"UNEQUAL VERDICTS" IS BILLED IN ITS FOREWORD

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 21, 1993                   TAG: 9303210230
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: B-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by LANA WHITED
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
"UNEQUAL VERDICTS" IS BILLED IN ITS FOREWORD
Fatal Flaw: A true story of malice and murder in a small Southern town. By Phillip Finch. Villard Books. $20.\ \ Murder With a Badge: The secret life of a rogue cop. By Edward Humes. Dutton. $23.\
\ Unequal Verdicts: The Central Park jogger trials. By Timothy Sullivan. Simon & Schuster (American Lawyer Books). $23.\ \ My Husband's Trying To Kill Me!: A true story of money, marriage, and murderous intent. By Jim Schutze. HarperCollins. $20.
"Unequal Verdicts" is billed in its foreword as a book which will help us understand "what we can expect from the [judicial] system." Taken collectively, these four recent "true crime" books offer diverse commentary on "what we can expect" from the people who are supposed to keep order in our society.
The author of "Fatal Flaw," Phillip Finch, argues that the system is so horribly flawed that, in their eagerness to close a case, police and prosecutors could send an innocent man to the electric chair.
The man in question is Tommy Zeigler, a Florida furniture store executive convicted of the Christmas Eve 1975 murders of his wife, his in-laws and another man. Finch, a journalist who got involved in Zeigler's case in 1991, makes no small claims for his book, pointing out immodestly that " `Fatal Flaw' may be the key to [Tommy Zeigler's] absolution, and perhaps the instrument that saves his life."
The book does not convince a reader that Zeigler is an innocent victim whose execution would mean the death of justice itself (as Finch argues melodramatically in his epilogue). It does demonstrate that due to the flimsy evidence presented at his original trial and the state's eagerness to see the matter closed quickly, Zeigler's case deserves close review and, perhaps, another hearing.
William Leasure, protagonist of "Murder with a Badge," enjoys the notoriety of being called "the most corrupt policeman" in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, an agency which, it seems lately, could spawn a whole encyclopedia of corrupt policemen. Edward Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, explains how Leasure perpetrated three murders-for-hire, insurance fraud, and the theft of valuable yachts and automobiles while maintaining the outward demeanor of a "a low-key, unassuming man who had never even used his service revolver in the line of duty."
To his credit and his book's advantage, Humes makes no attempt either to vilify or to absolve Leasure. What he presents instead of rhetoric is an intriguing and fairly well-written portrait of a man whose story reveals that the trouble in the LAPD goes back much farther than Rodney King.
With "Unequal Verdicts," we turn from the police to attorneys, specifically prosecutors.
Elizabeth Lederer and Tim Clements of the Manhattan Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit won convictions in two trials and five separate plea-bargain agreements on 38 charges (four of them rape) stemming from the Central Park jogger "wilding" on April 19, 1989. To readers expecting to find here detailed psychological or sociological analyses of the black and Hispanic teenagers involved, a word of caution: the book's dust jacket features a courthouse facade, not the Central Park loch and north meadow.
This is a story about lawyers, not criminals, and its virtue is its insider perspective into the intricacies of a rape case that involved more than a dozen suspects, and was played out in the national media before it ever reached the inside of a courtroom. Lederer and Clements clearly had to settle for the best of all possible verdicts and were lucky to get as many convictions as they did.
For the real triumph of "the system," though, see "My Husband's Trying to Kill Me!," the story of how the FBI faked the murder of Linda DeSilva in order to get sufficient evidence to convict her husband, Robert Edelman, of attempted murder-for-hire. A reader seasoned in this genre gets the feeling that Calvin Trillin could have handled this material more effectively in a long story, but the book is probably worth reading for the sheer implausibility of the account - proof again that "truth is stranger than fiction."
(A note of interest: author Jim Schutze's new "true crime" book is "Preacher's Girl," the story of North Carolina arsenic murderer Blanche Taylor Moore.)
As a group, these four books suggest that our legal system fails miserably, has its weak links, does the best it can in difficult situations, and works quite well. All of those perspectives may be true - depending on whom you ask.
Lana Whited teaches at Ferrum College and is writing a dissertation about homicide in nonfiction novels.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB