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Heavy justice : the State of Indiana v. Michael G. Tyson / J. Gregory Garrison and Randy Roberts.

by Garrison, J. Gregory.

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Tyson, Mike, 1966- -- Trials, litigation, etc.

Trials (Rape) -- Indiana -- Indianapolis.

Trials, litigation, etc.

Publisher Info:

Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., ©1994.

xii, 311 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Heavy Justice is the inside story of one of the great courtroom battles of our time, told by the prosecutor in the case, the man who put "Iron" Mike Tyson behind bars. With all the drama, verve, and procedural detail of a novel by John Grisham or Scott Turow, it is also a highly topical morality play touching on all the issues of sex, race, celebrity, and justice that now so perplex our society. How does a master legal tactician establish beyond a reasonable doubt what happened between two people in a hotel room in the middle of the night, when the conventional wisdom could dismiss the whole affair as a groupie going after a rich and famous man? How does a prosecutor weave through the thicket of "expert" testimony when noted authorities disagree radically even about the meaning of physical evidence? How does he build up, layer upon layer, the detailed psychological profile of each of the players, so that motives and values and states of mind become almost tangible to the jury? And what leads the other side to base their defense on a contention so bizarre as this: that the man accused was such a disgusting human being that no woman in her right mind would have gone to his room expecting anything other than raw sex? When he first heard about the Tyson case, special prosecutor Greg Garrison wanted nothing to do with it. Date rape? Always tough to prove. And one of the few facts already reported was that the young woman making the accusation had been in the defendant's hotel room at 2 o'clock in the morning. This case was dead on arrival. Except that when Desiree Washington told her story, Garrison believed her. So drawing on this simple trust, and inspired by Desiree's courage and conviction, he accepted the challenge of this "unwinnable" case, stepping into the ring against not only Mike Tyson, multimillionaire sports celebrity and hero to millions, and Don King, Tyson's promoter and worldwide multimedia cheerleader, but also the Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly, perhaps the slickest and most powerful defense counsel money could buy. The trial, of course, turned into a media circus, ringed by protesters and satellite dishes, conducted amid charges of racism and against a backdrop of death threats, bribery allegations, and a suspicious midnight fire at the hotel where the jury was sequestered. But beyond those salacious facts, beyond the glitter and the Minicams, the real drama took place quietly behind the scenes, where Garrison and his colleagues painstakingly assembled the body of evidence that would persuade the jury to convict Tyson. Heavy Justice brings together the worlds of bigtime sports, low-life sleaze, painstaking police work, and the lofty realms of Harvard's Alan Dershowitz, who appears in the final chapter as a comical deus ex machina determined to overturn the verdict on appeal. And it is Dershowitz's efforts that prompt Garrison's concluding reflections on this case and on the state of American jurisprudence, when trials are conducted as much on "Geraldo" as in courts of law.

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