Black's Law.

Roy Black Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 320 pp, $25

Books about trials and trial lawyers fall into two broad categories: those written about lawyers and their trials and those written by the lawyers themselves about cases they have tried. The second category is always suspect, as even a good work can be fatally flawed by rampant self-adulation. Black's Law falls into this high-risk category, and I was perfectly ready to be under-whelmed, if not annoyed, by the book. I was not.

Florida criminal defense lawyer Roy Black's book is the history of four of his cases--three murder cases and one white collar crime case. The stories are imminently readable and allow readers to come as close to walking in Mr. Black's trial shoes as is possible from the vantage of their armchairs.

Black's Law is a good book for trial lawyers on several levels. First, there is enough trial transcript in the four stories to make for good learning opportunities. One of the tenets of the late law professor Irving Younger's philosophy for inexperienced lawyers was to read books about trials, especially those with embedded questions and answers from more experienced lawyers. Thus, classics like Francis X. Wellman's The Art of Cross-Examination or almost any book about Sir Edward Carson's cross-examination of Oscar Wilde set a reading standard for lawyers who are interested in their craft. Second, the stories themselves are interesting.

The first and third cases in Black's book, Alvarez and Hicks, are murder cases with plenty of courtroom dialogue and some sound tactical lessons. In the second case, Knight, Black represents a condemned man during the writ of habeas corpus process that follows the unsuccessful appeals of a death penalty case. For those of us who are involved in death penalty litigation, the story is interesting, but not radically enlightening. But, because it is not a trial story, the story may be of least interest to the general reading public and, perhaps, even the trial bar. We would have been better served with an additional tale from a jury trial.

The last case, which details bank president Fred De La Mata's prosecution for bribery and money laundering, is more enlightening for the civil bar. Many of us cannot imagine being in the shoes of a criminal defendant. The defendants in Black's first three stories are defendants charged with "street crimes." But De La Mata might as well have been an innocent, hardworking lawyer. His fall from grace, his mental decompression, his victimization by the government's ruinous games, and his abandonment by lifelong "friends" are familiar to those of us who have lived "white collar" nightmares with our clients. Black does an excellent job of bringing home this kafkaesque alienation at the hands of an overreaching system.

An interesting example of an excellent cross-examination appears in Alvarez during Black's questioning of Luis Rivera, an amateur gunsmith who had modified police officer Luis Alvarez's service revolver, the alleged murder weapon. The Q&A is instructive not so much from a substantive point of view but from a structural one. Black's first three questions end with tag lines that are classics for leading questions" ... didn't I?" and "... isn't that true?" But, beginning with the fourth question, the tag lines disappear. Now the questions are statements thrown at the witness with question marks at the end. As we read, we hear the inflections at the end of these statements that turn them into questions in the courtroom. This classic transition from real question to statement-as-a-question is critical to the art of cross-examination.

Black's dialogues display these fundamental tools time after time. Black gives two excellent examples of courtroom demonstrations gone bad that every trial lawyer can take to heart. His motto is, Never conduct courtroom demonstrations with an adverse witness.

The first example is told at the near expense of Black himself. During the cross-examination of a SWAT team officer and hand-to-hand combat expert in Alvarez, Black decided to use the witness to demonstrate how difficult it is for an officer to dis-arm a suspect--the circumstance in which his own client had found himself that gave rise to his murder charge. Black asked the officer to step down from the stand, but as he approached, Black sensed the officer was "ready for combat." It was a fight Black was not going to win. `"Oh no,' I said, walking away and shaking my head, trying to defuse the situation with humor. `Now you're getting too serious.'"

The second example is at the expense of the prosecutor in the murder trial of Steve Hicks. The prosecutor in the case was cross-examining a defense firearms expert on whether a round could lodge or hang in any of the cylinders of the revolver that was the acknowledged lethal weapon. The prosecutor ordered the expert to put a round in the chamber.

The expert resisted. The judge, a former associate of the prosecutor, sided with the prosecutor. The round was loaded. The prosecutor then commanded the witness to load the other five shells into the revolver. Again, he protested on the basis of courtroom safety, but the judge overruled. The finale, of course, was the order to unload.

As Black tells it, "Five bullets fell out. The sixth remained in the chamber. A juror jumped up and pointed at the gun. `Look! It stuck!'" If you cannot be there to experience this firsthand, the next best way to learn is through a dramatic presentation like this.

On the critical side, Black misses an excellent opportunity to teach readers about the most obscure area of trial practice--jury selection. In Hicks, the defendant asks Black about his strategy in asking detailed questions of the prospective jurors. His answer is astute, "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." Perfect, but readers could have benefited greatly from an example or two. Opportunity missed. There is one part of the book that Black should have left in his word processor, and that part is his personal attack on then State Attorney Janet Reno. The attack is not necessary.

Black's ascribing political reasons to Reno's indicting police officer Luis Alvarez hardly distinguishes her from other prosecutors faced with similar situations. His labeling her as "Saint Janet" and his chiding her for not indicting herself for the Branch Davidian tragedy in Waco, Texas, in 1993 are beneath a lawyer of dignity and reputation.

Black's Law is a good book for any trial lawyer to read, and it is an important book for the less experienced among us. The author avoids the common sin of too much self-congratulation while giving readers enough courtroom dialogue to create realism and allow for vicarious learning of the courtroom arts.

William P Allison is a partner with Allison, Yeager & Bassett in Austin, Texas.