I love true crime stuff, and I love baseball, so when I learned that Bill James (the guy who invented the theory behind moneyball) had written a true crime book I knew I was going to read it. And there are several sections where he attempts to say, "Okay, if it requires 100 points to convict someone, this evidence should be about 30 points, and this evidence should only be 5, and we shouldn't include this kind of evidence at all." It's hilariously Bill James-ian, trying to quantify the legal system in that way. Make stats! Find averages! Set up a system!
So about 2/3 of the book is about different crimes, from very early crimes in New York when the US was brand new, through to discussions of cases like the JonBenet Ramsey case and OJ Simpson. He does a great job of describing what happened without getting gory or too excited about the gross details. He attempts to explain why he thinks various people are innocent or guilty. (Lizzie Borden: not guilty. The guy who confessed to being the Boston Strangler: not guilty of most of it.) He also talks a lot about why "true crime" is considered so lurid and such a waste of our time, and so destructive to our morality. He argues in favor of true crime reporting, books, and even TV movies if they're well done. And at the end he has a list of 100 best true crime books. I'm going to check out a bunch.
The other 1/3 is, frankly, weird. Every few chapters James stops to tell us, the audience, why the Warren Court was way too liberal and destroyed American society's ability to keep criminals in jail. Or he argues that Miranda Rights and giving suspects access to legal libraries created our super-sized industrial jail complex. He says he's not liberal or conservative on the issue, and he has a long, long, long explanation at the end about all the ways he'd reform prisons to make them places that would create good citizens ready to go out into the world, rather than locking them up forever. But his ideas about how to fix prisons seem, honestly, bananas. (24 person prisons? Tiny prisons on one floor of an office complex?) These chapters were interesting, but not at all persuasive, and you could skip them without losing much. They felt a little -- sorry Bill James, I swear I still love you -- Old Man Yells At Clouds.
Anyway. Excellent true crime stuff. I had to check the closets and make sure no murderers were lurking in them, but the book also made me laugh out loud.
Grade: B
#61 in 2016
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