A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald
Errol Morris
Language: English
Pages: 576
ISBN: 0143123696
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Academy Award–winning filmmaker Errol Morris examines one of the most notorious and mysterious murder trials of the twentieth century
In this profoundly original meditation on truth and the justice system, Errol Morris—a former private detective and director of The Thin Blue Line—delves deeply into the infamous Jeffrey MacDonald murder case. MacDonald, whose pregnant wife and two young daughters were brutally murdered in 1970, was convicted of the killings in 1979 and remains in prison today. The culmination of an investigation spanning over twenty years and a masterly reinvention of the true-crime thriller, A Wilderness of Error is a shocking book because it shows that everything we have been told about the case is deeply unreliable and that crucial elements of case against MacDonald are simply not true.
The Iraq War and International Law
The Threat of Force in International Law (Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law)
Win Your Case: How to Present, Persuade, and Prevail--Every Place, Every Time
Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas
The Essential Talmud (30th Anniversary Edition)
(or, as the case may be, misperception) of what each man is like. It is in this sense that writers of nonfiction create the characters in their texts—through the two-way force of the author/subject encounter.4 I agree with Malcolm. “As the poet can’t change the rhyme pattern, so the journalist cannot alter facts. Where McGinniss gets the facts wrong, you are right to charge him with falling down on the job.” But in The Journalist and the Murderer, a year later, Malcolm decided that facts don’t
accommodate the sample types that we were being asked to evaluate. But then there were other challenges. The lawyers were telling the scientists what to do. And that’s really not appropriate. You have to look at the mission of the lab, which is to identify deceased U.S. military service members from current and previous military conflicts. The lab was court-ordered [to do the DNA analysis] in 1999, and it wasn’t completed until May 10, 2006. But during that seven-year period, there was the USS
353 indictment of, 149, 150 initial account of, 13–14 injuries of, 13–14, 83, 114, 147, 437 introspective tape recordings of, 349–54, 359 Kassabs’ civil suit filed against, 342, 389 in lie about hunt for killers, 86–88, 127–28 McGinniss’s correspondence with, 342–48, 357, 359, 362–63, 388–89 move to California of, 115, 119, 128–29, 163, 170–71 as prime suspect, 39 psychological and psychiatric evaluations of, 48, 67–68, 69, 94, 99–101, 115–16, 144–48, 193–99, 248, 439, 465, 482 as
had made Woodstock and drugs and acid and all those terminology commonplace and well-known…It just seems to me on balance that the court has to say, “I know the words the government wanted, but the total effect of what they read to the jury tends to convey some larger, different image,” and that to leave that to lie in this case—to leave it in at all—is to present considerable danger of prejudice… THE COURT:…Let me say that I was of the impression that the jury was bored and to the point that
forensic evidence because we hadn’t asked it in time. ERROL MORRIS: Under normal circumstances, might this even be grounds for dismissing the case or reversing the case, no? BERNARD SEGAL: Well, the courts are not quick to dismiss cases for what may be considered a procedural gap such as not giving us the evidence there that we needed. But this was a terrible, terrible miscarriage. In a case entirely built upon forensic evidence, to not allow the defense to examine it? Now, we did look at a few
