“Presumed Guilty” Is a Scintillating and Eye-Opening Courtroom Drama

Book review by Patrick H. Moore, August 21, 2022

I was recently asked to read and review a novel called Presumed Guilty by Alexandra Shapiro. Ms. Shapiro is a criminal defense lawyer and one of the leading appellate lawyers in the United States.

In this story, a hedge fund manager named Emma Simpson is charged with Obstruction of Justice in the Southern District of New York. In the course of the story, evidence concerning Ms. Simpson’s guilt or innocence is provided by both the prosecution and the defendant’s defense team. At a certain point, I got the impression that Ms. Simpson was being railroaded by a callus Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) who was being aided by the judge who clearly favored the prosecution. Unsurprisingly, this made it almost impossible for the defense team to present its case in a cogent and effective manner because its exculpatory evidence was ruled inadmissible by the biased judge.

Despite the deck being stacked in favor of the prosecution, the Government’s case against Ms. Simpson is clearly somewhat flimsy, and throughout the story she appears to have a fairly good chance of gaining an acquittal.

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