Here's the beginning:
"North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three-dollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He’d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood.Update: I was talking to a friend who mentioned NPR did a short piece on this. It's a dramatic reading -- totally worth a listen.
Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner."
It starts off real good, then disintegrates into boring mumbo-jumbo though. I hate that -- you feel tricked.
ReplyDeletethat is wild -- the chief justice of the united states writing a sam spade adventure.
ReplyDeletethat little piece of narrative is cool, and like jen said, it would have been even better had he written his entire decision that way instead of a bit of a bait-and-switch.
but it would have taken a lot of guts for a supreme court justice to write a decision in that style all the way through.
i wish it was longer, too. but it was very unexpected. a breath of fresh air in a place you usually only find legalese.
ReplyDeletebe sure to check out the NPR piece i just posted as an update.