Man Slaughter:
Doyle, Kevin M
Retelling and retrying MAN SLAUGHTER STEVEN ENGLUND Doubleday $17.95, 419 pp. Kevin M. Doyle THE 1978 Wisconsin trial of Jen Patri for shooting her estranged husband, Bob Patri, gained national...
...Englund suggests Bob Patri was not Eisenberg's wife-beater but simply a neglectful husband and father who let his marriage wither...
...The book illustrates well both the inevitability and imperfectibility of criminal defense-social-cause partnerships...
...Through extensive interviews, Englund uncovered the flesh and blood people behind the Patri controversy...
...This logic should sound familiar...
...As a storyteller, Englund compares with Mailer or Capote-or even a less-manic Tom Wolfe...
...The pro-defendant disclaimer prefacing the literary conviction is wearing a tad thin...
...Kevin M. Doyle THE 1978 Wisconsin trial of Jen Patri for shooting her estranged husband, Bob Patri, gained national attention through a self-defense claim grounded in a battered-wife "history...
...294-295 and 398...
...It fails really for the same reason the Patri case makes an interesting story...
...By illuminating the concrete situation the story evokes that moral ambiguity we all know the law ignores or smothers...
...The author is best when reminding us of the law's inability to capture or reflect moral nuance...
...It doesn't just raise questions or tragic possibilities but deals in conclusions and evidentiary probabilities...
...The case turns on perceptions of personalities and judgments of character...
...In a sense, Englund adds attorney Eisenburg and his defense to the docket for retrial...
...Still, a weak but unmistakable retrial has marred a good story...
...If he had found a way, a good book could have been a very good book...
...In his final pages, he deems Man Slaughter not the last word or the whole word, but "my word...
...Maybe Englund could not separate historical probing from legal opining...
...For behind defense and prosecution theories, both deceased and accused emerge as victims...
...For Man Slaughter is two books, one good, one not so good...
...Englund must ask we trust him as he concludes Jen Patri's self-defense plea was a combination of ideological flimflam and character-assassination...
...First, the good one: Man Slaughter is a well-researched and well-recounted story...
...Defense attorney Alan Eisenberg pulled feminist groups and media aboard his adversarial bandwagon and attempted to run it through, or over, the small town of Waupaca...
...The issues are human and "soft...
...Man Slaughter's story tells how social movements and criminal defenses use and abuse each other and how lawyers tailor reality to make cases...
...Englund vividly describes the manipulation of defense facts to fit feminist concerns for battered wives...
...The book's greatest strength is not, however, its treatment of the mis-marriage of lawyer and lobbyist...
...It has become a standard of literary retrials from Allen Weinstein's Hiss analysis to the Milton-Radosh Rosenberg File...
...Englund's verdict thus rests largely on post-trial personal encounters with witnesses which the reader cannot fully share...
...It tells of a hardworking small-town farmer and mother who, accused of killing the only man she had ever loved, becomes a feminist heroine/martyr through her attorney's creative defense efforts...
...Englund's tale is one of lost loves and lives...
...Jen, from a childhood riddled with incest and poverty, could not, in Englund's scenario, surrender the alliance she had forged with Bob against a malignant world...
...For the second book inside Man Slaughter, Englund forgoes storytelling...
...The personal tragedy shows the inadequacy of the law's clear distinction between guilt and innocence...
...Eng-lund's juxtaposition works so well, however, only because his writing delivers...
...Misapplication of burdens of proof, however, is not the reason the retrial aborts...
...She certainly could not watch Bob emotionally mature with another woman, the book's third protagonist, and so killed in hopelesness and helplessness...
...I suspect the Patri juries (there was a murder and related arson trial) wouldn't recognize the actual people Englund emphatically portrays...
...This lesser book is a retrial of State v. Patri...
...As trier of facts, the author focuses more on holes in the defense than on the holes the defense pokes in the State's case...
...But has he earned our trust because he brought a pro-Jen Patri, feminist prejudice to his investigation...
...In what is a second book he then juxtaposes these lives with the caricatures and scripts proffered at trial...
...Englund ultimately concedes that he demands too much trust, that retrial is a bad idea...
...Moreover, Englund does not help matters by salting his early pro-defendant bias with his own ambivalence (see pp...
...Perhaps the author could not suspend or mute his judgments as he pried beneath the surface of the Patri case...
...Along the way, Eisenberg picked up Steven Englund to write a book on the Patri case...
Vol. 110 • November 1983 • No. 19
