The prosecutor doesn't rest

Am I the only woman in America who considers Preet Bharara her podcast husband?

I am guessing not. His show, “Stay Tuned With Preet,” is a salve, an indulgence, a lifeline: It coasts along not just on the vitality of Mr Bharara’s intelligence (uncommonly useful, given that he once was the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, and so many urgent questions these days are legal ones), and not just on his ability to do a good interview (one wonders if years of quizzing witnesses and summarising cases made him understand the rhythms of a good story), but on his warmth, humour, reasonableness. 

Donald J Trump may be laying dynamite beneath the floorboards of our most beloved institutions, democracies here and elsewhere may have blown a flat, but Preet’s still there, calmly issuing dispatches from Planet Rational, reminding us each week that humane people with fine minds and old-fashioned concerns (integrity! character! truth, justice, the commonweal!) are still very much a part of public life.

Plus, his children think he’s a dork. United States attorneys: They’re just like us.
 

Given how busy his tenure was — his office prosecuted everyone from the Times Square Bomber to the two top legislators in Albany — and given how rare a varietal he is of charm and conscientiousness and intellect, Mr Bharara seems the ideal candidate to write a fine memoir. But Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law isn’t a memoir, exactly; had it been an uncomplicated reminiscence, I would have enjoyed it much more.

DOING JUSTICE

A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law

Preet Bharara 

Bloomsbury; Rs 499; 368 pages

What is it instead? In his preface, Mr Bharara explains that for years, he’s wanted to write a guide for young prosecutors, one that draws “not from legal texts and treatises but from the real-life human dilemmas that would perplex them every day.” But as Mr Bharara was developing his themes, he adds, he realised that this book “might in fact be a guide to justice generally, not only for practitioners, but for real people who strive and struggle in their homes and offices to be fair and just.”

Which is all fine in theory — but only sometimes works in practice. Mr Bharara seems to be addressing would-be prosecutors on some pages and a wider audience on others  and he doesn’t seem to settle into a common register until the second half of the book.

More vexing still: In pouring his memoir into the mould of an advice book, Mr Bharara winds up speaking in aphorisms and bromides. Of all the counsellors in literature to channel, why on earth would he choose Polonius?

I half wonder whether Doing Justice works better as an audiobook, which Mr Bharara personally reads aloud. I suspect he’s had to read much of what he’s written aloud, for speeches, closing arguments or his podcast. What can seem profound in your earbuds can seem facile on the page.
 

Is all of this book filled with Polonius gunk? No. Most chapters delight or provoke in some way, if you mentally redact the fortune-cookie sentences. Mr Bharara divides Doing Justice into four parts — Inquiry, Accusation, Judgment and Punishment — thereby following the rhythms of a criminal case, and almost every chapter returns, either directly or via roundabout, to Mr Bharara’s basic contention, pithily summarised on Page 58: “In the end, the law doesn’t do justice. People do.”

Mr Bharara, who enjoyed a high profile and (mostly) favourable press attention during his tenure from 2009 to 2017, does not show a lot of leg in this book, nor does he settle many scores. Yes, he tweaks The Wall Street Journal for highlighting the fact that he went after Raj Rajaratnam, a fellow immigrant from the same region of the world. “My goodness, there’s a South Asian defendant, and there’s a South Asian prosecutor!” he writes. “You know where this happens every day? India.” But he says virtually nothing about SAC Capital’s Steven A. Cohen, whose wolfish appetite for insider information Mr Bharara’s office could never quite prove, and his words about Mr Trump, the man who fired him, are few.

And why is this, exactly? Considering Mr Bharara’s emphasis on old-fashioned values — duty, discretion, decency — and their application to the law, it seems strange that he wouldn’t offer some words about what happened to the United States on November 8, 2016, when the worst-faith actor imaginable was suddenly elected president.

What Mr Bharara does offer, however, is an inspired and slightly perverse idea about how to salvage public discourse in 2019: We should take our cues from American criminal trials, in which both parties are obliged to consider flaws in their own arguments and understand the mind-set of the other side. Assertions must be evidence-based; research must be rigorous; decorum is paramount. “You can’t call your adversary a ‘low-IQ person,’” he notes. “You can’t argue the prosecution is political; and you can’t make sweeping biased statements.”

The first thing we do, let’s revive all the lawyers. Mr Bharara, as usual, makes a very strong case.

©2019 The New York TimesNews Service