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4.2.12 WC: 191694 I am convinced—and I think most observers were convinced—that if Tyson had gotten a second trial with all the new evidence before the jury, he would have quickly been acquitted. But this was Indiana. They had a trophy in Tyson. And they had a trial judge determined to prevent a new trial that would have embarrassed her and freed Tyson. The conviction was eventually affirmed on a two to two tie vote by the Indiana Supreme Court, with the chief justice disqualifying himself from participation in the decision on a phony pretext. He sent his wife to speak to me during a Yale Law School event. She said, “your New York style won’t work in Indiana.” I asked who she was, and when she identified herself as the wife of the chief justice, I quickly moved away saying, “We can’t talk.” He used this contrived encounter as an excuse to disqualify himself. I believe that the real reason he got out of the case was because his own previous decisions would have required him to vote for reversal, and if he did, the public would be reminded that he himself had been accused of sexual impropriety with a law clerk by a fellow judge. In my half century of practicing law throughout the world, I have never encountered a more thoroughly corrupt legal system than I did in 1992 in Indiana and a less fair trial and appeal than those accorded Mike Tyson. If hard cases make bad law, then the Tyson case proves that unpopular celebrity defendants often receive bad justice. If Mike Tyson had not been a celebrity, with a reputation for toughness, and if he had a zealous lawyer experienced in rape cases and a fair judge, he never would have been convicted of a rape he didn’t commit. If he had been convicted in a different state, or at a different time, his conviction would have been reversed. The deck was stacked against Tyson and he paid a heavy price—loss of his career, and several years of hard prison time—for a consensual one night stand with a young woman who apparently regretted her decision and then decided to exploit it for money. Different perceptions on Rape My decision to represent Mike Tyson on appeal generated considerable controversy and some outright animosity. Rape is a highly emotional issue, like abortion. Extremists on both sides of such issue tend to see things in black and white terms. It used to be thought that there were some lines that were crystal clear. Remember the old quip about not being a “little bit pregnant” or a “little bit dead”? But today it may matter greatly whether a woman is a little bit pregnant or a lot pregnant. The right to have an abortion may turn on the trimester of the pregnancy. Even the issue of what constitutes “death,” that absolute of absolutes, may now be hotly disputed in close cases. Polemicists and absolutist on all sides of these and other gray-area issues refuse to recognize matters of degree. To an absolute right-to-lifer, life begins at the moment of conception and is as sacred then as it is at the moment before birth. To an absolute pro-choicer, a woman’s right to terminate pregnancy is as compelling in the last trimester as in the first. Some radical feminists, such as Judge Gifford, regard acquaintance rape in which the man honestly but mistakenly believes his friend has consented as indistinguishable from a stranger rape at knife point. A letter to the editor critical of columns I wrote on date rape made the point as follows: Dershowitz further endears himself by explaining that date rape and acquaintance rape is an area in which differing perceptions may produce inadvertently false testimony about 242 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017329