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 Ordinary Injustice written by Amy Bach and published by Picador. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 0 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 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 Ordinary Injustice written by Alfredo Mirandé and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ordinary Injustice shows how the legal and judicial system is stacked against Latinos, documenting the racial inequities in the system from the time of arrest and incarceration to final deposition and post-conviction experiences. The book chronicles the obstacles and injustices faced by a young Latino student with no previous criminal record and how a simple misdemeanor domestic violence case morphed into a very serious case with multiple felonies, and potential life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Download or read book Injustice The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt written by Barrington Moore, Jr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1978. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.
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 Good News About Injustice written by Gary A. Haugen and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The good news about injustice is that God is against it. God is in the business of using the unlikely to bring about justice and mercy. In Good News About Injustice, Gary Haugen offers stories of courageous Christians who have stood up for justice in the face of human trafficking, forced prostitution, racial and religious persecution, and torture. Throughout he provides concrete guidance on how ordinary Christians can rise up to seek justice throughout the world. This landmark work, featuring newly updated statistics, is now part of the IVP Signature Collection, which features special editions of iconic books in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of InterVarsity Press. A five-session companion Bible study is also available.
Download or read book The Priority of Injustice written by Clive Barnett and published by Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original and ambitious work looks anew at a series of intellectual debates about the meaning of democracy. Clive Barnett engages with key thinkers in various traditions of democratic theory and demonstrates the importance of a geographical imagination in interpreting contemporary political change. Debates about radical democracy, Barnett argues, have become trapped around a set of oppositions between deliberative and agonistic theories--contrasting thinkers who promote the possibility of rational agreement and those who seek to unmask the role of power or violence or difference in shaping human affairs. While these debates are often framed in terms of consensus versus contestation, Barnett unpacks the assumptions about space and time that underlie different understandings of the sources of political conflict and shows how these differences reflect deeper philosophical commitments to theories of creative action or revived ontologies of "the political." Rather than developing ideal theories of democracy or models of proper politics, he argues that attention should turn toward the practices of claims-making through which political movements express experiences of injustice and make demands for recognition, redress, and re pair. By rethinking the spatial grammar of discussions of public space, democratic inclusion, and globalization, Barnett develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the crucial roles played by geographical processes in generating and processing contentious politics.
Download or read book Waste written by Catherine Coleman Flowers and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.
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 The Broken Heart of America written by Walter Johnson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing portrait of the racial dynamics that lie inescapably at the heart of our nation, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike—a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States.
Download or read book How Can You Represent Those People written by A. Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Can You Represent Those People? is the first-ever collection of essays offering a response to the 'Cocktail Party Question' asked of every criminal lawyer. A must-read for anyone interested in race, poverty, crime, punishment, and what makes lawyers tick.
Download or read book The Triumph of Injustice How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay written by Emmanuel Saez and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s runaway inequality has an engine: our unjust tax system. Even as they became fabulously wealthy, the ultra-rich have had their taxes collapse to levels last seen in the 1920s. Meanwhile, working-class Americans have been asked to pay more. The Triumph of Injustice presents a forensic investigation into this dramatic transformation, written by two economists who revolutionized the study of inequality. Eschewing anecdotes and case studies, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman offer a comprehensive view of America’s tax system, based on new statistics covering all taxes paid at all levels of government. Their conclusion? For the first time in more than a century, billionaires now pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Blending history and cutting-edge economic analysis, and writing in lively and jargon-free prose, Saez and Zucman dissect the deliberate choices (and sins of indecision) that have brought us to today: the gradual exemption of capital owners; the surge of a new tax avoidance industry, and the spiral of tax competition among nations. With clarity and concision, they explain how America turned away from the most progressive tax system in history to embrace policies that only serve to compound the wealth of a few. But The Triumph of Injustice is much more than a laser-sharp analysis of one of the great political and intellectual failures of our time. Saez and Zucman propose a visionary, democratic, and practical reinvention of taxes, outlining reforms that can allow tax justice to triumph in today’s globalized world and democracy to prevail over concentrated wealth. A pioneering companion website allows anyone to evaluate proposals made by the authors, and to develop their own alternative tax reform at taxjusticenow.org.
Download or read book The Divide written by Matt Taibbi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS A scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends—growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration—come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime—but it’s impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side. In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice—the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. He uncovers the startling looting that preceded the financial collapse; a wild conspiracy of billionaire hedge fund managers to destroy a company through dirty tricks; and the story of a whistleblower who gets in the way of the largest banks in America, only to find herself in the crosshairs. On the other side of the Divide, Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an arrestable offense. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision of civil rights. Through astonishing—and enraging—accounts of the high-stakes capers of the wealthy and nightmare stories of regular people caught in the Divide’s punishing logic, Taibbi lays bare one of the greatest challenges we face in contemporary American life: surviving a system that devours the lives of the poor, turns a blind eye to the destructive crimes of the wealthy, and implicates us all. Praise for The Divide “Ambitious . . . deeply reported, highly compelling . . . impossible to put down.”—The New York Times Book Review “These are the stories that will keep you up at night. . . . The Divide is not just a report from the new America; it is advocacy journalism at its finest.”—Los Angeles Times “Taibbi is a relentless investigative reporter. He takes readers inside not only investment banks, hedge funds and the blood sport of short-sellers, but into the lives of the needy, minorities, street drifters and illegal immigrants. . . . The Divide is an important book. Its documentation is powerful and shocking.”—The Washington Post “Captivating . . . The Divide enshrines its author’s position as one of the most important voices in contemporary American journalism.”—The Independent (UK) “Taibbi [is] perhaps the greatest reporter on Wall Street’s crimes in the modern era.”—Salon
Download or read book Letter from a Birmingham Jail written by Dr Martin Luther King and published by HarperOne. This book was released on 2025-01-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Structural Injustice written by Madison Powers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Madison Powers and Ruth Faden here develop an innovative theory of structural injustice that links human rights norms and fairness norms. Norms of both kinds are grounded in an account of well-being. Their well-being account provides the foundation for human rights, explains the depth of unfairness of systematic patterns of disadvantage, and locates the unfairness of power relations in forms of control some groups have over the well-being of other groups. They explain how human rights violations and structurally unfair patterns of power and advantage are so often interconnected. Unlike theories of structural injustice tailored for largely benign social processes, Powers and Faden's theory addresses typical patterns of structural injustice-those in which the wrongful conduct of identifiable agents creates or sustains mutually reinforcing forms of injustice. These patterns exist both within nation-states and across national boundaries. However, this theory rejects the claim that for a structural theory to be broadly applicable both within and across national boundaries its central claims must be universally endorsable. Instead, Powers and Faden find support for their theory in examples of structural injustice around the world, and in the insights and perspectives of related social movements. Their theory also differs from approaches that make enhanced democratic decision-making or the global extension of republican institutions the centerpiece of proposed remedies. Instead, the theory focuses on justifiable forms of resistance in circumstances in which institutions are unwilling or unable to address pressing problems of injustice. The insights developed in Structural Injustice will interest not only scholars and students in a range of disciplines from political philosophy to feminist theory and environmental justice, but also activists and journalists engaged with issues of social justice.
Download or read book The Green City and Social Injustice written by Isabelle Anguelovski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Green City and Social Injustice examines the recent urban environmental trajectory of 21 cities in Europe and North America over a 20-year period. It analyses the circumstances under which greening interventions can create a new set of inequalities for socially vulnerable residents while also failing to eliminate other environmental risks and impacts. Based on fieldwork in ten countries and on the analysis of core planning, policy and activist documents and data, the book offers a critical view of the growing green planning orthodoxy in the Global North. It highlights the entanglements of this tenet with neoliberal municipal policies including budget cuts for community initiatives, long-term green spaces and housing for the most fragile residents; and the focus on large-scale urban redevelopment and high-end real estate investment. It also discusses hopeful experiences from cities where urban greening has long been accompanied by social equity policies or managed by community groups organizing around environmental justice goals and strategies. The book examines how displacement and gentrification in the context of greening are not only physical but also socio-cultural, creating new forms of social erasure and trauma for vulnerable residents. Its breadth and diversity allow students, scholars and researchers to debunk the often-depoliticized branding and selling of green cities and reinsert core equity and justice issues into green city planning—a much-needed perspective. Building from this critical view, the book also shows how cities that prioritize equity in green access, in secure housing and in bold social policies can achieve both environmental and social gains for all.
