Pursuing the Horizon

Book excerpt: Pursuing the Horizon offers a collection of essays and courtroom stories from an activist, death penalty lawyer, and Washington, D.C. judge struggling to seek justice in the courtroom, in the fields where migrant farmworkers toil and in the rice paddies of Vietnam. The book explores justice in all its forms from freedom for beaten migrant farmworkers in the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan, to life itself in a death row plea for mercy before Governor George Wallace of Alabama only to witness the client killed in a botched execution in the electric chair that shocked the world. Justice from the other side of the bench looks at the challenge for a judge wrestling with the age-old quandary of whether the ends justify the means when strictly following the law would result in a miscarriage of justice. The author must make the wrenching decision as to whether to terminate life support to allow a woman die with dignity when family members have different views of the right to live and right to die. The elusive search for justice follows the judge to a high profile murder trial for the killing of a prominent Georgetown writer by her fabulist husband posing as an Iraqi general all the while conning a Vice President, Supreme Court justice and elite journalists that led to the Hollywood movie Georgetown, starring Christoph Waltz and Vanessa Redgrave. Finally, the journey takes the author to Vietnam where he seeks to pay homage and find reconciliation at the site where his brother was killed in the war. Pursuing the Horizon allows the reader to sample some of the most horrifying, perplexing, and important issues in life and the law, offering the general public, via suspenseful and riveting stories, a rare lens into the daily life and minds of those seeking to achieve justice and those who must live, or sometimes die, with the consequences of their efforts. Justice, like the horizon, always seems to be beyond our grasp. But that can never mean that we should stop pursuing it. This book is about the author's search for justice along with dedicated judges, lawyers, jurors, those accused of crime, those who are the victims of crime, police, social workers, nurses, mental health workers, and the public at large.