Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court

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."

What a comprehensive and eye opening look at the problems with the American justice system that fly below the radar. I hope that every judge reads this! " "Ordinary injustice results when a community of legal professionals becomes so accustomed to a pattern of lapses that they can no longer see their role in them." It's the book I would have written about Maine ... if I could write at all." - Robert J. Ruffner Director Maine Indigent Defense Center [...]

This is how a book about a problem in our legal system should be written. With fascinating vignettes, Ms Bach makes it clear that although many of the problems' causers are very wrong, they are often almost ignorant of the harm they are doing. I recommend it highly. Stephen Adler

Ms Bach's book is brilliantly written and researched and is accessible to non-lawyers, like me. Within the first few pages I had a dramatically new perspective on our legal system. I knew there were immense inequities in our legal safety net, but did not realize the degree. Well done.

Highly readable page turner. I'm sure this will become a staple in college and law school classes for years to come.