The Best American Crime Writing 2006 Read Online Free PDF Page A

recklessly, indifferently-even criminally-do not eviscerate the School's legal protection."
    Lessig was floored. Enacted in 1958, amended in 1995, the Charitable Immunity Act, as he understood it, was designed to shield nonprofits from being sued for negligence. But Hardwicke's suit had nothing to do with negligence-his injuries had been inflicted intentionally. Thus Sabatino's ruling was "flagrantly wrong," Lessig says."Here was this innocent who was being doubly screwed-first literally by the Boychoir and now by the legal system."
    Angry as Lessig was at the opinion, he was angrier at the school. "It's like, what the fuck?" he says. "You know this happened.You know this was pervasive.Why do you force people to hire lawyers to fight all these bullshit claims when you know you're guilty? You ought to be figuring out ways to make people whole again. It's this failure to take responsibility for what they did that just began to make me furious."
    Six days after reading the story in the Times, Lessig received the news that he'd lost the Eldred case. Crushed, despondent, and perhaps in need of a new obsession, he called Keith Smith and volunteered to argue Hardwicke's appeal. Hardwicke was thrilled; Smith, conflicted. He had devoted thousands of hours to the case, but now Lessig was going to get the glory of making the argument in the higher courts. Smith was aware that Lessig's track record as an appellate lawyer was limited to two arguments in the Eldred case, both of them unsuccessful. But Smith was swayed by Lessig's legal stature and his biography. "I felt Larry could approach the argument from a standpoint that I can't," Smith says. "He experienced this."
    For the past two decades, Lessig had kept the story of his abuse a closely guarded secret-especially from his parents. By plunging into the Hardwicke case, Lessig says, he understood that it was likely he would "be forced to confront this with my family; people are going to look at me differently."
    The argument before the New Jersey appellate court took place in November 2003. Its essence was straightforward. To Lessig's knowledge, there was no prior case in the history of New Jersey in which the courts had ruled that charitable immunity applied to intentional wrongful acts. And the acts at the school in the seventies, he said, were not merely intentional: The sexual abuse that occurred was "pervasive and institutionalized." If the supreme court granted total immunity in such cases, Lessig concluded, New Jersey could become "a haven for sex abuse by charitable institutions."
    When the argument was over, the school's litigator, Jay Greenblatt, told Lessig the performance was "one of the best oral arguments I've heard in my career." Four months later, the three-judge panel sided 2 to 1 with Lessig and Hardwicke, prompting the school to appeal to the state supreme court.
    Lessig was in Washington when he learned the news, about to board a train for New York.Ten minutes later, his first victory as a litigator notched in his belt, he was in the bar car, beaming, babbling, buying drinks for everyone.
     
    After hearing so many awful things about the Boychoir School, I drove down to Princeton to hear what its officials had to say in its defense. The school's current president, Donald Edwards, gave me a tour of the grounds.We stopped at the rooms that once made up the Hanson-Lessig suite. "He lived here? You know more than I do about that," Edwards said in a tone of mild shock.
    Bearded and bespectacled at sixty-three, Edwards feels beleaguered by the case. "This is the only litigation I've ever gone through, and it's the only one I will ever go through," he said in his genial, soft-spoken way. "It's an adversarial process, and I've built a forty-year career on being nonadversarial."
    Edwards joined the school's staff as head of fund-raising and publicity in 1999, then was elevated to president in 2002. In the spring of 2000, a few months after Hardwicke surfaced with his