Overview

From an award-winning lawyer-reporter, a radically new explanation for America's failing justice system

The stories of grave injustice are all too familiar: the lawyer who sleeps through a trial, the false confessions, the convictions of the innocent. Less visible is the chronic injustice meted out daily by a profoundly defective system.

In a sweeping investigation that moves from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Chicago to Mississippi, Amy Bach reveals a judicial process so deeply compromised that it constitutes a menace to the people it is designed to serve. Here is the public defender who pleads most of his clients guilty; the judge who sets outrageous bail for negligible crimes; the prosecutor who brings almost no cases to trial; the court that works together to achieve a wrong verdict. Going beyond the usual explanations of bad apples and meager funding, Bach identifies an assembly-line approach that rewards shoddiness and sacrifices defendants to keep the court calendar moving, and she exposes the collusion between judge, prosecutor, and defense that puts the interests of the system above the obligation to the people. It is time, Bach argues, to institute a new method of checks and balances that will make injustice visible--the first and necessary step to any reform.

Full of gripping human stories, sharp analyses, and a crusader's sense of urgency, Ordinary Injustice is a major reassessment of the health of the nation's courtrooms.

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9780805074475

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&#8220;More than anything else I have read, Ordinary Injustice tells us what actually happens in the prosecutorial world. That reality is painfully different from the romantic picture of constitutional rights triumphant that I helped to paint in Gideon&#8217;s Trumpet. It is a fascinating and essential book.&#8221;<br>&#8212;Anthony Lewis, author of Freedom of the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment &nbsp;&#8220; Ordinary Injustice takes the reader to unexamined fiefdoms across the country and brings them deep into the heart of the way justice truly happens on a day-to-day level.&nbsp; It shows how dangerous it is when any one of the clearly defined roles in the system malfunctions. No one concerned with the state of this country&#8217;s democracy can afford to ignore this necessary book.&#8221; <br>&#8212;Barry Scheck, co-founder and co-director of The Innocence Project, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law&nbsp;&#8220;Amy Bach sets out to uncover and, more imp

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