Sublime

The younger lawyer was named Marcus, he was from Shaker Heights, he had attended Penn, where he had majored in philosophy and lettered in rowing. After a stint working in a rural Mississippi town with Teach for America, he had gone on to Stanford Law School. He had a lovely wife of Korean ancestry and a six-month-old baby and was just days away fro

shivering twelve-year-old and suddenly had no taste for a public fight, agreeing with the boy’s flaky-scalped lawyer, Doc Solomon, that this was essentially a mercy killing and, so, made a quick deal for manslaughter—a two- or three-year jolt at the most for, as the ADA described him, “an otherwise decent kid like this one.”