Overdue Heresies

Malcolm Bell grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Harvard College (cum laude) and Law School, served in the U.S. Army, and practiced in Manhattan. After fifteen years of mainly civil litigation, he decided to become a criminal defense lawyer, where more was at stake than other people's money. To learn the new trade, he answered a blind ad for prosecutors, a step that would change his life.The special prosecutor of crimes arising out of New York's bloody 1971 Attica prison riot hired him and soon tasked him with indicting state troopers and prison guards who had committed murders and other violent crimes there. But the closer he came to obtaining indictments, the more his superiors blocked his efforts. He resigned in protest and took the cover-up public in the New York Times. High officials postured and scurried, leading to revelations they had sought to suppress and more justice than they had wanted; and New York law firms lost interest in hiring Malcolm. His account of all this came out in 1985; its latest version is The Attica Turkey Shoot: Carnage, Cover-up and the Pursuit of Justice (Skyhorse Publishing, paperback, 2022). While becoming a confirmed Episcopalian at age thirteen, he began to question traditional Christian doctrines. His spiritual journey took him from the Episcopal Church to a United Church of Christ, where he taught junior and senior high Sunday school, to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), where he found his spiritual home. For the past forty years, he has jotted down his spiritual thoughts, which are now collected in Overdue Heresies and Other Reflections of a Quaker Seeker. The book seeks, not to persuade anyone of anything, but to prompt readers to examine their own spirituality.