The Price of Acquittal

Non-Fiction Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Carlton Press Release Date: January, 1986 ISBN: 0806219440 » Buy the Book

Few real-life scenarios afford the suspense, the danger, the excitement, and the opportunity for the exercise of pure power, both personal and institutional, as does the first-degree murder trial. Indeed, more often than not, the adversaries appear to be the prosecuting attorney and the defense counsel rather than the interests they respectively represent - the State and the defendant - and it sometimes becomes difficult to remain aware that it is not the attorneys themselves whose welfare is at stake.

But, what happens when, as a result of his efforts, defense counsel suddenly becomes entangled in a judicial web spun to capture the attorney himself? Such was the twist of fate that threatened to end the flourishing career of William C. Costopoulos who, after successfully defending a teen-aged boy at his trial for the murder of his mother, was himself charged with fixing the trial, a crime for which, if convicted, he would be disbarred and sent to prison - The Price of Acquittal.

From first page to last, Mr. Costopoulos has chronicled an odyssey through the judicial corridors of power that will hold any reader - lawyer or layman - spellbound with anticipation and numb with circumstances and events so coincidental and unlikely that were it not for the exhaustive documentation so skillfully integrated into the story, we might think we were reading the fantasy of a Leon Uris. But fiction this is not.

The Price of Acquittal is a remarkable book, one destined to permanently affect every reader's opinion of American justice and jurisprudence.