The Gavel
THE TRUTH HURTS BY ANDREW BOE Review by Ashton Darracott
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HE TRUTH HURTS BY ANDREW BOE is an unflinching exploration of the fault lines in our justice system by an outsider who found his way in.' Written by a Burmese refugee to Australia in the seventies to a celebrated/hated career in criminal law, the book explores some of the cases that have haunted Boe. He specifically instructs his reader to not read the text as a memoir, yet cedes, at least throughout the first few chapters, that his youth feeds into the development of his career. The book is structured into fifteen chapters that loosely deal with their own separate matter, or defendant, that Boe worked on or with. Each chapter is its own self-contained narrative, where he focuses his authorial gaze on a case that he worked, or his experiences with groups in society. These encounters segway into his opinions on the system in which we all live, work and interact with to varying degrees. Boe asserts that each of his cases taught him something more about the ugly side of how the criminal law system treats those colonised and those paternalized, privately, publicly, and systematically. It is not new information, but it never hurts to be reminded of what work is still to be done.
society. The tone shifts during the chapter on Ivan Milat, where the reader clearly senses that the baby fat of Boe’s formative years in both his personal life and his professional career has been shed, and he is left with a lean, clear, penetrating, and scathing critique of the people and the systems that determine ‘justice’. The chapters do not tend to offer answers to the questions Boe raises, more often than not taking a more moderate stance so that the questions must be carefully considered by the reader. This sometimes feels anticlimactic, but I would prefer no answers over bad answers to the big questions. If anything, Boe invites constant reflection and revaluation on the reader’s core values and attitudes.
This book is written primarily for a commercial, layperson audience. Throughout the book, concepts of criminal practice and procedure are raised, and are explained in a few simple and concise sentences, sometimes a short paragraph. For some, this might feel like Boe assumes his readers are unintelligent. The tone, however, is never one that asserts a superiority over its audience; Boe is here to help, and he needs his reader to understand Boe’s incisive language cuts throughout the ‘i’s he has to dot and the ‘t’s he has to cross the entire book, and the further in a reader so that he can properly persuade readers to goes, the reader experiences him casting off take his point. I, for one, am grateful for the his reservations about sparing anyone, even thirty-five-word sentence that captures the ‘important’ members of society. Especially, purpose and essence of an application for one might argue, important members of a grant of special leave to the High Court.
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