Author finds himself on familiar turf in 'Hanging Judge'

 Max D. Stern, The Daily Record Newswire

“The Hanging Judge”

By Michael Ponsor

Open Road Media E-riginal, 2013

376 pages; $16.99

 

One would say that Michael A. Ponsor’s new novel, “The Hanging Judge,” is an exciting and welcome entrant into the legal thriller genre, if it were not so much more than that.

The story revolves around a death penalty prosecution in the Western Division of the District of Massachusetts and grows out of what has become the routine business of the federal criminal docket: narcotics prosecution of minority defendants facing inevitable conviction and draconian sentence for comparatively minor crime.

(As the story opens, the protagonist, Judge David Norcross, laments that he has handed out more than 1,000 years in prison in his just two years on the bench. “I am not a judge. I’m an adding machine,” he remarks.)

But the case turns out to be anything but routine. A drive-by shooting in Holyoke kills not only the “gang-banger” drug dealer target, but the innocent (and white) mother of three, felled by a stray bullet while bending down to pet a puppy on the way to volunteer work.

Very “bad facts,” as they say. Indeed, officials at the Department of Justice, already impatient with Massachusetts’ aversion to capital punishment, jump at the opportunity to order a death penalty RICO prosecution.

Suspicion soon focuses on Clarence “Moon” Hudson, an African American small-scale dealer of drugs who has a record and has done some time. He now has a wife and child to whom he is devoted and is struggling — two steps forward, one step back — to leave his old life behind.

The prosecutor is Lydia Gomez-Larsen, a Cuban American who labors under the opposing pressures of a boss who expects a win and her perception of disapproval in her own community.

Bill Redpath, Hudson’s attorney, is a criminal defense lifer taking on his fourth death penalty case. Overly engrossed in his latest defense, Redpath’s chain smoking regularly sets the blizzard of paper in his cluttered office on fire. The resemblance to the author’s mentor, Boston defense attorney Bill Homans, is convincing, and decidedly not coincidental, which Ponsor admits in his author’s note.

The book draws richly from Ponsor’s experience as a federal judge of 20 years.  The dueling opening statements at the trial are a special treat. Gomez-Larsen sets the highly charged emotional tone and then skillfully weaves the facts into an overpowering case, whereupon Redpath immediately deflects the emotion and systematically strips down the impregnable mountain the prosecutor has just built.

Unlike many other novels of the genre, there are no flights of fancy here. The story unfolds from the varied points of view of the characters, none of whom are without flaws or lacking in virtues.

This allows Ponsor to highlight the inherent ambiguity of the trial process — as Norcross’ clerk observes: “a trial is about believability, not necessarily truth” — and also to keep the reader turning the pages to discover how the crime actually occurred and how it will all turn out.

What results is an engaging “whodunit” coupled with a refreshing insider’s examination of the ability of the judicial system to sort out the truth and achieve genuine justice.

While Ponsor, who continues to sit on the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, disavows having implied any personal view on the death penalty, his story and his characters undeniably make the case. Norcross’ chief judge sums it up:  “Who had the inhuman idea that we could rationally select people for execution anyway?”

The book has a number of subplots, not all of which seem necessary, but one is essential. Ponsor interlaces his fictional account with a real one about the prosecution, trial and hanging of Dominic Daley and James Halligan in Northampton in 1806. At their trial, which began two days after appointment of counsel, there was scant evidence other than that they were Irish immigrants passing through Protestant western Massachusetts. In case the irony of the lesson ignored is not recognized by the reader, Ponsor’s innocent victim in the fictional component is the direct descendent of Dominic Daley.

Judge Ponsor presided over the first federal death penalty case ever to be tried in Massachusetts, and the experience, obviously, profoundly affected him. His first sally into the realm of mystery fiction entertains, but more importantly informs and provokes the reader in a way that can be done only by one intimately familiar with the fault lines of the system.

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Max D. Stern practices at Stern, Shapiro, Weissberg & Garin in Boston.