Daily Inspiration Quote by Scott Turow

Justice is supposed to be a weighing machine. Turow insists it’s also a printing press.

Calling the prosecutor “an author” is a sly demotion and an alarm bell at once: the state’s representative isn’t merely assembling facts under a constitutional standard, but composing a narrative with characters, motives, and climaxes. The burden of proof sounds objective, almost mechanical. “Author” smuggles in subjectivity, craft, and the power to frame. In a courtroom, the first draft often wins; jurors don’t just count evidence, they follow a story that helps them decide what kind of world they’re in and who belongs where in the moral order.

The specific intent here is to expose a structural advantage. Prosecutors choose which facts get spotlighted, which witnesses become “credible,” which inconsistencies are explained away as human and which are branded as deceit. They control pacing: what arrives early becomes the lens for everything after. Even the charge itself is a genre decision, nudging the jury toward tragedy, farce, or cautionary tale.

The subtext is unsettling: due process promises a contest of equals, but storytelling skill and institutional resources tilt the field. Turow, a novelist steeped in legal realism, isn’t romanticizing the prosecutor’s artistry; he’s warning that narrative is a form of authority. The context is modern courtroom culture, where media logic and “case theory” reward coherence over complexity. When the prosecutor becomes the author, the defendant risks becoming a character written to fit the ending.