After the Madness
A Judge's Own Prison Memoir
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Driving down the Long Island Expressway in November of 1992, Sol Wachtler was New York's chief judge and heir apparent to the New York governorship. Suddenly, three van loads of FBI agents swerved in front of him—bringing his car and his legal career to a halt. Wachtler's subsequent arrest, conviction, and incarceration for harassing his longtime lover precipitated a media feeding frenzy, revealing to the world his struggles with romantic attachment, manic depression, and drug abuse.
In this, his prison diary, Wachtler reveals the stark reality behind his vertiginous fall from the heights of the legal establishment to the underbelly of the criminal justice system. Sentenced to a medium security prison in Butner, North Carolina, Wachtler is stabbed by an unseen assailant, berated by prison guards, and repeatedly placed in solitary confinement with no explanation. Moreover, as a prisoner he confronts firsthand the inequities of a system his judicial rulings helped to construct and befriends the type of people he once sentenced.
With unflinching honesty, Wachtler draws on his unique experience of living life on both sides of the bench to paint a chilling portrait of prison life interwoven with a no‑holds‑barred analysis of the shortcomings of the American legal justice system.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former New York State chief judge Wachtler's contrite, compulsively readable confessional is an edited version of the prison diary he kept in 1993-94 while doing time for his obsessive harassment of his ex-lover, married socialite Joy Silverman, the stepdaughter of his wife's uncle. His bizarre letter-writing campaign to her resulted in his arrest in 1992, which made tabloid headlines. Writing with a mixture of eloquence and prickly self-pity, Wachtler attributes his "unpardonable and shameful" behavior to a diagnosed manic-depressive disorder, induced by abuse of prescription drugs, which led him to invent imaginary personas. His wife, Joan, and their four children, who stood by him, make intermittent appearances in the prison log that is by turns candid and self-conscious. Wachtler became surprisingly friendly with his fellow inmates--murderers, bank robbers, rapists, drug dealers, arsonists--some of whom he had sentenced. Along his rogues' gallery, we meet Jonathan Pollard, convicted U.S. spy for Israel; bibliomaniac Stephen Blumberg, who stole rare books; and porn kingpin Herbert Feinberg. Woven through these grueling daily observations, boyhood reminiscences and summary of Wachtler's achievements as judge, administrator and town councilman is a skein of attention-deserving proposals for reforming our prisons and judicial system. Author tour. FYI: Watchler has founded and heads a nonprofit mediation forum for the resolution of civil disputes.
