Inferring and Explaining

134 e 7 . Mark Furman’s history of racist behavior InferrIng and exPlaInIng IBE can potentially lead us astray at this point. It appears that the jurymust decide between the two competing explanations that the attorneys have profered: t 0 . O. J. Simpson murdered Nicole and Ron Goldman. t 1 . Drug dealers murdered Nicole and Ron Goldman, and ofcers for the Los Angeles Police Department framed O. J. Tis is mistaken on two counts. First, the jury should be considering, not the quite detailed rival explanation ofered by Simpson’s attor- neys, but one that is spectacular in its vagueness and generality. t 2 . O. J. Simpson did not murder Nicole and Ron Goldman. Now the jurywill undoubtedly be troubled by the state’s physical evidence and thewell-established motive, so the defense needs to sow the seeds of doubt, which the more detailed account of drug dealers and a racist frame does so well. But Simpson is innocent until proven guilty, so the real rival is any account where he is in fact innocent. But even if we grant that t 0 is a better explanation than t 2 , this will only show that the state has evidence that he is guilty, not that they have proven it beyond a reasonable doubt . Abe and His Daughter Te case involved a businessman namedHamiltonwho had taken out a life insurance policy on his partner ten days before the partner was gunned down by a profes- sional hit man. Te district attorney (DA) was fnding it easy to persuade the jury that the timing could not possibly be coincidental, and Abe had been racking his brain for an answer. Emma [Abe’s seventeen-year-old daughter], fnding that she simply couldn’t get his attention, had decided to try to help him fgure out a common-sense rebuttal to the DA’s circumstantial case. And she had. “Daddy,” she said, popping into his ofce late one night, “the answer is Chekhov.” “Why Chekhov?” Abe asked, his head still buried in the books. “Because Chekov once told an aspiring dramatist that if you hang a gun on the wall in the frst act, you had better use it by the third act.We read it in lit class.” 8 Alan Dershowitz is a frst-class storyteller. His little anecdote about Abe and Emma is used to remind readers that narrative devices and expectations can have undesirable legal consequences. It is easy to read his essay as a subtle indictment of the legal narrative project. I think, however, that Abe and Emma teach us not to eschew law as narrative but to keep in mind that the best narratives will sometimes be messy, unexpected, and even defy simple narra- tive rules like Chekhov’s. Te DA told a plausible enough story about Hamilton. We are not privy to all the details in the story, but we can guess that they involved facts about Hamilton’s rela- tionship to his partner and perhaps information about Hamilton’s fnances.Te key dramatic ele- ment, though, is the weird timing. A (large?) life insurance policy is taken out on the partner, ten days later the partner is gunned down. Obvi- ously, Hamilton hired the hit man so that he could collect on the policy. Abe, however, tells