Summary Of Ordinary Injustice By Amy Bach - 991 Words
Free Essay: Amy Bach, author of Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court describes the flaws of the criminal justice system. She elaborates from research...
Amy Bach, author of Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court describes the flaws of the criminal justice system. She elaborates from research and her own personal experience as a lawyer. In the final chapter, Show Trial, Bach discusses a story about the wrongful conviction of two innocent boys. Thomas Breen helped convict Michael and Paul, two seventeen year old teens, one of them with special needs. They were sentenced to 200 and 400 years in prison (193). Sam Adam, Michael’s defense attorney, was not able to let the case go, and constantly reminded Breen of the case. Shockingly, after nineteen years, Breen decided to take another look at the cause, because he questioned their guilt (219). Although the competitive nature of prosecutors …show more content…

He was given the case of the rape and strangulation of Lisa Cabassa. The media reported extensively on the details of the case, which caused it to be a high-profile trial. This was an easy case for Breen to win, due to a couple of factors: the media attention, the community’s call for punishment, and the naming of two African-American suspects in a racially charged community. The prosecution’s case was uncertain, and their evidence was a witness who had named only one boy, and a man named Earl who no one in the community knew. The witness referred to the boy as a ‘negro’ and she waited five days before coming forward to claim Michael as a suspect (200). In her interview she seemed very unclear about what she had seen. Police apprehended the suspect and claimed that he had made a statement or confession about Lisa’s murder. Suspicion began to rise when Michael’s confession was missing from the police report. The defendants were sentenced based solely on witness testimony. However, Adam found out that the witness was given a substantial amount of money to relocate, and this is a possible incentive to lie …show more content…

The unfortunate truth about this case is that while the boys were eventually released it was nineteen years later and that is a staggering loss of life. Not only does the victim’s family suffer not having proper justice, but also the two innocent boys lost years of their lives. Paul went insane in prison, and after being released he was not able to carry on with a normal lifestyle. Bach does a good job of building her case against the competitive, frat-like antics of prosecutors much like Thomas Breen. He utilized tactics such as appeal to emotion by having Cabassa’s mother cry on the stand clutching her daughters blood streaked clothes, and defending the tenuous witness by arguing the great courage it took for her to even come forward. He went so far as to say that her fear caused her lapses in memory. This is both irrelevant and creates sympathy in the jurors who are seeking for reprisal for the victim at any cost (212). This proves that the justice system would rather the poor and unrepresented stay buried behind bars than risk embarrassment for lawyers as a