Saturday, September 01, 2012

This could be be the start …

… of something big: Book Review: A Wilderness of Error - WSJ.com.


In the years after the verdict, the prosecution's narrative of the crime—evil man, perhaps on amphetamines, murdering his family and concocting a story about hippie-like intruders—was burnished in the public mind by Joe McGinniss's 1983 best seller about MacDonald, "Fatal Vision"; by a television miniseries based on the book; and, later, by "The Journalist and the Murderer" (1990), Janet Malcolm's analysis of Mr. McGinniss's wily interactions with his subject. Most people, including me, assumed that there was no reasonable doubt about Jeffrey MacDonald's guilt.

The assumption may well be false. In "A Wilderness of Error," Errol Morris, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, challenges the established narrative and offers a plausible counternarrative. The book's thoughtful presentation of the evidence alone makes it worth taking seriously. Just as important, Mr. Morris's tone is temperate and fair-minded. He is not an angry polemicist but, we cannot help feeling, someone trying to get at the truth. His 1988 documentary, "The Thin Blue Line," helped to commute the life sentence of a convicted murderer in Texas. Mr. Morris clearly knows what it is to interrogate conventional views and scrutinize legal documents with care.

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