No Heroes, No Villians

Dave Lukas

Dr. Papaleonardos

Sociology 309

11 October 2007

No Heroes, No Villains

After reading the story, I found I had mixed emotions about it. To explain, when we were getting into detail and finally finding out what really happened the day of June 28th, I found myself completely interested and glued to the book. I also enjoyed the way the incident was explained because I felt like I was there watching it all happen from the great detail. I enjoyed Phillips style of writing because through his writing, he really came off as an intelligent person who is very familiar with the legal system. The book is an easy read, and I liked the non-pretentious style of writing. I did not find myself struggling with reading the book at all, which made the overall experience that much more enjoyable.

To me, the challenging part of the book was reading a book on a topic that I do not know much about. I am starting to become familiar with the legal system, however I am nowhere near that of a lawyer. This is why I stumbled at times on some of the legal lingo that the book contained. In addition to that, I did find myself with a better understanding of our legal system. I felt like I was along for the ride on the whole legal process. Also, I would like to note that I thoroughly enjoyed the chapter on the autopsy because I thought it was very interesting how they performed those procedures in that time period. I loved the detail that the author went into when describing how it all took place.

I enjoyed that the book challenged some of the biggest problems in our legal system, or even society as a whole. There is still a lot of racism going on, and this book was not afraid to exploit that. I enjoy those kinds of readings. They are the things that will eventually spark a change and shed some light on the problems that are happening right now.

The parts that I found boring were when there was a lot of description going on from the author. I do realize that it is necessary to set up the scenes and locations so that us as readers can have a better understanding of what is happening in the book, however I felt like at times he went too far into detail and had me nearly sleeping at times, literally. For example, some of the dialogues he included may have gone into too much detail, but that is a credit to the descriptiveness of Mr. Phillips.

The main thing this book did for my understanding of the legal system was it showed me how easy it is for someone to be falsely tried, especially in a case that has little evidence and few witnesses. For a while, I thought that Mr. Richardson was the victim, and then with a dramatic twist, we saw that was definitely not the case. Also, I learned a lot about what happens behind the scenes with building a case as well as going through with the case. We saw the amount of interrogation that is necessary for building a case and it is a lot more work then I had thought. With the exception of a few high profile trials, I have never really followed a case in the detail that this book goes into. You really feel like you are watching it live on Court TV, so needless to say, I learned a lot about how