Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create accountShop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowFelony Murder
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreOn the surface, the court-appointed case that lands on young Dean Abernathy's desk is a biggie; he is slated to defend a homeless man accused of the felony murder of the popular black New York City Police commissioner during an early-morning mugging attempt. But at second look, the case promises to be a routine conviction. The evidence is overwhelming. The police have come up with an eyewitness, they have physical evidence, and Joey Spadafino has given the arresting officers a signed confession.
Dean's course seems obvious: Get Joe Spadafino, an ex-con, to plead guilty, bargain for the most lenient sentence possible, and figure you can't win ‘em all.
Before he can talk to his client about a plea bargain, however, he finds that the prosecutor has already offered one - which Joey refuses. Dean, not only a conscientious defense attorney but a former investigator, starts looking harder at the seemingly incontrovertible evidence.
What he turns up changes a foregone conclusion into something very different. The district attorney, although outwardly cooperative, seems to be trying to keep Dean from interviewing the eyewitness - and the reason becomes apparent when Dean, challenged, digs deeper into her background. Anomalies and discrepancies in the government's case crop up.
Dean realizes that he is drawing closer to a particularly nasty truth, one that not only puts his life and those of others in immediate peril but confronts him with a moral dilemma that is even more difficult to face.
Joseph T. Klempner is a criminal defense attorney. He was formerly an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and a legal aid attorney. He lives in Upstate New York.