Without a Doubt
Carpenter, Marcia Clark with Teresa
The John Elway of Criminal Prosecutors Without a Doubt Marcia Clark with Teresa Carpenter Doubleday /502 pages / $25.95 REVIEWED BY Joe Queenan One of the great things about professional...
...In the world of letters, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose but only whether you have a large enough public profile to justify the publication of a few hundred thousand copies of your ghostwritten book...
...We saw the trial on TV...
...Simpson double-homicide trial, has now co-penned a compendious apologia entitled Without a Doubt...
...But then again, these are sad times...
...I am not gesting that Clark people V 5or,i,3011 BA 411211 frax—of 66 July 1997 • The American Spectator would have necessarily won this case had she avoided the famous errors cited above...
...She's like a football team that got spotted a 28- o lead in the first quarter of the Super Bowl, only to lose 63-31...
...We already know why they lost...
...Nobody really expects ex-politicians to write their own books, but it is a sad commentary on our times that even lawyers need ghostwriters to put their thoughts into luminous prose...
...All that matters is the brand name...
...She does seem to have been saddled with an incompetent judge and a recalcitrantly unintelligent set of jurors...
...The John Elway of Criminal Prosecutors Without a Doubt Marcia Clark with Teresa Carpenter Doubleday /502 pages / $25.95 REVIEWED BY Joe Queenan One of the great things about professional football is that no one ever asks the team that lost the Super Bowl to write a book about it...
...The other guys were better...
...Jane Q. Public knows who you are, so she might buy a copy of your book...
...Consider a typical passage: Almost every day, the defense made some attempt to inject race into the courtroom...
...So we're not going to stop the presses just to print this recycled material...
...But the second, bigger problem is that Clark isn't a victim...
...Assisting her in this effort is Teresa Carpenter, a Pulitzer-Prizewinning journalist now reduced to doing JOE QUEENAN is the author of The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card (Hyperion...
...Well, obviously to make a few bucks, both for Marcia Clark, and for her Pulitzer Prize–winning ghostwriter, who clearly needs the spare cash...
...She should have vetted Mark Fuhrman more carefully before she put him on the stand...
...The trial made her a celebrity...
...I don't blame her for losing the case...
...But we sure as hell don't want to read their books...
...The deliberate twisting of reality to distort this horrific murder was the biggest lie told in the entire case...
...She can move to France...
...Here we have two distinct problems...
...You can call the cops sloppy, you can call me and my colleagues inept, but the facts showed that Simpson was guilty...
...Our hearts go out to the losers, who will be haunted forever by the memory of what might have been...
...She got a huge advance for the book...
...We read about it in the papers...
...A victim of an incompetent judge...
...I blame her for writing the book...
...It is a blow-by-blow recapitulation of everything that took place in the O.J...
...She should have made sure that Simpson tried on a pair of duplicate gloves without wearing a latex liner...
...the evidence demanded that he be arrested and tried...
...Au contraire, Ms...
...Marcia Clark, the Los Angeles public prosecutor who made a mess of the O.J...
...Don Imus and Dominick Dunne got the word out...
...The details of the Simpson case—the gloves, the white Bronco, the cut hand, the missing knife, the "n" word—are as widely known as the details of George Washington's chopping down the cherry tree...
...The society Marcia Clark was supposed to protect has to live with the fallout from this trial...
...One, we already know all this stuff...
...No one is really interested in reading books by people who lost the biggest game of their lives...
...Without a Doubt is not so much a bad book as an unnecessary one...
...A victim of Simpson's unethical lawyers...
...scut work...
...The American people are...
...How very different things are in the publishing arena...
...A victim of a racist police officer...
...Marcia Clark isn't the victim...
...It seemed to me the height of immorality cynically exploiting a serious social issue for the benefit of a murderer who'd never lifted a damned finger to advance the cause of civil rights...
...Simpson trial from the time the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were discovered to the moment the murderer officially beat the rap...
...For more information on the burgeoning genre of best-selling authors most famous for being losers, consult "Carter, James...
...What then is the point of this book...
...You do not see the shelves in your local bookstore filled to overflowing with volumes by Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly, Minnesota Vikings coach Bud Grant, Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway...
...Clark seems to be laboring under the impression that most of us missed out on this event, that she is writing a book about esoteric twelfth-century Incan burial techniques of whose existence the general public is entirely ignorant...
...Never mind that your only claim to fame is having lost the most famous criminal trial in American history, in a case that was initially viewed as being completely unlosable...
...The rest of America can't...
...But the facts also show that the cops were sloppy and that Clark and her colleagues were inept...
...She should have kept it simple, stupid, because she was dealing with a simple, stupid jury...
...A victim of a brain-dead jury...
...Simpson wasn't "rousted" by a band of racist cops...
...By this point, the words "Bruno" and "Magli" are so much a part of our DNA coding that even our grandchildren will come into the world with an innate understanding that if your parents name you Kato it's because they've already decided that you're an idiot...
...Beyond that, the book would appear to be a sad attempt to portray Clark as a victim...
...Even if Doubleday would...
Vol. 30 • July 1997 • No. 7
