Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A jury, hand-picked by Jeffrey MacDonald's defense team, determined MacDonald's guilt -- two counts of second-degree murder, one count of first-degree murder -- after deliberating only six and a half hours. The members of the jury said later that they'd taken even that long only because they wanted to be sure they had been completely fair to MacDonald. And now along comes Errol Morris, acting as if this convicted triple murderer were merely a defendant entitled to the presumption of innocence. The real mystery is why Morris should assume that MacDonald, demonstrably a liar, is incapable of lying about the crimes for which he was justly and properly convicted. Even the book's front matter and the first few pages of the prologue contain egregious errors of fact: 1. MacDonald was never a Green Beret. He was an army surgeon assigned to the Green Berets. 2. Joe McGinniss was not a member of MacDonald's defense team. He was embedded with the defense, but he never made any agreement whatsoever with Jeffrey MacDonald regarding the scope or the content of his eventual book, "Fatal Vision." 3. Freddy Kassab is most definitely NOT the "protagonist" of McGinniss's book. He is the protagonist of the film that was based on "Fatal Vision." The remainder of Morris's book is filled with far more serious errors. The book betrays the author's ignorance not only of the law but also of case-related material that Morris should have read, or should have read more carefully, during the twenty years he claims to have devoted to researching the case. This material includes transcripts of the U.S. Army's "Article 32" hearing from 1970, transcripts of testimony before the 1974 grand jury, transcripts from the 1979 trial, and reports describing more than a thousand pieces of evidence that point directly at Jeffrey MacDonald and no one else -- evidence that the defense did not dispute for the simple reason that the evidence is indisputable. As everyone knows, Jeffrey MacDonald has consistently maintained his innocence since 1970. He has also continued to tell a preposterous story about the murders. That story didn't hold water in 1970, it didn't hold water in 1974, it didn't hold water in 1979, and it doesn't hold water now. In fact, MacDonald's story would be hilarious if its context didn't make it obscene. Errol Morris did great work in "The Thin Blue Line" and "The Fog of War," but he's really screwed the pooch with this project. The "new evidence" that Morris presents is not new at all. It's the same so-called evidence that was considered and appropriately dismissed many, many times before. It's just that MacDonald, who has spent more than thirty years in court trying to avoid punishment for his crimes, has found yet another loophole through which to drag this discredited "evidence" into yet another hearing, in a case that has already been to the Supreme Court seven times (soon to be eight). And Errol Morris's treatment of Freddy Kassab is shameful, both in the book and in publicity surrounding its publication. FREDDY KASSAB WAS A HERO! When Kassab was MacDonald's staunchest supporter, he took action on a heroic scale to assert his son-in-law's innocence and clear his name. And after Kassab reluctantly concluded that his son-in-law was indeed guilty, he took equally heroic action to make sure that MacDonald would be indicted, tried, and convicted. MacDonald's conviction for first-degree murder, by the way, was for the premeditated and cynical killing of his two-year-old daughter, Kristen -- a murder committed for no other purpose than to create the cover story he knew he was going to need after mortally wounding his wife, Colette (then four months pregnant with their never-to-be-born son), and their five-year-old daughter, Kimberly. After all, what better coverup than a story about a home invasion, complete with an army captain's central-casting notion of "hippies," the kind who slaughter while chanting "Acid is groovy" (sic) and "Kill the pigs," and who leave behind no footprints or DNA evidence, and who use only weapons they happen to find lying around the MacDonald household, and who then cleverly dispose of the murder weapons under a bush right outside the house's back door? And what jury, after all, wouldn't do its damnedest NOT to believe that a father could deliberately stab his own baby girl to death in order to save his own skin? MacDonald's attorneys should have prepared a temporary-insanity defense. But they couldn't, because MacDonald stuck to his patently ludicrous story, and now he has only himself to blame for being right where he belongs until the day he dies. Long may he live.