Download or read book Ordinary Injustice written by Amy Bach and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-09 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Supreme Injustice written by Paul Finkelman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-08 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ruling after ruling, the three most important pre–Civil War justices—Marshall, Taney, and Story—upheld slavery. Paul Finkelman establishes an authoritative account of each justice’s proslavery position, the reasoning behind his opposition to black freedom, and the personal incentives that embedded racism ever deeper in American civic life.
Download or read book Sexual Injustice written by Marc Stein and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on six major Supreme Court cases during the 1960s and 1970s, Marc Stein examines the generally liberal rulings on birth control, abortion, interracial marriage, and obscenity in Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe, Loving, and Fanny Hill alongside a profoundly conservative ruling on homosexuality in Boutilier. In the same era in which the Court recognized special marital, reproductive, and heterosexual rights and privileges, it also upheld an immigration statute that classified homosexuals as "psychopathic personalities." Stein shows how a diverse set of influential journalists, judges, and scholars translated the Court's language about marital and reproductive rights into bold statements about sexual freedom and equality.
Download or read book Injustice written by J. Christian Adams and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-10-03 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department of Justice is America’s premier federal law enforcement agency. And according to J. Christian Adams, it’s also a base used by leftwing radicals to impose a fringe agenda on the American people. A five-year veteran of the DOJ and a key attorney in pursuing the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, Adams recounts the shocking story of how a once-storied federal agency, the DOJ’s Civil Rights division has degenerated into a politicized fiefdom for far-left militants, where the enforcement of the law depends on the race of the victim.
Download or read book Court of Injustice written by J.C. Salyer and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Court of Injustice reveals how immigration lawyers work to achieve just results for their clients in a system that has long denigrated the rights of those they serve. J.C. Salyer specifically investigates immigration enforcement in New York City, following individual migrants, their lawyers, and the NGOs that serve them into the immigration courtrooms that decide their cases. This book is an account of the effects of the implementation of U.S. immigration law and policy. Salyer engages directly with the specific laws and procedures that mandate harsh and inhumane outcomes for migrants and their families. Combining anthropological and legal analysis, Salyer demonstrates the economic, historical, political, and social elements that go into constructing inequity under law for millions of non-citizens who live and work in the United States. Drawing on both ethnographic research conducted in New York City and on the author's knowledge and experience as a practicing immigration lawyer at a non-profit organization, this book provides unique insight into the workings and effects of U.S. immigration law. Court of Injustice provides an up-close view of the experiences of immigration lawyers at non-profit organizations, in law school clinics, and in private practice to reveal limitations and possibilities available to non-citizens under U.S. immigration law. In this way, this book provides a new perspective on the study of migration by focusing specifically on the laws, courts, and people involved in U.S. immigration law.
Download or read book Crook County written by Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2017 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Finalist for the C. Wright Mills Book Award, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Winner of the 2017 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, sponsored by the American Sociological Association's Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Winner of the 2017 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book, sponsored by the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Culture Section. Honorable Mention in the 2017 Book Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Race, Class, and Gender. NAACP Image Award Nominee for an Outstanding Literary Work from a debut author. Winner of the 2017 Prose Award for Excellence in Social Sciences and the 2017 Prose Category Award for Law and Legal Studies, sponsored by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers. Silver Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (Current Events/Social Issues category). Americans are slowly waking up to the dire effects of racial profiling, police brutality, and mass incarceration, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities of color. The criminal courts are the crucial gateway between police action on the street and the processing of primarily black and Latino defendants into jails and prisons. And yet the courts, often portrayed as sacred, impartial institutions, have remained shrouded in secrecy, with the majority of Americans kept in the dark about how they function internally. Crook County bursts open the courthouse doors and enters the hallways, courtrooms, judges' chambers, and attorneys' offices to reveal a world of punishment determined by race, not offense. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spent ten years working in and investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago–Cook County, and based on over 1,000 hours of observation, she takes readers inside our so-called halls of justice to witness the types of everyday racial abuses that fester within the courts, often in plain sight. We watch white courtroom professionals classify and deliberate on the fates of mostly black and Latino defendants while racial abuse and due process violations are encouraged and even seen as justified. Judges fall asleep on the bench. Prosecutors hang out like frat boys in the judges' chambers while the fates of defendants hang in the balance. Public defenders make choices about which defendants they will try to "save" and which they will sacrifice. Sheriff's officers cruelly mock and abuse defendants' family members. Delve deeper into Crook County with related media and instructor resources at www.sup.org/crookcountyresources. Crook County's powerful and at times devastating narratives reveal startling truths about a legal culture steeped in racial abuse. Defendants find themselves thrust into a pernicious legal world where courtroom actors live and breathe racism while simultaneously committing themselves to a colorblind ideal. Gonzalez Van Cleve urges all citizens to take a closer look at the way we do justice in America and to hold our arbiters of justice accountable to the highest standards of equality.
Download or read book Ordinary Injustice written by Amy Bach and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A groundbreaking book . . . revealing the systemic, everyday problems in our courts that must be addressed if justice is truly to be served."—Doris Kearns Goodwin Attorney 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-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 visible—the first and necessary step to reform.
Download or read book Supreme Injustice How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 written by Alan M. Dershowitz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001-06-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions of Americans were baffled and outraged by the U.S. Supreme Court's role in deciding the presidential election of 2000 with its controversial ruling in Bush v. Gore. The Court had held a unique place in our system of checks and balances, seen as the embodiment of fairness and principle precisely because it was perceived to be above the political fray. How could it now issue a decision that reeked of partisan politics, and send to the White House a candidate who may have actually lost the election? In Supreme Injustice, best-selling author and legal expert Alan M. Dershowitz addresses these questions head-on, at last demystifying Bush v. Gore for those who are still angered by the court's decision but unclear about its meaning. Dershowitz--himself a former Supreme Court clerk--argues that in this case for the first time, the court's majority let its desire for a particular partisan outcome have priority over legal principles. As in his other bestselling books, Dershowitz clarifies complex legal issues, explaining concepts such as "equal protection" and "irreparable harm." Digging deeply into their earlier writings and rulings, Dershowitz proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the justices who gave George W. Bush the presidency contradicted their previous positions to do so. The most egregious ruling since the Dred Scott Decision, Bush v. Gore has shattered the image of the Supreme Court as a fair and impartial arbiter of important national issues. The resulting loss of the American people's respect, Dershowitz concludes, has severely compromised the Court's role in national affairs. And yet Dershowitz sees some benefit emerging from this constitutional crisis--if we understand its lessons and take action to prevent it from happening again.
Download or read book The Injustice of the Justice System written by T.M.H. Foote and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2012-10-17 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The people who denied Bill his US constitutional rights and protections know who they are and what they did for the love of money. Now, the rest of the world can know, too. This is the story of a laymans fight against a justice system that refuses to look out for his rights. Child Protective Services literally rips Bills family apart, stealing his younger daughter Joanna. It all starts when Allicia falls in love with a boy shell do anything to be witheven if that means accusing her father of sexually abusing her from an early age. Seeking to build a case, investigators badger other family members to get them to come over to the states side. A police report ends up being a preliminary brief on behalf of the prosecution instead of a retelling of the facts. Bill had to learn how to file motions and appeals. Its a lot of work, but he knows the truth, and hell do whatever it takes to expose The Injustice of the Justice System.
Download or read book A Knock at Midnight written by Brittany K. Barnett and published by Crown. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE • A “powerful and devastating” (The Washington Post) call to free those buried alive by America’s legal system, and an inspiring true story about unwavering belief in humanity—from a gifted young lawyer and important new voice in the movement to transform the system. “An essential book for our time . . . Brittany K. Barnett is a star.”—Van Jones, CEO of REFORM Alliance, CNN Host, and New York Times bestselling author Brittany K. Barnett was only a law student when she came across the case that would change her life forever—that of Sharanda Jones, single mother, business owner, and, like Brittany, Black daughter of the rural South. A victim of America’s devastating war on drugs, Sharanda had been torn away from her young daughter and was serving a life sentence without parole—for a first-time drug offense. In Sharanda, Brittany saw haunting echoes of her own life, as the daughter of a formerly incarcerated mother. As she studied this case, a system came into focus in which widespread racial injustice forms the core of America’s addiction to incarceration. Moved by Sharanda’s plight, Brittany set to work to gain her freedom. This had never been the plan. Bright and ambitious, Brittany was a successful accountant on her way to a high-powered future in corporate law. But Sharanda’s case opened the door to a harrowing journey through the criminal justice system. By day she moved billion-dollar deals, and by night she worked pro bono to free clients in near hopeless legal battles. Ultimately, her path transformed her understanding of injustice in the courts, of genius languishing behind bars, and the very definition of freedom itself. Brittany’s riveting memoir is at once a coming-of-age story and a powerful evocation of what it takes to bring hope and justice to a system built to resist them both. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS
Download or read book Manifest Injustice written by Barry Siegel and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this remarkable legal page-turner, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Barry Siegel recounts the dramatic, decades-long saga of Bill Macumber, imprisoned for thirty-eight years for a double homicide he denies committing. In the spring of 1962, a school bus full of students stumbled across a mysterious crime scene on an isolated stretch of Arizona desert: an abandoned car and two bodies. This brutal murder of a young couple bewildered the sheriff 's department of Maricopa County for years. Despite a few promising leads—including several chilling confessions from Ernest Valenzuela, a violent repeat offender—the case went cold. More than a decade later, a clerk in the sheriff 's department, Carol Macumber, came forward to tell police that her estranged husband had confessed to the murders. Though the evidence linking Bill Macumber to the incident was questionable, he was arrested and charged with the crime. During his trial, the judge refused to allow the confession of now-deceased Ernest Valenzuela to be admitted as evidence in part because of the attorney-client privilege. Bill Macumber was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The case, rife with extraordinary irregularities, attracted the sustained involvement of the Arizona Justice Project, one of the first and most respected of the non-profit groups that represent victims of manifest injustice across the country. With more twists and turns than a Hollywood movie, Macumber's story illuminates startling, upsetting truths about our justice system, which kept a possibly innocent man locked up for almost forty years, and introduces readers to the generations of dedicated lawyers who never stopped working on his behalf, lawyers who ultimately achieved stunning results. With precise journalistic detail, intimate access and masterly storytelling, Barry Siegel will change your understanding of American jurisprudence, police procedure, and what constitutes justice in our country today.
Download or read book Anatomy of Injustice written by Raymond Bonner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim's body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt's battle to save Elmore's life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation's ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.
Download or read book Usual Cruelty written by Alec Karakatsanis and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an award-winning civil rights lawyer, a profound challenge to our society's normalization of the caging of human beings, and the role of the legal profession in perpetuating it Alec Karakatsanis is interested in what we choose to punish. For example, it is a crime in most of America for poor people to wager in the streets over dice; dice-wagerers can be seized, searched, have their assets forfeited, and be locked in cages. It's perfectly fine, by contrast, for people to wager over international currencies, mortgages, or the global supply of wheat; wheat-wagerers become names on the wings of hospitals and museums. He is also troubled by how the legal system works when it is trying to punish people. The bail system, for example, is meant to ensure that people return for court dates. But it has morphed into a way to lock up poor people who have not been convicted of anything. He's so concerned about this that he has personally sued court systems across the country, resulting in literally tens of thousands of people being released from jail when their money bail was found to be unconstitutional. Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings—an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color and for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it.
Download or read book Colorblind Injustice written by J. Morgan Kousser and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 603 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging recent trends both in historical scholarship and in Supreme Court decisions on civil rights, J. Morgan Kousser criticizes the Court's "postmodern equal protection" and demonstrates that legislative and judicial history still matter for public policy. Offering an original interpretation of the failure of the First Reconstruction (after the Civil War) by comparing it with the relative success of the Second (after World War II), Kousser argues that institutions and institutional rules--not customs, ideas, attitudes, culture, or individual behavior--have been the primary forces shaping American race relations throughout the country's history. Using detailed case studies of redistricting decisions and the tailoring of electoral laws from Los Angeles to the Deep South, he documents how such rules were designed to discriminate against African Americans and Latinos. Kousser contends that far from being colorblind, Shaw v. Reno (1993) and subsequent "racial gerrymandering" decisions of the Supreme Court are intensely color-conscious. Far from being conservative, he argues, the five majority justices and their academic supporters are unreconstructed radicals who twist history and ignore current realities. A more balanced view of that history, he insists, dictates a reversal of Shaw and a return to the promise of both Reconstructions.
Download or read book Sensing Injustice written by Michael E. Tigar and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable life of a lawyer at the forefront of civil and human rights since the 1960s By the time he was 26, Michael Tigar was a legend in legal circles well before he would take on some of the highest-profile cases of his generation. In his first US Supreme Court case—at the age of 28—Tigar won a unanimous victory that freed thousands of Vietnam War resisters from prison. Tigar also led the legal team that secured a judgment against the Pinochet regime for the 1976 murders of Pinochet opponent Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Moffitt in a Washington, DC car bombing. He then worked with the lawyers who prosecuted Pinochet for torture and genocide. A relentless fighter of injustice—not only as a human rights lawyer, but also as a teacher, scholar, journalist, playwright, and comrade—Tigar has been counsel to Angela Davis, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), the Chicago Eight, and leaders of the Black Panther Party, to name only a few. It is past time that Michael Tigar wrote his memoir. Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer's Life in the Battle for Change is a vibrant literary and legal feat. In it, Tigar weaves powerful legal analysis and wry observation through the story of his remarkable life. The result is a compelling narrative that blends law, history, and progressive politics. This is essential reading for lawyers, for law students, for anyone who aspires to bend the law toward change.
Download or read book Gospel Justice written by Bruce D. Strom and published by Moody Publishers. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a justice system that doesn’t protect the poor be considered truly just? We have all heard the phrase, “You have the right to an attorney.” But did you know this is only true for those being accused of a crime in our country, not their victims? Without a legal advocate, innocent victims are left to fend for themselves. The church is called to do justice and love mercy. We are given the example of the Good Samaritan serving a victim in need, no matter the stigmas attached. But how are we to do this amidst the complexities of the current system? Bruce Strom left a successful legal career to start Administer Justice, a nonprofit organization providing free legal care to our most vulnerable neighbors. Gospel Justice calls churches across the nation to transform lives by serving both the spiritual and legal needs of the poor through participation in the Gospel Justice Initiative. It is not only a book for lawyers or pastors, though. Bruce Strom is calling each of us, the whole body of Christ, to join the cause of legal justice for the oppressed.
Download or read book Unfair written by Adam Benforado and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Unfair succinctly and persuasively recounts cutting-edge research testifying to the faulty and inaccurate procedures that underpin virtually all aspects of our criminal justice system, illustrating many with case studies.”—The Boston Globe A child is gunned down by a police officer; an investigator ignores critical clues in a case; an innocent man confesses to a crime he did not commit; a jury acquits a killer. The evidence is all around us: Our system of justice is fundamentally broken. But it’s not for the reasons we tend to think, as law professor Adam Benforado argues in this eye-opening, galvanizing book. Even if the system operated exactly as it was designed to, we would still end up with wrongful convictions, trampled rights, and unequal treatment. This is because the roots of injustice lie not inside the dark hearts of racist police officers or dishonest prosecutors, but within the minds of each and every one of us. This is difficult to accept. Our nation is founded on the idea that the law is impartial, that legal cases are won or lost on the basis of evidence, careful reasoning and nuanced argument. But they may, in fact, turn on the camera angle of a defendant’s taped confession, the number of photos in a mug shot book, or a simple word choice during a cross-examination. In Unfair, Benforado shines a light on this troubling new field of research, showing, for example, that people with certain facial features receive longer sentences and that judges are far more likely to grant parole first thing in the morning. Over the last two decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have uncovered many cognitive forces that operate beyond our conscious awareness. Until we address these hidden biases head-on, Benforado argues, the social inequality we see now will only widen, as powerful players and institutions find ways to exploit the weaknesses of our legal system. Weaving together historical examples, scientific studies, and compelling court cases—from the border collie put on trial in Kentucky to the five teenagers who falsely confessed in the Central Park Jogger case—Benforado shows how our judicial processes fail to uphold our values and protect society’s weakest members. With clarity and passion, he lays out the scope of the legal system’s dysfunction and proposes a wealth of practical reforms that could prevent injustice and help us achieve true fairness and equality before the law.
