28 Seconds: A True Story of Addiction, Tragedy, and Hope(2012)

Michael Bryant

An addiction memoir that reads like pulp fiction.  A night that began with a dinner to celebrate his twelfth wedding anniversary ended in a jail cell for Michael Bryant. He was charged with dangerous driving causing death and criminal negligence causing the death of cyclist Darcy Sheppard. Ironically, he had helped write the legal test for the same charges sixteen years earlier, while clerking at the Supreme Court of Canada.
 
Bryant, as Ontario's youngest-ever Attorney General, was the man responsible for administering 500,000 criminal charges every year in that province. He now faced prosecution by the same justice system. The charges were eventually dropped, but nothing could undo what had happened to Sheppard--or Bryant.
 
In 28 Seconds, Bryant chronicles the fateful aftermath of that late-summer evening in August 2009. He looks at the realities of the adversarial court system and a prison system filled with addicts and the mentally ill, speaking publicly, for the first time, of his own battle with alcoholism, and his life in recovery.