2020-12-03
In this debut memoir, a former prosecutor recounts the various crimes and culprits he faced in Arkansas.
Jones had been an Arkansas lawyer for a quarter-century before retiring. Most of the events in this book took place while he was the prosecuting attorney in the 4th Judicial District, from 1993 to 2006. He writes about numerous cases he’s seen, often contained within short chapters. These primarily involve serious crimes, like murder and rape, as well as kidnap victims who endured periods of torture. He discusses the cases unflinchingly even when they entail such atrocities as animal cruelty and the mutilation of human bodies. In a later chapter, Jones explains that prosecutors need to keep their emotions in check, suggesting those who regularly empathize with victims “would probably suffer from a form of PTSD.” But the volume offers amusing morsels, too. For example, the author provides a list of people’s unconvincing excuses for speeding and tells of a man who walked into his office with a box of dynamite. Jones periodically focuses on one crime, the Billie Jean Phillips murder, which he describes as the “most frustrating” and “most intriguing” of the homicide cases he prosecuted. The killing, which occurred in 1994, spawned a bevy of suspects, one of whom was the author’s deputy prosecutor, who had an affair with Phillips. Years later, after little progress in the case and heavy public pressure, a murder trial finally began. And the final verdict, like those of so many other cases in this work, wasn’t easy to predict.While Jones’ memoir is generally chronological, it’s not always cohesive. In one chapter, the author discusses juries and jury selection and then, with no segue, moves on to crime scene evidence and lie detectors. Similarly, information sometimes appears randomly, as when Jones cites the death of Arkansas’ governor in the midst of cases unrelated to the leader. Still, the author delivers breezy prose that eases readers into his accounts of dark subject matter. “Every prosecutor has a sore spot,” he writes. “My sore spot was any crime against very young children.” At the same time, he spotlights a career filled with diverse cases, including vengeful murders, accidental deaths, and money scams. Along with those came unexpected legal results; sometimes the sentence was too light while other times a person seemingly got away with murder. Jones occasionally abandons individual cases to write about the law in general. Especially illuminating are a list of conditions juries must consider when the death penalty is on the table and the abundant factors at play in prosecutors’ decisions to file charges. He also includes more personal stories, though sadly not many. He recalls that he “felt like an outsider” for his entire duration as Madison County’s prosecuting attorney. In what he calls a “hostile environment,” locals typically answered a knock on the door with a loaded gun. The author ends his book with a series of intriguing documents, ranging from a letter praising him to a humorous internal memo deeming him the “ring leader” of a “psychotic cult of gun nuts.”
An enriching and absorbing portrait of a life in law. (index)