The Crime of Sheila McGough - Paperback

by Janet Malcolm (Author)

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

Front Jacket

[N]o other writer tells better stories about the perpetual, the unwinnable, battle between narrative and truth. --"The New York Times Book Review
The Crime of Sheila McGough is Janet Malcolm's brilliant expose 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.
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.

Back Jacket

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.