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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2012It's been years since I've thought about the MacDonald case. I used to think and write about it a lot, and even used it as the backdrop for a unit on persuasive writing when I taught high school English. I read Fatal Vision for a journalism class in college, read Fatal Justice when it came out in the mid-1990s, read every appellate court decision in the case, and have seen every TV program, documentary, interview, etc. that's ever been aired. I've even met and/or spoken with a couple of people who were involved in the case at various times, one in particular who was a key figure.
The fact is I got exhausted by the MacDonald case and the ever-raging disputes over its ultimate resolution, which can get as nasty as political fights, a long time ago. I picked up this book to try to catch up on it and see what, if anything, Morris had to add. Some of this is a brief summary/re-hash of Fatal Justice, some of it revisits contemporaneous testimony and takes us "behind the scenes" thereof, and a lot of it is interview transcripts from Morris' catching up with some of the participants to get their 30-years-out recollections and perspectives.
A Wilderness of Error is interesting, but it's a supplemental resource at best. Fatal Vision and Fatal Justice, taken together, provide a much more complete and detailed picture, each with some editorializing I'd leave to the reader to evaluate. That said, I don't think Morris' goal was to create a -resource- on the case, along the lines of those other two books, the defense's "official" website or Christina Masewicz's website/document archive. This is more of a reflective essay than an investigative report, although the interviews make it seem like the latter.
Morris' point is that the investigation, reinvestigation and prosecution of this case was a gigantic, epic, monstrous clustersomething, an assessment that's hard to dispute irrespective of whether MacDonald himself is guilty or innocent. Even a guilty man can be framed, railroaded, wrongfully convicted and put away for all the wrong reasons by all the wrong methods. The question is whether we're willing to tolerate it, viz., whether we're willing to tolerate either or both of incompetence and abuse of the system so long as the guilty are punished, knowing it must occasionally, inevitably, sweep up the innocent. And if MacDonald is innocent, then........
