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bonnieg 's review for:
The Murder Rule
by Dervla McTiernan
__________________
The full review
I read this book in part because of a positive review in the Wall Street Journal (which I trust enough to make it one of my two regular daily newspapers) and a positive blurb from Don Winslow whose work I really adore. I am now questioning the judgement of those foolishly trusted sources.
I am going to say that Dervla McTiernan did a grand total of . . . zero minutes of research for this book. Unless you count binge-watching Suits. She got wrong everything about the law and about American education. It is absurd. At first I castigated myself for over-thinking. I am a former lawyer and I now work in a law school (the action here happens at University of Virginia Law) so I come to this book with a bank of knowledge others readers don't have. It is why I enjoyed watching Grey's Anatomy for a time (I know nothing about medicine or hospitals) but could not make it through a single episode of How To Get Away With Murder. Then I read more, and I realized that anyone with access to popular television or movies or Court Cam over the last 20 years would know how off base McTiernan is with most of this. Also, taking out my specialized knowledge, the writing here is really bad (especially Laura's diary, which is a large portion of the text.) Even if you overlook that pretty much everything that happens in the book could not and/or would not happen, under any circumstances, this is just poorly crafted.
Let's start with the setup. Hannah is a 3L at University of Maine law school which is ranked 114th in the country. If you are wondering, that is not great. She shows up at the Innocence Project office at the University of Virginia saying she had just transferred from U of Maine to UVA because her mother is undergoing cancer treatment in Richmond. Do people think that could happen? That you can simply transfer to one of the best law schools in the country (#8 if you are keeping score) from University of Maine? I would have put my dad into the hospital in New Haven when I was in law school if this were a thing. My dad was actually ill but I would have likely resorted to some Munchausen's-by-Proxy if he were not if this were possible. Yale baby! No one, absolutely no one to whom she told this story at UVA would have believed her. Not students or faculty or staff. When the reader sees this they know Hannah is either lying and not enrolled, or that Dervla McTiernan did no research, or both.
Hannah walks into the Innocence Project clinic at the school and dazzles the Clinical Prof with her 2 years at the 114th best law school in the nation and with her chutzpah. You see, initially he won't talk to her. Then she not so subtlety threatens him with her supposed knowledge of an affair he had with a student. He laughs off the blackmail attempt saying he was not this student's professor so the school is fine with the dating, and invites her to join the Innocence Project team. First, the Innocence Project clinic is incredibly prestigious. It takes the best and the brightest students and the application process is very competitive. The whim of a Clinical Prof is not going to cut it. Also, professors at UVA law school are strongly advised not to date students, regardless of whether they are in their classes. You know how long it took me to fact check that. about 12 seconds. Ms. McTiernan, lets sit down and I will tell you about a thing called Google. You are gonna love it. Second, blackmail attempts are not looked at as an appealing behavior in law school. I feel confident saying it is an honor code violation at every academic institution (though I have never had a student try to blackmail me so I have not looked it up) and would result in expulsion. Everything I have mentioned so far happens in the first 30 pages of the book. It gets worse.
There is a bunch of stuff on the Felony Murder Rule. McTiernan gets her initial description of the rule mostly right, but the rest is a mess. First, she keeps calling it the "Murder Rule." No one has ever called it that before. It doesn't even make sense. Second, lawyers and law students would never say "the Felony Murder Rule applies here" they would say "are they charging felony murder?" or something like that. And since they would have known within a couple of weeks of starting a crim law class what the rule is (if they did not know it from tv shows before that) no law student would feel compelled to explain what felony murder is to another 2L or 3L (no 1L's in the clinic) let alone to a PROFESSOR! Its nuts. But the biggest thing, the wackiest thing, is that the Felony Murder Rule has nothing at all to do with the case in the book. Why is everyone talking about it? We have no idea.
There are 100 other things wrong with this. Ex: someone explains to everyone in a crim law clinic what happens at a preliminary hearing. If they don't know that before they are on the eve of said hearing many people need to be fired. Ex: There is a really important hearing on a Monday for which everyone is unprepared. On Friday the person running the case says "take the weekend off. Relax!" I seriously started giggling when I typed that. This is not how lawyers roll. I worked a trial as first year where I did not sleep for more than a handful of 30 minute catnaps for three days before trial began. Ex: people casually drive from Virginia to Maine to help out a friend who wants to have a 10 minute face to face critical conversation and then drive back. That is a 10+ hour drive each way. (Again, 12 seconds on Google.) Maine and Virginia are in fact both in the US, but a glance at a map will tell you there are A LOT of states in between, like 10. Ex: people refer to "summer internships" in large law firms. They are called Summer Associate programs -- internships are different. Ex: Hannah's mother refers to herself several times as a "cleaner." We don't use that term in the US. She is a maid or a housekeeper (especially 25 years ago that would be true.) But in the interest of time I just want to focus on the most egregious legal errors. I don't want to spoil so I will just say that in a courtroom lawyers can't just accuse witnesses of things, "isn't it true you stole candy from babies!" No. You have to lay a foundation that allows you to introduce evidence, you need to introduce it properly, you need to defend its relevance, you need to show a chain of custody. (The book refers to a chain of title for the evidence-- unless they are buying a used car that is not something they need to worry about.) Also, if someone commits a felony to procure evidence that evidence IS INADMISSIBLE. And if someone gets evidence illegally and that evidence points to other evidence, it too is INADMISSIBLE. And if someone commits a felony to get evidence, even if it is for a good reason, that person is guilty of a felony (ask Edward Snowden.) There is no backslap. The only slapping is the slapping on of cuffs.
I am stunned at how bad this was. I kept reading because I felt like it was so bad she must have had a plan to bring everything together and explain why there was this horrible diary that read like no diary ever, and why nothing plausible happens, and why I know more about every student's coffee order (lots of sugar for some reason) than about the facts of the central case. And she did bring it all together, and it was more absurd and implausible than it was before she brought it together.
Okay, done for now because it is 1:50 in the morning and I want to go to bed, but I could write a book on this book.