Juvenile Injustice

Peter Reilly was both the victim and the beneficiary of a small New England village's behavior. Living in an unheated shack with his mother, an educated alcoholic and lesbian, and surviving on welfare checks and the regular gifts of one of his mother's former lovers, the teenage boy stood out in alls Village, Conn., as a likeable object of pity and concern.

On discovering his mother's mutilated corpse lying on the shack floor four years ago, he set into motion small-town forces that would both convict and vindicate him. At first, the state police and district attorney approached the case mechanically; eventually, they would hide evidence under pressure to vindicate their hasty actions. In turn, Reilly's neighbors would rally to his defense as the unethical procedures police used to investigate the murder became public. The case turned into a crusade with New Times magazine, The New York Times, and a score of celebrities led by playwright Arthur Miller at the vanguard.

Donald S. Connery's Guilty Until Proven Innocent traces this bizarre case, showing how prosecutors almost destroyed an impressionable but inofensive teenager. The police forced Reilly to confess he killed his mother. The illegitimate son's allegedly stormy relationship with his mother was named as the motive. Connery goes beyond outlining the skeletal facts of the case, focusing on how Falls Village reacted to the case. Two families--one Jewish and the other Italian--virtually adopted Reilly after the murder, mortgaging their homes to provide bail money and hiring him to babysit for their children in order to demonstrate their confidence in his innocence.

A few of the less attractive details from Reilly's life are somewhat glossed over or romanticized in Connery's book. Connery gives an explicitly detailed account of his mother's bizarre lifestyle, but he gives Reilly, in cases, more credit than he actually deserved, by failing to back up illogical claims. Connery tried to depict Reilly as exceptionally intelligent, when he apparently was not. Reilly had so little self-confidence that the police easily brainwashed him into confessing. Connery glosses over this tragic weakness in Reilly's character.

Still, this touching up of details is hardly a major fault, partly because it stems from the book's greatest strength: Connery's familiarity with the case. The author lives in a town neighboring Falls Village and he is familiar with the setting in a way no outside writer could have been. Connery, sometimes overindulging in details, vividly sketches Falls Village life.

In Guilty Until Proven Innocent, Connery gives a gripping description of an average kid interested in cars and an electric guitar caught up in a situation he cannot comprehend. Reilly had always thought of the local police as friends and because of it never requested a lawyer's presence during his initial interrogation.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent provides no categorical condemnations of the judicial system, though it easily could have. It seems that if Reilly had come from a poor urban setting, as do most juvenile delinquents, he would still be in jail today. Connery outlines the police and district attorney's mistakes, malicious and unwitting, but he views them with a touch of sympathy. What he writes instead is a compelling if somewhat sentimental story of a town with something more than cover-bridged innocence.