Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court

Courts and legislators have criminalized so many conducts or behaviors that police are blindly arresting millions of people annually -- almost 11 million in 2011!!!! Todays plea bargaining are secretive meetings and the process can very likely lead to coercing an innocent defendant to plead guilty or no contest -- each of these brings one to lose their Constitutional Rights!!! "Plea bargaining is indistinguishable from the a direct sale of justice." Good book but stay out of the legal industry - its designed to destroy you.

Amy Bach has written about how people in the criminal justice system can suffer from empathy/justice fatigue a form of neural adaptation where they become desensitized to injustice. She gives four rather extreme examples of this process.An unjust outcome can be the result of wrongful arrest, charge, conviction, sentencing, incarceration and revocation of parole/probation. The most frequent unjust outcome would be a wrongful arrest on a simple misdemeanor where the person arrested quickly discovers that their least costly option is to plead guilty, pay the fine and move on. Complaints about the police are investigated by the police and in the vast majority of the cases the officer is upheld. Anyone who pleads not guilty to a simple misdemeanor risks annoying the judge, prosecutor and public defender who all think their time is being wasted.Charging errors are fairly common and they should be detected and corrected as early in the process as possible. The only real supervision of plea-bargaining is by the judge and if the judge has a large case load supervision is probably cursory. Sentencing is very complex process and it is easy to make a sentencing error (in some states the Department of Correction will discover sentencing errors and send the prisoner back to court for re-sentencing). One possible reason for a wrongful incarceration is because of a faulty/waived pre-sentence investigation.The system is a confederation of independent governmental and non-governmental agencies with a common set of clients. There is no oversight and no effective constituency and no single entity has the authority to fix stuff that is broken. I hope Amy Bach has made it harder for people to claim "The system does not need to be fixed because it is not broken."

This book is a must read for anyone caring about our system of justice. The fact is there are many innocent people in prison. As a nation we should care deeply about who goes to prison and if they really deserve to be there. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on U.S. prisons at both the federal level and the state level. They should be reserved for the hard core criminals. Many of our prosecuters are overstepping their legal boundries and the judges most of the time don't care. Most innocent people are forced into plea agreements thinking they are going to be sent home but instead the judges throw serious long term sentences at them and the accused gives up any right to appeal becasue they signed the coersed plea agreement.Most of our justice system does not operate as you see on TV. Justice is dirty and corrupt in our nation by daily violating the accused Constitutional rights and no one seems to care. Billionairs who own private prison companies seek longer and longer sentences for people sent to prison, they push for stricter laws and quicker sentencing FOR PROFIT. This book speaks mainly of the prosecuters and the neglegent defence attornies and judges who operate within our justice system. This is a book everyone should read and at least know that the system we call justice is subpar and needs some serious reform and accountablity.

In four reportorial chapters and one author's summary Bach portrays a legal system seriously dysfunctional, broken, and downright frightening. It is both an eye-opener to those of us non-initiates to the legal system (i.e., most of us) and a call for reform, greater transparency, and greater accountability to those it serves: all U.S. citizens.In easily readable, jargon-free prose Bach manages to both portray the systemic ills and deliver its impact on real people: both defendants and victims of crime. She memorably depicts the harm done to people's lives by this broken system by interviewing those involved and making us understand how it directly affects them. All this in ideologically balanced, well-argued prose which makes the four chapters so memorable and, ultimately, so tragic.(Think of medical malpractice run wild and unchecked and the damage that would do, and you'll get some idea of how broken the legal system is as portrayed in this book.)The four chapters cover the criminal legal process at the state, not the federal, level by depicting systemic problems in each:1. A public defender's system in Georgia.2. A rogue judge in Troy, New York3. A ream of deserving but unprosecuted cases in Mississippi4. A wrongful conviction for murder in ChicagoEach presents the legal system delivering injustice due to ineptness, incompetence, a lack of adequate resources, or unchecked police/prosecutorial zeal and fervor.Any person who might ever be involved in the U.S. court system should read this book. It's a call for action, now.

This book is worth reading for anyone who is interested in how the courts work or the nature and quality of justice in America or anyone contemplating a career in law, law enforcement, county government, or state government. It is written in the style that is somewhere between good magazine journalism and a serious academic research paper. But the author moves around enough and quickly enough so that she pretty much keeps our interest. It is an interesting blend of legal procedures, everyday courtroom drama, American legal history, and, best of all, constitutional law. Along the way, it raises some serious questions about how well or poorly the system works, the way it is monitored (or not), and, perhaps most important, the ways in which change occurs and the reasons it often does not.