25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
All Huff, Very Little Fact, August 19, 2005
"Objection" is nothing but a rant after rant. There is little coherent in this book. There is no sequence to the chapters and it proves that to be "famous" one just need be controversial, not factual.
For example, Grace spends a great deal of time blistering the criminal justice system for the way it treats victims. She includes a chapter on the New York Central Park jogger case, complaing about the way original case was defended. Amazingly, she makes no mention at all of the fact that the original defendants were unjustly convicted and served many years in jail for a crime they didn't commit. One wonders if ignoring the facts was something she practiced when she was a prosecutor.
That this fact gets not even a footnote in her book makes all of the book suspect.
While the cover of the book proclaims that it takes a look at the inside story of the criminal justice system, she also takes a pot shot at the civil justice system, a part of the law about which she has no experience. She repeats worn out myths about the "McDonalds's hot coffee case", again displaying an astonishing lack of research.
Nancy Grace fans will probably like the book. I was on the fence about her from watching her on TV, but seeing how shallow this book is, I think it makes anything she says or writes about really suspect.
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31 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Is this a joke?, April 2, 2006
Nancy Grace has co-authored a book decrying the negative influence of 24/7 media and celebrity defendants?!?! She made her millions by slinging mud at celebrity defendants, convicting them on T.V. before they've even been arrested. You need look no further than the cover of the book, which was actually authored by Diana Clehane, but whose name and photo do we see? - one that sells books - Nancy Grace's.
I have to agree with Ms. Clehane and Ms. Grace on one point: We should get rid of the cable shows focusing hour-after-hour on particularly celebrated criminal cases.
But they missed the target in the first part of their book's title... Our focus should not just be on "high-priced defense attorneys" but high-priced, million-book-selling, T.V. drama queens that proclaim their distorted ideas of "justice" as a prosecution system, absent defenses; one where no man is innocent - we're all guilty if she makes that her almighty determination.
Our legal system is not, and should not be, a prosecution mill Ms. Grace.
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87 of 115 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Objection to Nancy Grace, June 13, 2005
This book is full of lots of raw emotion directed against defense attorneys, celebrities, judges, juries and lots of others. The pattern to it is that the emotion is directed against those either who Nancy Grace thinks are guilty or who don't think that Nancy Grace does. The book tries to very loosely offer a plan to make the criminal justice system better, but the plan is ill-defined and weak.
Her objections, summarized by me, are:
- She wants tighter controls on the behavior of the defense.
- She doesn't seem to like the jury system at all
- She wants to re-define downward the standard for guilt. Rather than prosecutors having to prove guilt, the prosecutor would be allowed to make a circumstantial or emotional case for guilt.
She spends a whole lot of time attacking defense attorneys in the book, but its not really credible because its a one-sided attack where she is blind to the possiblity of misconduct by
prosecutors.
The problem with the book is that Nancy Grace is blind to her own faults and her own behavior. She is critical of 24/7 News coverage of trials, but doesn't deal with her own large role in that coverage. She is also blind to the problems in her record as a prosecutor.
Since leaving the prosecutor's office, Nancy Grace has been sharply repremanded by three different appeals courts for unethical and illegal behavior while she was a prosecutor. Her behavior was called illegal by every judge on the Georgia Supreme Court. Georgia is not exactly a friendly place for criminal defense and the lengths the court went in calling out Nancy Grace for ethical violations was very unusual.
They said she:
- Misrepresented facts to the trial judge so that her out of state witness could access the defendants home without the knowledge of the defense. Her witness gained access by breaking down the front door. For good measure, she subsequently also entered the defendants home with CNN cameras.
- Outright misrepresented the testimony of witnesses (falsely indicating in her closing argument that a defense witness had not disagreed with an opinion of the state).
- She inserted false information regarding hearing dates into a court proceeding to gain an advantage.
- She repeatedly ignored the instructions of the court. For example, she made multiple references to issues in her opening statement that the court had ruled (previously) to be inadmissiable.
- She failed to disclose a romantic relationship she knew about between two of her witnesses to the defense. She deliberatly held back her full witness list until the start of the trial.
For those interested, the case was: Carr v. State, 267 Ga. 701, 482 S.E.2d 314 (1997). Its a very detailed case study in how Nancy Grace abused her power as a prosecutor and how she operated without any real sort of ethics.
The court summarized her conduct in really harsh language:
begin quote -
Our review of the record supports Carr's contention that the prosecuting attorney engaged in an extensive pattern of inappropriate and, in some cases, illegal conduct in the course of the trial.
end quote -
This isn't one bad judge, its the entire very conservative usually pro prosection Georgia Supreme Court giving that opinion.
Its also important to remember that the person involved is free today only because he was rich and had the money to hire the lawyers to fight back against what she was trying to do. Most people would have ended up in jail for the rest of their lives.
Now you can choose to think that Nancy was right in this case and that somehow the entire court system of a state is so corrupt that it is misrepresenting the facts to free a man in a corrupt manner. But if you step back from that, your left with a prosecutor in Nancy Grace whose record of abuse in court is horrible. They didn't say sort-of illegal or maybe illegal, they said illegal.
Nancy has nothing to say about this. Since she doesn't participate in any forum that she doesn't control, nobody really has the chance to ask her about it. And this isn't her only problem with an appeals court.
This is important because it shows the big flaw of the book: hypocrisy. The book gets three stars because its a very useful book to read to see the dishonesty and maybe even self-deception that is behind Nancy Grace. The legal system does have ethical problems and problems with the media. But its not just defense attorneys, its prosecutors too. Its also almost surreal to see Nancy Grace of all people object to the media culture of 24/7 surrounding trials.
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