Presumed Innocent and the Fragility of Justice

Some stories come to us like whispers. They don’t announce themselves with fireworks or marketing blitzes. They arrive quietly, sometimes from unexpected hands, and they linger. In 1987, Scott Turow, an assistant U.S. attorney who wrote in the hours between cases, published Presumed Innocent. On paper, it was just a debut thriller. In practice, it changed how we imagine the law in fiction, and how we imagine ourselves within it.

The premise is straightforward enough. A prosecutor named Rusty Sabich is assigned to investigate the murder of a colleague who also happens to be his former lover. As the case develops, suspicion pivots toward him. Because the novel is told in Rusty’s own voice, the story becomes claustrophobic. You don’t just watch a man being investigated. You inhabit him. His words feel both like an explanation and a plea, sometimes a confession, sometimes a dodge. He speaks, and you are never entirely sure whether to trust him. That uncertainty is what makes the book less a whodunit and more an echo chamber of doubt.

To this point, this was not what legal novels had been. For decades, law in fiction was mostly a stage prop, a place where detectives wrapped up their work or melodramas played out with gavel and robe. Perry Mason solved puzzles; courtrooms provided neat endings. Turow upended that. He treated the law as its own labyrinth, a system at once majestic and deeply compromised. He showed prosecutors as political creatures, judges as human and fallible, and defendants as both guilty and not. And he did so in a voice that was plain, unadorned, but haunting, because the plainness made it believable.

The cultural moment mattered. America in the late 1980s was uneasy. We had learned to distrust politicians through Watergate. We watched Iran-Contra unfold. Corporate scandals and Reagan-era indulgence made cynicism almost patriotic. Into this atmosphere, Turow dropped a story where the very institution meant to safeguard fairness, the courtroom, turned out to be a theater. Rules and procedures carried the day, not necessarily the truth. Guilt and innocence blurred, sometimes fatally. Readers recognized that. They bought the book in the millions, not just because it was entertaining, but because it resonated deeply with them. It told them something they already suspected: that the places we put our faith in were not as sturdy as we wanted them to be.

What made the book endure was its humanity. Rusty was not noble. He was not wicked. He was ordinary in his failings, extraordinary only in the spotlight of accusation. Readers found him frustrating and sympathetic in the same breath. That tension mirrored real life, where people are rarely one thing. Turow made you feel the gap between the story a person tells and the story that might be true. That gap is where the novel lives.

The ripple effects were immediate. Turow opened the door to a genre. John Grisham sprinted through it with The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and a string of bestsellers that turned legal thrillers into publishing’s juggernaut of the 1990s. Turow wrote literature wrapped in a thriller’s clothing; Grisham streamlined it into a page-turning spectacle. Together, they gave us a cultural wave: the lawyer as hero, villain, and every shade between. Hollywood amplified it. Harrison Ford embodied Rusty in the 1990 film version. Tom Cruise brought sleek energy to The Firm. Julia Roberts carried The Pelican Brief. Suddenly, the courtroom wasn’t a niche; it was the stage for American anxieties about corruption, power, and truth.

The influence didn’t stop at bookstores or movie theaters. Television picked it up. Law & Order built an empire on courtroom ritual. The Practice made lawyers flawed and human. The Good Wife turned legal maneuvering into prestige drama. Even Suits owes a debt to Turow, playing with the idea that law is as much performance as principle. And now, in the streaming era, we circle back: Netflix adapting The Lincoln Lawyer, Showtime giving us Your Honor, and HBO's 2024 retelling of Presumed Innocent itself with Jake Gyllenhaal. The story returns, not because we forgot it, but because we never answered its questions.

What Turow tapped into was timeless: the fragility of justice. He showed that the law doesn’t guarantee truth. It produces a version of truth, curated through evidence, testimony, and persuasion. That idea unsettled people then and unsettles people now, in an era where courts are politicized and verdicts questioned before they are read. Reading Presumed Innocent today doesn’t feel like a trip back to the 1980s. It feels like holding up a mirror to 2025.

This is why the book matters more than its twist. The twist resolves the plot; the unease lingers. Turow wasn’t asking us to thrill at a revelation. He was asking us to live with ambiguity. To admit that innocence is rarely absolute and guilt is rarely confined to one person. That institutions falter because they are run by people who falter. That doubt is not a flaw in the system but its condition.

I sometimes think about what it means for a book to last in a world like ours. We are flooded with stories now, streamed and summarized until they blur together. Most vanish as quickly as they appear. But Turow’s novel has not vanished. It stays because it speaks to something deeper than plot mechanics. It stays because it touches the part of us that wants justice and fears we will never quite get it. It stays because in Rusty Sabich’s voice we hear not just one man’s defense, but our own defense, too.

Maybe that’s why it had to be retold in 2024. Not because the first telling was incomplete, but because the questions refuse to die. Can a society that doubts its institutions still believe in justice? Can we live in a culture addicted to certainty and speed, and still accept the burden of not knowing? Turow suggested no. He left us with something harder: the courage to dwell in doubt, to admit that justice is fragile, and to recognize that guilt, more often than we like to think, belongs to us all.

Cover design © Grand Central Publishing (Hachette Book Group). Used here under fair use for purposes of commentary and cultural analysis.

1msulax. Scott Turow, Annapolis, MD. 23 Jan. 2008, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scott_Turow_2008.jpg. Public domain.