A Cozzens Novel
I bought a few novels by James Gould Cozzens many years ago, inspired entirely by a piece by Joseph Epstein.
I just re-read The Just and the Unjust.
Lots of good stuff here. As I mentioned to my Ethics class, Cozzens is on the side of the squares, a bit like Aristotle. For them I read a bit about the Calumet Club in a small town, requiring respectability and a bit of income in its members; being from an old family helps. Obviously no sane person would say every member of such a club has Aristotle's moral virtues, nor that no one outside it has them; but it's a start.
The protagonist is an Assistant District Attorney, who plays a role in a rare murder trial in a small town. The defence lawyer is much of a back-slapper and practical joker than our hero. This doesn't mean there is anything really wrong with him--we are told our hero is probably not demonstrative enough, a brooder who will occasionally offer an outburst with little reason or explanation. (Passive/aggressive, as we say now?) Still, the defence lawyer is a bit shady--less than a gentleman--and this helps him defend his clients with sincerity.
This underlies a passage about having a sense of humor: "Though a sense of humor was generally spoken of with approval, and a man was pitied for lacking one, Abner supposed that he must lack one himself. When he saw a sense of humor in action, it always seemed to Abner a lucky thing, since somebody had to do the work of an unappreciative world, that a certain number of people could be relied on to lack it."
I'll have to remember that when we come to "wit" (the old comedy was better than the new comedy) in the Ethics.
The defence lawyer pull off a bit of a coup. He practically begs the jury to carry out jury nullification. Although the facts are pretty clear, the real reason the accused are on trial for first degree murder is that they were part of kidnapping. The ringleader eventually shot their captive, and this was probably not really planned or intended by the two who are on trial. (One of them may have fired the second shot into the victim, but this is doubtful; no one suggested that the second accused did any shooting at all). The novel is set in the 1930s, so this demonstrates the old law (then new?) of felony homicide. If a homicide was committed during another felony, as a direct result of the felony, then all those guilty of the felony could be charged with murder for the homicide. The lawyer asks the jury to reject this reasoning, and apparently they do. They find the two guilty of second-degree murder; maximum 20 years, whereas their erstwhil accomplice who testified against them, and was less involved in planning the kidnapping than they were, will get life for pleading guilty to first-degree murder. The prosecutors and judges expected convictions, so that the judge could then impose the death penalty. All of them seem to regard this as the just outcome, which was denied them by the jury.
The defence also raised the issue of a confession extorted by a skillful beating by the FBI. Such practices eventually led to the famous "rights of the accused" cases, especially Miranda, which Rehnquist as a young man said he opposed, but as an old man he voted to uphold.
In the last pages, to my surprise, the lawyers and judges are tending to oppose capital punishment altogether.
"There is always a little satisfaction in seeing the professionally just, reformers and clergymen, judges and prosecutors and police officers, set back."
Abner sees the chance to become District Attorney, and to groom a younger man as his assistant. "He was unexpectedly made aware of the pleasure of patronage. It was, he saw, a fairly pure pleasure. If it made him feel good to be able to give what was plainly so much wanted, the good feeling was at least in part the good feeling of being able to adjust the fallings-out of a too impersonal and regardless chance so that the deserving got some of their deserts...the one real pleasure, when all was said and done, of power."
As Abner gains self-knowledge in the course of the novel, one thing he seems to conclude is that he is not so different from Harry, the slippery but skillful--and, in his way, hard-working, defence lawyer.
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