Heavy Justice
The Trial of Mike Tyson
Randy Roberts and Gregory J. Garrison
978-1-55728-600-0 (paper)
February 2000
$24.95
About
Heavy Justice is the inside story of one of the great courtroom battles of our time. Gregory Garrison, the special prosecutor in the case, and Randy Roberts, historian and eminent boxing scholar, recount the trial that put heavyweight champion Mike Tyson behind bars. With all the drama, verve, and procedural detail of a novel by John Grisham or Scott Turow, this is also a highly topical morality play touching on all the issues of sex, race, celebrity, and justice that now so perplex our society.
When he first heard about the Tyson case, Greg Garrison wanted nothing to do with it. Date rape? Always tough to prove. And one of the few facts already reported was that the young woman making the accusation had been in the defendant’s hotel room at two o’clock in the morning. This case was dead on arrival, except that when Desiree Washington told her story, Garrison believed her. So drawing on this simple trust, and inspired by Desiree’s courage and conviction, he accepted the challenge of this “unwinnable” case, stepping into the ring against not only Mike Tyson, multimillionaire sports celebrity and hero to millions, and Don King, cheerleader, but also the Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly, perhaps the slickest and most powerful defense counsel money could buy.
Originally published in 1994, Heavy Justice brings together the worlds of big-time sports, lowlife sleaze, painstaking police work, and the lofty realms of Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz to offer us a thoroughly absorbing account of one of the century’s most important legal cases.
Author
Randy Roberts is a professor of history at Purdue University and the author of several books on boxing, including Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler.
J. Gregory Garrison is a partner in the Indianapolis law firm of Garrison & Kiefer and has not lost a jury trial in twenty years.
Praise
“A pile-driving and relentless narrative that far transcends the usual “true” crime story. . . . What is told here . . . is nothing short of a heart-breaking American tragedy.”
—Gerald Early, author of Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prize-fighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture