So okay. If you have read Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer, which I have, or if you are interested in true crime, which I am not, you may have heard of this guy Jeffrey MacDonald, whose wife and two daughters were murdered and he said hippies did it. A Wilderness of Error is about this case and the many flaws and unreasonablenesses about the case the government (and popular culture) built against Jeffrey MacDonald.
Morris has done an extraordinary amount of research into this case, conducting interviews with everyone who was involved in the case and survived to the time of his research, and quoting extensively from those interviews. He went through the evidence with a fine-tooth comb and did all the due diligence and, from all I can tell, cannot be faulted on research.
Yet — and this may just be because I am not a true crime gal — I was overcome with a bad case of premise denial. (That’s a term I made up to refer to the reading experience where you simply cannot suspend disbelief sufficiently to enter into the world of the book.) It wasn’t that I couldn’t believe in the possibility of Jeffrey MacDonald’s innocence. It was that as I read more of more of these infinite minutiae relating to his case, I couldn’t believe how much ink and time and outrage has been spent on this one guy, this one case.
Errol Morris says that people believe MacDonald is guilty because the alternative, believing that he watched his family get murdered and then spent twenty-five years in prison on a false conviction, is too awful to contemplate. But like — and again, maybe I am being too cynical here — don’t we all already know that? If we don’t know it about MacDonald, we know it about the criminal justice system. Someone was falsely convicted in America and didn’t get a fair trial? FETCH MY SMELLING SALTS. And like, would we be having this fit of the vapors if Jeffrey MacDonald were black?
Said Jenny the cynic.
And I didn’t like The Journalist and the Murderer that much either. So.
Hands up if you’ve ever served on a jury! And if not, have you ever been cut and they told you the reason why? I was once cut for cause (no reason given! should’ve asked!) and once my case settled before the jury got impaneled. And I just got called for my third-ever round of jury duty, so we’ll see how that goes.