The Crime of Sheila McGough - by Janet Malcolm (Paperback)

About the Book

Malcolm presents a brilliant expose of the miscarriage of justice in the case of Sheila McGough, a disbarred lawyer recently released from prison after serving two years for collaborating with a client in his fraud.

Book Synopsis

The Crime of Sheila McGough is Janet Malcolm's brilliant exposé of miscarriage of justice in the case of Sheila McGough, a disbarred lawyer recently released from prison. McGough had served 2 1/2 years for collaborating with a client in his fraud, but insisted that she didn't commit any of the 14 felonies she was convicted.

"[N]o other writer tells better stories about the perpetual, the unwinnable, battle between narrative and truth." --The New York Times Book Review

An astonishingly persuasive condemnation of the cupidity of American law and its preference for convincing narrative rather than the truth, this is also a story with an unconventional heroine. McGough is a zealous defense lawyer duped by a white-collar con man; a woman who lives, at the age of 54, with her parents; a journalistic subject who frustrates her interviewer with her maddening literal-mindedness. Spirited, illuminating, delightfully detailed, The Crime of Sheila McGough is both a dazzling work of journalism and a searching meditation on character and the law.

From the Back Cover

In the winter of 1996, Janet Malcolm received a letter from a stranger -- a disbarred lawyer named Sheila McGough, who had recently been released from prison, and who wrote that she had been convicted of crimes she had not committed. Malcolm decided to look into the case, and this book -- a dazzling work of journalism as well as a searching meditation on character, on the law, and on the incompatibility of narrative with truth -- is the product of her growing belief that a miscarriage of justice had taken place.

Sheila McGough was prosecuted and convicted because the government (and then the jury) interpreted her zealous representation of a con-man client named Bob Bailes as collaboration in his fraud. Malcolm's close readings of court records and her interviews with lawyers and businessmen connected with the case give a picture of American law and American cupidity that is startling in its pitiless specificity. And her portrait of Sheila McGough -- "a woman of almost preternatural honesty and decency", as well as maddening literal-mindedness and discursiveness -- brings an unconventional new heroine into vivid being.

Review Quotes

"No portrait of innocence was ever more damning, revealing, and compassionate at once.... Janet Malcolm [is] a formidable reporter." --The Boston Globe

"[A] breathtaking series of insights on the peculiarly treacherous nature of legal narrative.... Janet Malcolm is the most morally illuminating literary journalist in the country." --Slate