The stories of grave injustice are all too familiar: the lawyer who sleeps through a trial, the false confessions, the convictions of the innocent. However, the less visible failures of justice meted out by America's defective system receive scant attention unless you've personally experienced it. Attorney and journalist Amy Bach has spent the last eight years investigating the chronic lapses in courts across America, and through gripping stories and trenchant analyses, she offers a wholly original understanding of why justice fails on a daily basis for so many people across the country.
ORDINARY INJUSTICE: How America Holds Court (Metropolitan Books/September 1, 2009) goes well beyond one particular injustice, one specific court, or one aspect of the legal system. Instead, Bach conducts a sweeping investigation that moves from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Chicago to Mississippi, recounting fascinating stories that reveal a deep culture of complicity among prosecutors, defenders, and judges-a complicity that puts the interests of the system above the court's obligation to the people. ORDINARY INJUSTICE casts a light on an assembly-line approach that rewards shoddiness and sacrifices defendants and victims to keep the court calendar moving.
Here are cases where brutal domestic assault and child rape go unpunished, where indigent defendants are coerced into guilty pleas without being notified of their right to a public defender, where bail for offenses like riding a bike on a sidewalk is set at $25,000. In Quitman County, Mississippi, we meet Brenda Wiggs, a court clerk who keeps a list of cases that mysteriously never reach a courtroom; the county, she asserts, has not prosecuted a domestic violence case in twenty-one years. In southeast Chicago, two seventeen-year-old African American boys are wrongfully imprisoned for twenty-seven years for the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl. From minor to outrageous, the disregard for rights is commonplace in city, county, and circuit courts across the country.
Why is this happening? Bach goes beyond the easy explanations of bad apples and meager funding to show how in the name of expedience legal professionals routinely choose to collaborate rather than face off as adversaries. The result is a breakdown in due process that fails to safeguard the rights that well-intentioned legal professionals aim to protect, and ultimately leaves the public less safe. Bach provides the evidence that communities across America will use to demand greater oversight of their courts. She proposes a road map for the monitoring and measurement of court performance to give Americans a court system worthy of a great nation of laws.
In an accessible, riveting narrative that recalls the pace of legal TV and the crusading urgency of this country's great reformers, ORDINARY INJUSTICE delves deeply into courtroom culture and identifies practices that must be explored and changed for our system to be truly effective, equal, and just.
# # #
ORDINARY INJUSTICE
How America Holds Court
by Amy Bach
Metropolitan Books
Publication date: Sept 1, 2009
Hardcover / $26.00 / 320 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7447-5
ISBN-10: 0-8050-7447-3
ORDINARY INJUSTICE: How America Holds Court (Metropolitan Books/September 1, 2009) goes well beyond one particular injustice, one specific court, or one aspect of the legal system. Instead, Bach conducts a sweeping investigation that moves from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Chicago to Mississippi, recounting fascinating stories that reveal a deep culture of complicity among prosecutors, defenders, and judges-a complicity that puts the interests of the system above the court's obligation to the people. ORDINARY INJUSTICE casts a light on an assembly-line approach that rewards shoddiness and sacrifices defendants and victims to keep the court calendar moving.
Here are cases where brutal domestic assault and child rape go unpunished, where indigent defendants are coerced into guilty pleas without being notified of their right to a public defender, where bail for offenses like riding a bike on a sidewalk is set at $25,000. In Quitman County, Mississippi, we meet Brenda Wiggs, a court clerk who keeps a list of cases that mysteriously never reach a courtroom; the county, she asserts, has not prosecuted a domestic violence case in twenty-one years. In southeast Chicago, two seventeen-year-old African American boys are wrongfully imprisoned for twenty-seven years for the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl. From minor to outrageous, the disregard for rights is commonplace in city, county, and circuit courts across the country.
Why is this happening? Bach goes beyond the easy explanations of bad apples and meager funding to show how in the name of expedience legal professionals routinely choose to collaborate rather than face off as adversaries. The result is a breakdown in due process that fails to safeguard the rights that well-intentioned legal professionals aim to protect, and ultimately leaves the public less safe. Bach provides the evidence that communities across America will use to demand greater oversight of their courts. She proposes a road map for the monitoring and measurement of court performance to give Americans a court system worthy of a great nation of laws.
In an accessible, riveting narrative that recalls the pace of legal TV and the crusading urgency of this country's great reformers, ORDINARY INJUSTICE delves deeply into courtroom culture and identifies practices that must be explored and changed for our system to be truly effective, equal, and just.
# # #
ORDINARY INJUSTICE
How America Holds Court
by Amy Bach
Metropolitan Books
Publication date: Sept 1, 2009
Hardcover / $26.00 / 320 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7447-5
ISBN-10: 0-8050-7447-3