CONVICTION
By Richard North Patterson. Random House. 465 pp. $25.95
Richard North Patterson is a pop novelist who wants to change the world. In 12 previous novels, Patterson has taken on date rape (he's opposed), Watergate-style corruption (also opposed), child abuse (ditto), gun control (he's in favor), late-term abortion (see Protect and Defend for his stance on that) and an evil that Washington knows intimately -- the publicly financed sports stadium. One can hardly blame him for trying to slay society's dragons. One can, however, fault him for trying too hard.
In Conviction, Patterson, a former trial lawyer, makes a case against the death penalty; more specifically, against the labyrinthine and counterintuitive laws governing it. The central thrust of Conviction -- that an innocent man can be put to death because today's legal system provides no mechanism to spare him -- faces bipartisan political hostility. As governors campaigning for the presidency, neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush did anything to stop the executions of mentally retarded prisoners. In 1992, in an Arkansas prison, Ricky Ray Rector set aside a slice of pecan pie from his last meal, to eat after he returned from his lethal injection. In 2000, Oliver David Cruz died in the Texas death chamber even after lawyers cited his IQ of 63 and his three attempts at completing the seventh grade as evidence that he was useless in his own defense.
The cause celebre of Conviction is Rennell Price, a hulking, sad-eyed, slow-witted product of the San Francisco ghetto who, along with his Svengali brother, Payton, has been sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl. Swooping in 15 years after Rennell's conviction is a Justice League familiar to Patterson's readers: crusading attorney Teresa Peralta Paget, along with her law partner and husband, the famous Christopher Paget, and Chris's son, Carlo, now a lawyer, too.
Terri and the gang have two months to derail what increasingly seems like the inevitable execution of Rennell, who they claim is retarded. Rennell's account of the crime is limited to the crude refrain "I didn't do that little girl!" A key witness has died, and the physical evidence is too degraded to test for DNA, but Terri has determined that Rennell's lawyer at the original trial was a lazy cocaine addict, and in an 11th-hour confession, Payton proclaims Rennell's innocence and fingers another suspect in his place. Terri argues that that's enough for the courts to re-examine the conviction, but the game is stacked. Terri's appeals climb the judicial ladder, eventually involving another of Patterson's recurring characters, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Caroline Masters. Masters gets to duke it out with a not-so-veiled Antonin Scalia clone, a capital punishment zealot aptly named Justice Anthony Fini. Adding drama to the mix is Terri's teenage daughter, Elena, whose abuse Patterson fans will remember from Eyes of a Child. She's outraged that her mother would defend a convicted child molester.
It's high stakes and low drama played out in a middlebrow arena -- blue-state values served up red-meat style, hold the purple prose. Deliciously, Patterson spends the first third of Conviction piling on proof that Rennell is a sick predator worthy of being put to death. A less confident plotmeister might shrink from the task Patterson then hands himself -- to rehabilitate Rennell in the story's middle section, rendering him sympathetic enough to care about. The last third of Conviction offers a revelatory tour of the dark side of the American justice system.
But buzz-sawing through a thriller requires different reading muscles from parsing the limits of habeas corpus and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Acts. A reader's eyes can be forgiven for skipping over a few didactic paragraphs before Patterson gets back to the action. His argument is clear. The law, he says, is bloodthirsty. The best chance to save the wrongly condemned rests with our governors, and you can see for yourself how often those guys stroll down Mercy Street. The defendant is an afterthought.
Patterson is a terrific novelist whose only bar to greatness is, as with many other popular authors, a slavish devotion to plot. His characters aren't quite stereotypes, but they often seem to be conceived less as individuals than as narrative conveniences. Same with the dialogue. Regardless, Conviction, though not Patterson's best, has its rewards. That it tilts more toward educating than entertaining can be blamed on his decision to push an agenda. But give him credit for backing an underdog. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but at this point in the evolution of our great republic, it isn't mightier than 50cc of potassium chloride. •
Bob Ivry teaches journalism at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
