Home > Author > William Landay
81 " We do not punish the leopard for its wildness. "
― William Landay , Defending Jacob
82 " Precisely how the electrical signals and chemical reactions occurring second by second in the human body make the leap to thought, motivation, impulse—where the physical machinery of man stops and the ghost in the machine, consciousness, begins—is not truly a scientific question, for the simple reason that we cannot design an experiment to capture, measure or duplicate it. For all we have learned, the fact remains that we do not understand in any meaningful way why people do what they do, and likely never will. "
83 " At two o’clock, Paul and I commandeered the principal’s office and together we interviewed the highest-priority witnesses: the victim’s close friends, a few kids who were known to walk to school through Cold Spring Park, and those who specifically requested to speak with the investigators. Two dozen interviews were scheduled for the two of us. Other CPAC detectives would conduct interviews at the same time. Most we expected to be brief and yield nothing. We were trawling, dragging our net along the sea bottom, hoping. "
84 " 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. "
85 " in the living room, old grandmas, baby cousins. "
86 " 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. "
87 " one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but after all, we were children. "
88 " good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones. "
89 " A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who’s been indicted. "
90 " Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free—those "errors" we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in defendants' favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge—do not even think about—because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail, eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable, even the best-intentioned cops are subject to failures of judgment and recall. The human element in any system is always prone to error. "
91 " Every criminal is still a man, a complex of good and bad, fully deserving of our empathy and mercy. "
92 " Ninguém a quem valha a pena conhecer pode ser propriamente conhecido. Ninguém que valha a pena possuir pode ser realmente possuído. "
93 " 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 "
94 " At some point as adults we cease to be our parents’ children and we become our children’s parents instead. "
95 " some point as adults we cease to be our parents’ children and we become our children’s parents "
96 " no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but "
97 " 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. "
98 " 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. "
99 " 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. "
100 " 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 "