Trying patience.

• Author: Ripley, Amanda
• Position: Polital Booknotes

THE EXHAUSTED VETERANS OF America's jury-duty circuit know a nasty little secret about the way our justice system works. Ask the math teachers, secretaries, dentists, and other innocuous individuals who get impaneled time and time again about how they can predict their fates in each new case, and they will tell you the perverse rule of inverse justice: The higher the stakes, the shorter the trial.

If, God forbid, jurors get assigned to an intellectual-property case, or worse, a class-action asbestos suit, they might as well quit their jobs, cancel their vacations, and consign themselves to lives of service. They may endure weeks, if not months, of mind-numbing boredom involving pie charts, "expert" witnesses, and multiple Power Point presentations. And then, just when they've come to care about the case for no good reason other than overexposure, it will be settled out of court. They will be curtly thanked and sent home to look for a new job.

But a murder trial? Ha! A mere civic holiday! A week, tops (provided the defendant is not famous, naturally). A day of jury selection, a few volleys of semi-coherent testimony, several long lunches at Taco Bell, and boom. A young man goes to prison for 300 years, or he collects his watch and wallet and goes home for a steak dinner. Just like on TV!

But lawyers (like journalists) almost never get picked for juries. And very few ever try murder cases themselves, either. So to Thomas Geoghegan, Chicago's criminal court came as a terrifying surprise. Geoghegan is a civil litigator who, before this, has written two well-received books chronicling the decline of the labor movement and liberalism in general (including the 1991 treatise, Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back). But, like most civil litigators, he hardly ever tries any cases. (He estimates that the percentage of civil lawyers who go to trial is 2 to 3 percent, or less.) His cases settle, invariably, after months of billed hours and vows never to do so. All the while, like most lawyers, he yearns to be doing something else: "I keep thinking that somewhere for me there is another life I have as a lawyer and I'm not being allowed to live it."

So it is by sheer accident that Geoghegan ends up helping to defend a young murder suspect named Rolando. At age 15, Rolando had helped two older kids rob a bar. He didn't have a gun and didn't hurt anyone, but one of the other kids shot a customer. So Rolando was convicted...