How Can You Defend Those People?

In the tradition of true crime bestsellers by Alan Dershowitz and Dominick Dunne, Mickey Sherman delivers a powerful and extraordinarily candid account of his legal career that gives the readers an all-access backstage pass to not only the sausage factory that is the criminal justice system but the “big cases” we have all lived with on TV.

Sherman started his career as a public defender, then as a prosecutor, and later became a criminal defense attorney for clients such as Michael Skakel (convicted 27 years after the fact for the murder of Martha Moxley) and Alex Kelly (who, on the eve of his double-rape trial in Darien, fled to Europe for nine years). Sherman’s work has been groundbreaking and sometimes controversial: the raw Court TV coverage of his successful PTSD defense of a Vietnam veteran charged with murdering an unarmed man over a parking space argument was nominated for a Cable Ace Award.  When, after a mistrial due to a hung jury in a rape trial, Sherman hired one of the jurors to be his consultant in the retrial of the client, the New York Times declared he had “undercut the entire jury system.” A law was soon passed in Connecticut making Sherman’s move a misdemeanor.

This is both an entertaining account of how a successful attorney deals with impossible cases and clients and boldly challenges accepted laws and conventional tactics, as well as a voyeuristic glimpse into the real lives and travails of clients who represent a fascinating cross section of life.