With Prejudice by Robin Peguero

Published by Grand Central Publishing on May 17, 2022

It isn’t unusual for a courtroom drama to explore the private lives of the lawyers and the defendant who are the novel’s key characters. With Prejudice, set in Miami in 2011, moves beyond the usual. It offers a behind-the-scenes look at the judge and at the jurors who are deciding guilt in a sexual assault case. On occasion, the novel tracks the truth after a witness lies on the stand (such as the cop who recalls the truth as he denies ever using a pejorative term to describe a gay man).

Nor is it unusual for a courtroom drama to offer the “Inside Baseball” of criminal trials — the strategies employed by prosecutors and defense attorneys to work the angles and sway juries. With Prejudice does that, but it also takes a deep, honest dive into the dependence of prosecutors and defense attorneys on prejudice as they try to influence outcomes. The lead prosecutor in the trial, for example, while thinking of herself as a liberal feminist, wants a jury of white conservative males because they are demographically more likely to judge a nonwhite defendant harshly in a sexual assault case. The novel portrays, albeit superficially, the impact of race and ethnicity on trials and jury deliberations, from the impact of race on witness identifications to the interaction of jurors of different races.

The inner workings of the system are exposed in other ways. The novel features a medical examiner who is willing to slant ambiguous results to favor law enforcement when honesty would require ambiguity to remain unresolved. It recognizes that judges consider reelection when they think about making a legally correct ruling that the public might view as “soft on crime.” And it reminds readers that the rules governing police conduct — rules that allow the police to induce confessions by lying about nonexistent evidence and by claiming they are on the defendant’s side — make it easy to convict the innocent.

The crime involves the disappearance, alleged rape, and death of Melina Morris. Her body was evidently cremated in the medical examiner’s morgue. An anonymous tip alerts the authorities to look for bone fragments that the police eventually match to Melina’s DNA. Skull fragments suggest Melina sustained a blow to the head. Hairline fractures to the pelvis suggest she was “possibly maybe” the victim of a sexual assault. Oddly, while the body’s other bones were pulverized after cremation, the bones with evidentiary value were left intact.

Suspicion falls on Gabriel Soto, once of the body handlers in the morgue. He’s a quiet loner and regarded as a bit odd, so he’s immediately pegged as the culprit. After the police decide he’s guilty, they focus their investigation on proving that they are right. Is Soto guilty? Well, the question is answered at the story’s end, but that’s not really the point, is it? The question is whether guilt can be established beyond a reasonable doubt. The question is whether Soto can receive a fair trial. As the novel points out, defense lawyers are willfully ignorant of their client’s guilt or innocence, and rightly so; their focus is on the evidence and the process, not the truth.

But even those questions are not the point of With Prejudice. “With prejudice” is a legal term that refers to finality. A decision made “with prejudice” means a party won’t be given a do-over. The double meaning in the title refers to prejudice that pervades the legal system. That’s what the novel is about. The clever story Robin Peguero tells simply frames the larger issues.

The jurors violate the court’s instructions (as jurors commonly do) by chatting about the case during breaks, many having made up their minds before they hear any evidence at all. But as soon as it appears that they are ready to reach a verdict, the story upends. For a moment I thought the narrative traveled through a portal that transformed the roles of key characters. It soon becomes apparent that a flashback changes the perspective of everything that happened before. Characters, both living and dead, turn out to be connected to each other in surprising ways. I admire novels that can turn the story upside down in an instant and dislike novels that attempt that trick but fail. With Prejudice earned my admiration for pulling off the magic trick, for confronting timely issues of prejudice within and outside the criminal justice system, and for keeping me engaged in a smart story that disguises its intricacy with apparent simplicity.

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