One of the bad habits I picked up years ago was to begin reading a book at the beginning.  Not the first chapter, but the acknowledgements, then the foreward and finally onto the book itself.  Sometimes, it provides the reader with a perspective that enhances what follows.  This time, it was a mistake.

Peter Manso’s book, Reasonable Doubt, The Fashion Writer, Cape Cod, and the Trial of Chris McCowen, is the story of the murder of Christa Worthington, the somewhat drab prodigal daughter of a local family that’s longer on real estate and peccadillos than cash on hand or good judgment.  Her life wasn’t great and her murder wasn’t pretty:

In January 2002, forty-six-year-old Christa Worthington was found stabbed to death in the kitchen of her Truro, Cape Cod, cottage, her curly-haired toddler clutching her body. A former Vassar girl and scion of a prominent local family, Christa had abandoned a glamorous career as a fashion writer for a simpler life on the Cape, where she had an affair with a married fisherman and had his child. After her murder, evidence pointed toward several local men who had known her.

After years of police investigation that went nowhere, whether because of incompetence or willful blindness, they finally settled on a murderer, who coincidentally happened to be one of the few black men living on Cape Cod and borderline mentally retarded.

Yet in 2005, investigators arrested Christopher McCowen, a thirty-four-year-old African-American garbage collector with an IQ of 76. The local headlines screamed, “Black Trash Hauler Ruins Beautiful White Family” and “Black Murderer Apprehended in Fashion Writer Slaying,” while the sole evidence against McCowen was a DNA match showing that he’d had sex with Worthington prior to her murder. There were no fingerprints, no witnesses, and although the state medical examiner acknowledged there was no evidence of rape, the defendant was convicted after a five-week trial replete with conflicting testimony, accusations of crime scene contamination, and police misconduct—and was condemned to three lifetime sentences in prison with no parole.

While the book is in the true crime genre, Manso’s background as a journalist comes across loud and clear, His descriptions are crisp and, to a lawyer’s eye, surprisingly accurate.  It may well be that a non-lawyer would find Manso’s detail to be a bit over the top, I found it pleasantly thorough in contrast to other books of this genre I’ve read that seem to skirt over the details that comprise the crime scene and trial, leaving the reader wondering.

Manso drops in the obligatory color commentary that, for the most part, provides the spice that keeps our otherwise dreary world of law interesting, and even the most hardened lawyer used to reading transcripts will appreciate.  Let’s face it, without some snarky characterizations, particularly about the players, the law can be a total bore.

Rather than separate his writing into manageable sections like chapters, Manso chose to use the real world as a template for the Reasonable Doubt, meaning that one “chapter” is the crime, the next is the trial, then the aftermath and finally his indulgence.  If you’re inclined to read until the end of a chapter, this book doesn’t necessarily work well, as the trial goes on for quite a while.  Even when I realized that natural breaks would be few and far between, the structure of the book was somewhat annoying, as time demanded that I put the book down but the book didn’t cooperate.

Still, the story was substantively fascinating, gritty and held my attention throughout.  Manso’s journalistic style provides a fantastic sense of accuracy in his detailed descriptions, and yet remained interesting rather than burdensome.  You never got the sense that you had to muddle through the details to get to the good stuff, but relished in the developing story and looked forward to what came next.  This isn’t easy to do in this genre, that of necessity includes the boring along with the sordid and salacious.

I would have loved this book but for one mistake on my part: I read the Introduction.  Big mistake. Huge.

It turns out that Manso, as a result of this trial, had the epiphany that so many outside of criminal defense have, that the system is rife with prejudice, ignorance, lies, more lies and stupidity.  He admits to turning from journalist to advocate, from unbiased observer to disgusted seer. 

While not realizing it, his discussion is of the sort we see so often, the naive layman who has first come to grips with the reality that the legal system is deeply flawed.  He says many of the right things, but in the way that remains superficial and lacks the depth of someone who has lived with this reality.  As so often happens to those who have just had an epiphany, the event that gives rise to his realization seems to be the worst ever, the most flagrant and horrible wrong that can happen.

What Manso had yet to grasp is that this isn’t a matter of a bad case and a wronged defendant, but a cultural phenomenon that allows people who don’t know better to sleep at night.  And until he looked under the covers, he was one of them.  This one case clearly shocked Manso, and we should appreciate that it did as it’s far better that he came to realize the inherent flaws than not.  But then, he is clearly at the beginning of the learning curve.

Having read Manso’s admission that he learned too much from this case, it colored everything I read afterward.  There is no zealot like the new one, and Manso was clearly newly converted.  Knowing this up front, I found his descriptions and snarky commentary suspect, constantly questioning whether Manso’s seemingly accurate descriptions were real or colored by his new religion.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake this from my mind, and was left to question whether I could trust him throughout the book.

As a criminal defense lawyer, I certainly can’t fault Peter Manso for coming to the conclusions that have long formed the core of our daily lives, and it’s always nice, true or not, to have people see a trial through our lens.  It’s a great read and his style keeps the reader rapt even though we are all well aware that questioning witnesses rarely happens as easily and interestingly as described.  But hey, that’s what makes a book fun to read.  You will enjoy it, and perhaps learn from it.  But I would have felt better about it had Manso kept his personal bias to the end, or had I skipped the intro.