M.E.'s office while my son lay in his warm bed, with nothing but luck to separate the one from the other.

in the living room, old grandmas, baby cousins.

I did not usually feel that sort of passion about any case, but I disliked this murderer already. For murdering, yes, but also for fucking with us. For refusing to submit.

one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but after all, we were children.

good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones.

A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who's been indicted.

We are all sealed up alone. We all carry the center of the universe inside our own heads. It is, for each of us, a point a few inches behind our eyes where the binocular lines of vision converge. Only a narcissist or a child is fool enough to believe it.

Every criminal is still a man, a complex of good and bad, fully deserving of our empathy and mercy.

Who among you would stand up, step out of that jury box, and trade places with me? Who would be accused of a violent murder based on…nothing? How would you prove your innocence when there was never any proof against you in the first place?

Don't worry about how things look. People are going to think whatever they think. The hell with 'em. You can't worry about it.

You can cheat with a picture. You can fall in love with an image of someone, with a memory or an idea of her. For that matter, the matter is generally easier to love than the actual person, since the image will never change, never grow old, never argue or disappoint you.

Ninguém a quem valha a pena conhecer pode ser propriamente conhecido. Ninguém que valha a pena possuir pode ser realmente possuído.

The town's young parents especially prized this idea of Newton as a child's paradise. Many of them had left the hip, sophisticated city to move here. They had accepted massive expenses, stultifying monotony, and the queasy disappointment of settling for a conventional life. To

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.

Somebody stitched three holes in a line across that boy's chest and left nothing to indicate who or why.

A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it.

some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents

no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but

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 did not speak. I have found in any Q&A, in court, in witness interviews, wherever, often the best thing you can do is wait, say nothing. The witness will want to fill the awkward silence. He will feel a vague compassion to keep talking, to prove he is not holding back, to prove he is smart and in the know, to earn your trust.

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.

I am as conventional as white toast.)