Iphigenia in Forest Hills
Janet Malcolm on how the counsel for Mazoltuv Borukhova and Mikhail Mallayev, who were tried for the murder of Borukhova’s husband, shaped a dramatic trial.
Borukhova sat at the defense table throughout the trial, writing on legal pads, looking like a nineteenth-century woman-student revolutionary. Her lawyer Scaring was renowned for taking unwinnable cases—and winning. But the link to her husband's killer was unbreakable: ninety-one calls between them in three weeks.