Black's Law: A Criminal Lawyer Reveals His Defense Strategies in Four Cliffhanger Cases

Best known for representing headline-grabbers such as Marv Albert and William Kennedy Smith, defense attorney Black has spent 28 ""raw, bizarre"" years in the criminal courts. Here he recounts his successful defense strategies in four apparently hopeless cases, only one of which made the national news: the 1982 murder trial of Luis Alvarez, a young police officer whose shooting of a black teenager set off three days of rioting in Miami. Black shows how he selected, and then seduced, the Alvarez jury, how he designed his client's appearance (""single-breasted suits, in muted hues, with non-designer ties"") and how he showed up the prosecution's big-bucks case with low-tech tactics (""Never underestimate the power of a piece of chalk""). But for Black the most lethal weapon is cross-examination, the fascinating transcripts of which he quotes at length. Black tends to downplay his own rare mistakes even as he exudes contempt for prosecutorial, and sometimes judicial, incompetence. He's very good, and he knows it. On the other hand, he justifies his law-is-hell cockiness with convincing reminders of the high stakes involved: in the case of Thomas Knight, for example, all that saved the insane, indigent murderer from Florida's electric chair was Black's deft exposure of the previous attorneys' gross ineptitude. Practitioners may find many of Black's revelations unsurprising, but no one will dispute Black's in-court performance, which this book powerfully captures. BOMC alternate; author tour. (Apr.)