The Testimony of Daniel Pagels

L.A. Law meets quantum physics in this engrossing courtroom drama centered on Lawrence Pagels, a California Native American accused of murder. The evidence against Pagels: Daniel, his five-year-old grandson and ward, was found at the scene of the crime. But Daniel was also sighted at Pagels's motor home at the exact time he was discovered in the dead man's kitchen. In a last-ditch effort to save his client, attorney Edgar J. Stassen suggests that Daniel traveled by his own volition via little-understood laws of time and space. The lawyer's scientific mumbo jumbo about Bell's theorem, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Einstein's theory of relativity is surprisingly engaging. That Turner ( Love and Hunger ) also succeeds in rendering the defense plausible is a credit both to her storytelling prowess and to her apparent understanding of these mind-stretching scientific principles. (Jan.)