Power to Hurt : Justice Served and Defeated

Encompasses the landmark federal case against Judge David Lainer, who was sentenced in April 1993 to twenty-five years without parole for harrassing, stalking, and raping nineteen women, and who was recently released. By the author of A Dark and Bloody Ground.

In this well-reported but overstuffed true-crime tale, O'Brien (A Dark and Bloody Ground) tells of Dyer County, Tennessee, judge David Lanier, a local potentate who sexually abused and harassed female court employees for years. Using interviews with his victims, especially the troubled yet forthright Vivian Forsythe, plus details from the FBI investigators trying to break this delicate case, O'Brien ably lays out the closemouthed corruption of this Southern county. After the Anita Hill case made sexual harassment a national issue, the women were more willing to come forward; only during Lanier's federal trial did male investigators come to recognize that the women were both witnesses and victims. Lanier was convicted of federal civil rights violations in late 1992 and sentenced the next year to 25 years in prison. Given O'Brien's excess of detail early in the book, his sketchy epilogue describing the 1995 appeal that overturned Lanier's conviction is disappointing. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A horrific tale of rape and sexual abuse committed in a judge's chambers, recounted with plenty of tears and barbecue sauce by journalist/novelist O'Brien (A Dark and Bloody Ground, 1993, etc.). There's a sinisterness to small-town corruption that's even more frightening than the out-and-out bedlam of big-city violence. In his latest true-crime tale, O'Brien investigates the dystopia overseen in Dyersville, Tenn., by brothers David and James Lanier, respectively the town's only judge and district attorney. Incompetent on the bench, Judge Lanier wielded his real power from his soundproof and windowless private chambers. There he assaulted or raped at least a dozen women, then threatened them with dire consequences (loss of custody of their children being his favorite) should they tell anyone. When one humiliated staffer finally complained to the FBI, agent Bill Castleberry meticulously reconstructed the sordid goings-on. Fearing an acquittal on the rape charges--several of the victims were reluctant to testify about acts they considered unmentionable--Lanier was prosecuted under a statute that prevents criminal acts under the ``color of law.'' Initially, the novel strategy succeeded, leading to a 25- year prison sentence. But the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the conviction in 1995, ruling that the color of law statute had been misapplied. O'Brien paints heroic portraits of the women involved, who seem to spend most of their time in a state of Southern-inflected hysteria, but he neglects fully to analyze Lanier (who did not respond to requests for an interview). The judge must surely be more riveting in his peculiar pathology than the run-of-the-mill tyrant O'Brien displays here. What does emerge is a charged insight into the abuse of sex and power in the years between Anita Hill and Bob Packwood. At times melodramatic, this is nonetheless an extremely readable account of the creepy world behind one small town's picket fences. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.