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Legal News

: Lawbeat

Another Weingarten masterpiece

By Mark Obbie

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Readers of The Washington Post Magazine probably know Gene Weingarten as the humor writer in the back of the book, a wisecracking funny man. People in the business may know him also as the former editor to humorist Dave Barry. I knew all that, but I also knew him as the writer of a memorable, Pulitzer-winning feature that I've recommended often to others. That 2007 story, "Pearls Before Breakfast," centered on an ingenuous prank -- recording the lack of reaction of commuters in a D.C. Metro station to a street performer who was actually a virtuoso -- but in fact was a deeper story about human nature. And it was masterfully written. When I saw today's Post Magazine cover story's hed and dek, I expected a well-told legal tale by Weingarten. The heds read:

Fatal DistractionForgetting a child in the back seat of a hot, parked car is a horrifying, inexcusable mistake. But is it a crime?

We don't get an answer to that question -- not in the traditional legal-reporting sense, anyway, with a careful look at the elements of the crime and what it takes to prove it. What we get, instead, is something much more profound. And something consistent with Weingarten's abilities as a storyteller and interpreter of people. Weingarten doesn't ignore the legal story. Early on, he sets the context -- "There may be no act of human failing that more fundamentally challenges our society's views about crime, punishment, justice and mercy" -- and points out that what separates one case from another aren't just the facts, but prosecutorial discretion, or jurors' mercy. He includes some basic facts about such cases: how common they are, and what types of parents do this. But his deep reporting on this context is compressed into short form, leaving the rest of the long-form story to wrestle with the mysteries of our memories and attention span; about grief and forgiveness; and about our inability to comprehend making this horrible mistake, until we do. Weingarten does not hide the horrors inflicted on the little victims or on their negligent parents, starting with a lede that defies you to stop once you've started:

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn't want any sedation, that he didn't deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.

That man eventually talks to Weingarten, as do other parents, with stories that will surprise you and force you to think harder about the next horrible incident. A story like this is a massive undertaking, the sort of reporting and writing challenge that most journalists can only dream of handling. Fewer still could handle them so well.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on March 08, 2009 (boomark / email).