William Landay Quotes

I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results. A jury verdict is just a guess - a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard.

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

It turns out, you can get used to almost anything. What one day seems a shocking, unbearable outrage over time comes to seem ordinary, unremarkable.

We're not arguing. We're discussing." "You're a lawyer; you don't know the difference. I'm arguing.

I don't want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn't the same as being right.

Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking,

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.

I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.

My childhood ended that summer. I learned the word murder. But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that ... You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to ... see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you.

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

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.

An emotion is a thought, yes, an idea, but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body. Desire, love, hate, fear, repulsion - you feel these things in your muscle and bones, not just in your mind.

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

You have to follow your intuition. That is what expertise is: all the experience, the cases won and lost, the painful mistakes, all the technical details you learn by rote repetition, over time these things leave you with an instinctive sense of your craft. A "gut" for it.

I'm a bit of a tech geek myself.

Practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law. ... [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African

The act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

The leopard in the zoo wanders to the edge of his pen and, through the bars or across an unjumpable moat, he stares at you with contempt for your inferiority, for needing that barrier between you. There is a shared understanding in that moment, nonverbal but no less real: the leopard is predator and you are prey, and it is only the barrier that permits us humans to feel superior and secure. That feeling, standing at the leopard's cage, is edged with shame, at the animal's superior strength, at his hauteur, his low estimation of you.

We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls.

So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob.

No one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed

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

Predisposition is not predestination.

I have an idea that is 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.

fingers into a beak and flapped it open and shut: talk, talk. "You never know. If you pick him up, he'll just call his lawyer. You might lose your only chance to talk to him." "No, it's better we pick him up. After that, you can sweet-talk him, Duff. That's what you're good at." "You sure?" "We can't have people saying we didn't push hard enough on this guy." The comment was off key, and a doubtful expression crossed Duffy's face. We had always made it a rule not to give a shit how things looked or what people thought. A prosecutor's judgment is supposed to be insulated from politics. "You know what I mean, Paul. This is the first credible

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

But sometimes you can't figure everything out because you can't ever really understand other people. You can't understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are mysterious, the world is mysterious. You can't know everything. You're not supposed to. This isn't a history book. It's just the world. It's a messy place.

A hint of nonconformity was all he would risk.

Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster.

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.

A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it. A single word or gesture, a tone of voice can conjure up so many remembrances.

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.

All they got locked up in this hole is my body. That's all they got, my body, not me. I'm everywhere, see? Everywhere you look, junior, everywhere you go.

I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

you ever do it?" "It's a talent

Somewhere she had learned that if an interviewer remains silent, the interviewee will rush to fill the silence.

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.

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.

But good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones.

I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.

Witness: I thought it was a mistake. Based on what we knew at the time, it was a mistake to turn away from Patz as a suspect so early in the investigation.

The rest-the vast majority, tens of thousands of days-are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest.
We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories ... But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and 'The End' is never the end.

It is, of course, the last resort of a liar to challenge his inquisitor to call him a liar directly.

Every father knows the disconcerting when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self ... made real and flesh.
He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person.

With the minivan in the air, rolling counterclockwise, the engine racing, Laurie screaming
a fraction of a second, that's all
Jacob would have thought of me
who had held him, my own baby, looked down into his eyes
and he would have understood I loved him, no matter what, to the very end
as he saw the concrete wall flying forward to meet him.

Even the wettest violence, in the end, is cooked down to the stuff of court cases; a ream of paper, a few exhibits, a dozen ... witnesses. The world looks away, and why not?

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.

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

The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance ...

Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far.

It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive now. Now occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel now athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves ...

The truth is, the best win-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.

I can't say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me.