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Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court
Ordinary Injustice How America Holds Court Author:Amy Bach "A groundbreaking book . . . revealing the systemic, everyday problems in our courts that must be addressed if justice is truly to be served."Doris Kearns GoodwinAttorney and journalist Amy Bach spent eight years investigating the widespread courtroom failures that each day upend lives across America. What she found was an assembly-... more »line approach to justice: a system that rewards mediocre advocacy, bypasses due process, and shortchanges both defendants and victims to keep the court calendar moving. Here is the public defender who pleads most of his clients guilty with scant knowledge about their circumstances; the judge who sets outrageous bail for negligible crimes; the prosecutor who habitually declines to pursue significant cases; the court that works together to achieve a wrongful conviction. Going beyond the usual explanations of bad apples and meager funding, Ordinary Injustice reveals a clubby legal culture of compromise, and shows the tragic consequences that result when communities mistake the rules that lawyers play by for the rule of law. It is time, Bach argues, to institute a new method of checks and balances that will make injustice visiblethe first and necessary step to reform. Amy Bach, a member of the New York bar, has written on law for The Nation, The American Lawyer, and New York magazine, among other publications. For her work in progress on Ordinary Injustice, Bach received a Soros Media Fellowship, a special J. Anthony Lukas citation, and a Radcliffe Fellowship. She lives in Rochester, New York, where she taught legal studies at the University of Rochester. Winner of The Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
Attorney and journalist Amy Bach spent eight years investigating the widespread courtroom failures that each day upend lives across America. There, she observed professionals working in the system who, however well intentioned, cannot see the harm they are doing to the people they serve. There is a public defender pleads most of his clients guilty with scant knowledge about their circumstances; a judge who sets outrageous bail for negligible crimes; a prosecutor who habitually declines to pursue significant cases; a court that works together to achieve a wrongful conviction.
In an inquiry that moves from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Mississippi to Chicago, Ordinary Injustice shows the consequences that result when communities mistake the rules that lawyers play by for the rule of law. Amy Bach goes beyond the usual explanations of bad apples and meager funding to reveal a clubby legal culture of compromise. She exposes an assembly-line approach to justice that rewards mediocre advocacy, bypasses due process, and shortchanges both defendants and victims to keep the court calendar moving. It is time, Bach argues, to institute a new method of checks and balances that will make injustice visiblethe first and necessary step to reform.
With human stories, sharp analysis, and a sense of urgency, Ordinary Injustice is a major reassessment of the health of the nation's courtrooms. "Bach has done something different: shown us the reality of the criminal justice process in microscopic, human detail. In different places across the country she watched went on in courtrooms. Her accounts of what she saw should open others' eyes to unwelcome reality. It is a revealing and important book."Anthony Lewis, The New York Review of Books "Bach has done something different: shown us the reality of the criminal justice process in microscopic, human detail. In different places across the country she watched went on in courtrooms. Her accounts of what she saw should open others' eyes to unwelcome reality. It is a revealing and important book."Anthony Lewis, The New York Review of Books
"Bach, a writer and attorney, has found a powerful and frightening story in the day-to-day workings of the justice system and, in particular, how it fails to live up to its ideals`the routine injustice,? she writes, `happening in courtrooms across the country? . . . Ordinary Injustice tells stories that too often are overlooked by mainstream media, probably because they are not as dramatic as, say, a wrongful conviction. But in each injustice Bach reveals, with the poignant details that come only from long hours spent sitting on hard courtroom benches and knocking on doors, the seeds of larger, more dramatic injustices . . . Ordinary Injustice looks at a part of the criminal justice system that largely goes unexaminedrelatively minor cases where seemingly little is at stake. What it finds is deeply troubling."Steve Mills, Chicago Tribune
"One of the most powerful and important books on the law published in 2009."Tony Mauro, The National Law Journal
"Should be required reading for every judge, prosecutor, defense lawyer, clerk and defendant in courthouses everywhere."Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"One of the best portrayals I've read of the everyday, mundane, and yet utterly paralyzing weaknesses of state criminal justice systems . . . Sobering, and important."Emily Bazelon, Slate.com
"A highly readable and balanced look at a variety of criminal justice problems in America's courts . . . With compassion and an open mind, bach has created a work capable of broadening even the sophisticated lawyer-reader's perspective on where injustice is found."Alyson Palmer, Fulton County Daily Report (Atlanta)
"It takes an attorney to investigate state county courtrooms, and Ordinary Injustice reveals the sorry condition of certain state county courtrooms. Amy Bach is a hero to the faceless numbers who have stood before them, alone, convicted, without the guaranteed benefit of a zealous defense."Mandy Twaddell, The Providence Journal
"Exemplary legal writing."Green Bag awards, 2009
"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?s Trumpet. It is a fascinating and essential book."Anthony Lewis, author of Freedom of the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment
"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. 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's democracy can afford to ignore this necessary book."Barry Scheck, co-founder and co-director of The Innocence Project, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
"Amy Bach sets out to uncover and, more important, explain widespread failures of the legal process. That she achieves this is reason enough to read and respect Ordinary Injustice. But she does it in a way that turns a necessary study into a hard-to-put down narrative that sometimes reads like a screenplay. Best of all, Bach exudes understanding, even empathy, for those bad actors whom she rightly concludes shouldn't be blamed alonebecause, as she writes, `pinning the problem on any one bad apple fails to indict the tree from which it fell.'"Steven Brill, founder of Court TV and The American Lawyer
"This is a magnificent work, a crusading call for reform in the tradition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring or Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed. With her remarkable skills as a reporter and her masterful storytelling ability, Amy Bach provides a fascinating range of individual stories to reveal the systemic, everyday problems in our courts that must be addressed if justice is truly to be served. This groundbreaking book deserves widespread attention."Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals
"This is a very important book for any one seriously concerned about the continuing struggle for civil rights in this nation. Amy Bach takes us into courtrooms, judges' chambers, and prosecutors' offices and reveals what years of bias, neglect, and indifference have left: a system where the accused, victims, and their families get little or no individual attention, are often bewildered by the process and, at the end of the day are left without justice. As I read through these revealing and shocking pages, I was saddened, angered and outraged. I hope outrage will push citizens everywhere to demand fulfillment of the birthright of every American: equal justice under the law."Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, Co-Founder and President Emeritus of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
"Every judge, prosecutor, and defense lawyer should read Ordinary Injustice. I hope it will compel us to reevaluate the injustice that occurs with impunity and regularity in our criminal justice system and I recommend it with great enthusiasm to anyone concerned about inequality and the law."Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, and Founding and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice
"Moving, illuminating, damning. Bach gets beyond the usual suspects, exposing a corrosive culture. It is a tribute to its honesty that Ordinary Injustice will make readers squirm."Steve Bogira, author of Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes i...« less
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