Each of my books confronts current issues in the context of fictional criminal cases. My role model as an author is the English writer John Mortimer and his fictional character, Horace Rumpole. Indeed, I think of my protagonist, Connor Mendelson, as Rumpole’s American counterpart.
Tortured Justice Guantanamo Bay “is inspired” by the work I did for nearly ten years representing an accused terrorist facing a death penalty trial at Guantanamo. My book had to be cleared for release by “agencies of the US Government.” Still, it captures the folly of the military commission’s approach to justice and describes what a trial at GTMO will look like should any of the cases there go to trial.
As the Trump administration discusses establishing an expanded detention facility at Guantanamo to accommodate migrants, I can confidently predict that this facility will effectively be a concentration camp. Among the dreadful conditions that will undoubtedly occur will be the systematic sexual abuse of detainees. This form of abuse already occurs in US prisons and detention facilities, and it will undoubtedly be worse at GTMO.
The systematic sexual abuse of women is a central theme in Tortured Justice South Carolina, published in early 2024. This book, set in Mexico and the Low Country of South Carolina, confronts police and prosecutorial indifference to both sexual abuse and police misconduct.
My third book, Tortured Justice Alabama, addresses the issue of abortion, specifically the reality that physicians in abortion-legal states are not immune from criminal prosecution in an abortion-illegal state. The synopsis of Tortured Justice Alabama is: When the mother of a twelve-year-old rape victim and a physician who acted legally are put on criminal trial by a politically ambitious prosecutor for aborting the little girl’s baby, attorney Connor Mendelson finds himself hundreds of miles from home, facing one of his most challenging cases while confronting racism, hostility to women’s rights, and a take no prisoner legal culture.