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“It has to be more than plain error, Nathan. We’re referees, not players. We can’t advance our own arguments, unless ignoring them leads to a miscarriage of justice. That’s the standard we have to apply.”
    “And how is it not a miscarriage of justice to convict four men when the whole case against them is inadmissible?”
    George is somewhat surprised that Koll is so wedded to his argument. Often, he musters these arid academic displays to impress or belittle, then leaves them in the courtroom.
    Summerset continues shaking his head. He was a famous soul singer who went to law school between tours, one night quarter at a time, so that he could manage his own career. When his star sank to the point that he was appearing only at outdoor summer festivals and high school reunions, he decided to capitalize on his remaining name recognition by running for judge in the hope of achieving a reliable income. The bar associations wrung their hands over a judicial candidate who sang one of his two big hits, ‘Made a Man for a Woman’ and ‘Hurtin’ Heart,’ at every campaign stop, but Summer’s performance on the bench has been solid. His elevation to the appellate court was a way to get him out of the one job he didn’t belong in-he was a poor manager as Presiding Judge of the torts trial division in the Superior Court. Here he is neither George’s most distinguished colleague nor his least. He continues to work hard and shows uncommon common sense, rendering sound, pragmatic interpretations of the law.
    And the view he expresses several times now is that convicting these young men is far from unjust. Race, the perpetual theme song of American life, might be a factor in his evaluation, but George, who has sat with Purfoyle dozens of times, doubts that. Summer, much like George himself, usually sides with the prosecutors, except in clear cases of police misbehavior. Nathan duels with Summerset for some time, trying to nudge the facts with little hypothetical alterations into a shape allowing him to prevail, but increasingly he casts his dark, squinty look toward George, who obviously holds the deciding vote.
    The person on the street might think judges are emperors who wave their scepters and do what they like, but in George’s experience, all of them attempt to apply the law. Words are sometimes as elusive as fish, and reasonable minds often differ on the meaning of cases and statutes, but it is still the actual language that has to guide a judge. George concentrates on the question: Is convicting these boys on the basis of a videotape that should not have been admitted ‘a miscarriage of justice’?
    Incongruously, it is the tape itself that stands out in his mind as he endeavors to answer. Sapperstein’s arguments required George to view the video, locked in his inner chambers. Hard to shock when it comes to crime, George could stomach only a portion of it before assigning Banion to go through it frame by frame and produce a sterile description.
    But the ten minutes or so George took in still reverberate. Mindy DeBoyer was a deadweight throughout, her limbs like wet laundry. The teased ribbons of her dark hair were conveniently pushed across her face, while her naked hips and one leg straddled the arm of a Chesterfield chair, as if the fully dressed upper body slumped on the cushion below-the head, the heart-did not exist. It was crime at its purest, in which empathy, that most fundamental aspect of human morality, evaporated and another being became only a target for untamed fantasy. The sexual acts were committed in emphatic plunging motions of pure aggression, and the way the boys exposed themselves to one another before and after, amid much wild hooting, could only be labeled depraved-not in any puritanical sense but because George sensed that these young men were dominated by impulses they would ordinarily have rejected. But if the purpose of the criminal law is to state emphatically that some behavior is