Ordinary Injustice (Amy Bach)

Bach describes problems with America's criminal justice system by analyzing four situations in depth: a county in Georgia providing ineffective defense to indigent suspects, a highly respected judge in upstate New York thrown off the bench for routinely denying rights to people in need, a prosecutor in Mississippi who arbitrarily decides to ignore inconvenient cases, and another prosecutor turned defense lawyer who raised questions, freeing men he had sent to jail decades before, raising the ire of lawyers and police. In each case, she sees the problems stemming not from a few bad actors, but from well-intentioned people trying to get by in a broken system. The problem is that too many important legal decisions are made in secrecy, without any oversight, under conditions that focus on moving cases through the system efficiently, not on justice. This is a scary, important book.