Deliberate Intent

Reviewed by:
John Walsh

Can books kill? Well, sure. A nice heavy one can make a good blunt-force weapon. In the right hands, a hardback Grisham could probably pulp a man’s skull. But should a publisher be held liable for the crimes his readers commit? This is touchy First Amendment ground, and the stuff of FX Network’s Deliberate Intent.

In 1993, Lawrence Horn hired James Perry to murder his ex-wife and their quadriplegic son in order to collect money set aside for the boy’s care. Perry used Hit Man, a murder-for-hire manual published by Paladin Press, to do the job. Both he and Horn were eventually arrested, tried and convicted—Horn is serving a life sentence, while Perry now sits on Maryland’s death row.

After the trials, the victims’ families filed suit against Paladin Press, arguing that the publisher was also criminally liable for the murders. Paladin’s lawyers claimed the publisher was protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedom.

Timothy Hutton stars as Rod Smolla, a law professor and Constitutional scholar with an apparently unshakeable belief in the sanctity of the First Amendment. Approached by an attorney for one of the families, Smolla is skeptical at first. But Siegel, the dogged attorney played by Ron Rifkin, eventually persuades Smolla to take the case.

Deliberate Intent shifts gears several times—first you’re watching a murder mystery, then a detective story, and finally a courtroom drama. The mini-climaxes throughout feel more like false starts at times, but some interesting performances will keep you watching. Hutton looks like hell as Rod Smolla, an academic celebrity whose personal life is a shambles of solo drinking. James McDaniel, known to NYPD Blue fans as the uptight Lt. Fancy, is almost unrecognizable as Lawrence Horn. Coldly establishing an alibi for the night of the murder with a camcorder and a drunken floozy, Horn is thoroughly repellent and wonderfully underplayed.

But the movie really comes to life in Ron Rifkin’s scenes. As Siegel he trudges through the movie in rumpled suits, quoting Constitutional law and complaining about his indigestion with equal passion. He is welcome comic relief in some of the slower patches, but mercifully excused from putting a warmly humorous “button” on the story. Sure, it sticks to some safe courtroom story conventions, but Deliberate Intent is smart enough to know which clichés are just too hoary to revive.

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