Getting justice to measure up
Denise M. Champagne
Rochester attorney Amy Bach wants to make the judicial system more just. She has started a new foundation, Measures for Justice Institute, to rank the performance of local trial courts throughout the nation, providing a yardstick for those within the system to gauge how they measure up.
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NY Daily Record
Rochester attorney Amy Bach wants to make the judicial system more just.

She has started a new foundation, Measures for Justice Institute, to rank the performance of local trial courts throughout the nation, providing a yardstick for those within the system to gauge how they measure up. Included will be a Justice Index to shine a light on problems and raise awareness in an effort to promote change.

Bach is one of 22 fellows selected by Echoing Green from a pool of 2,854 applicants to launch 15 new organizations to promote social change.

Her idea stood out right from the beginning of an intensive selection process, said Rich Leimsider, director of Echoing Green’s fellow and alumni programs.

“At the earliest phase, it was the simplicity, the elegance and the power of her idea,” he said. “In this country, we rank everything. We rank restaurants and schools and people really pay attention. Justice is so important, that it really struck the staff and our independent judges that ranking and measuring the court system is just brilliant.”

Leimsider said the pool was then narrowed to 200 semifinalists during which Bach competed worldwide with people working on topics such as global warming or poverty in Kenya.

“Even against that whole mix, Amy rose to the top,” he said. “Amy’s passion and commitment to this idea really shine through. The Echoing Green fellowship is for emerging leaders and there’s no age cap on that, but a lot of our leaders are pretty fresh out of college. Amy has really spent an amazing career as a journalist and as a lawyer, but this pivot to being a leader and a builder of an organization seems pretty remarkable.”

Echoing Green is a 25-year-old non-profit organization that supports emerging social entrepreneurs and provides them with seed money to help launch new organizations.

Bach founded Measures for Justice in April. The $60,000 seed funding from Echoing Green will help make her concept a reality.

“Measures for Justice ensures that we, as citizens, can have a conversation about what matters — the everyday services that people experience in criminal courts,” Bach said. “If legal professionals can be alerted to patterns of problems based on credible metrics, they can do their best work and everyone will receive the benefits afforded by the U.S. Constitution.”

Bach became acutely aware of problems within the system during several years of research which culminated in her book “Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Courts,” published in 2009. Sitting in courtrooms in Troy; Chicago; Greene County, Georgia; and Quitman County, Mississippi; she witnessed horrendous miscarriages of justice as defendants were warehoused through a seemingly uncaring “fast-food” justice system.

Bach talks about the failure to prosecute a man whose severe beating of his girlfriend was witnessed by her young child. She later learned the prosecutor had not brought forth a domestic violence case in more than 20 years.

She saw defendants crying as they were sentenced to jail because they lacked proper representation, were urged to plead guilty and didn’t understand the implications of their admissions — made without due process in violation of their constitutional rights.

Bach said everyone from the court clerks, to the prosecutors, defenders and judges saw what was happening, but nobody did anything. The few who tried were smacked down or their limited successes barely made a noticeable chip in the system.

Ordinary Injustice highlights legal professionals who became so used to a pattern of lapses that they no longer noticed them, she said.

“The idea is in courts across America, there are ongoing problems, but they’re extremely hard to identify,” Bach said. “An individual may have experienced problems within the system, but there’s no way to prove a pattern.”

She said problems include prosecutors having too much discretion to decide whether or not to bring a case, judges who can grab power in the absence of checks on their performance and overwhelmed defenders.

She noticed in each case, there was a pattern of failures that most people — including lawyers and judges directly involved — accepted or chose to ignore.

“The people who work in the courts have good intentions,” Bach said. “They want to do the right thing. They think they’re doing justice.”

She notes in her book, that upon commencing the project, she wagered that ordinary citizens, most of whom will never face prosecution, could be roused to action. She was pleased to find people in nearly every community she visited were striving to correct failures in the system including clerks, paralegals, prisoners, family members and fellow journalists.

“Even more encouraging was the participation of the four lawyers at the center of this book,” she wrote in the introduction. “The very people who have helped perpetrate ordinary injustice met with me repeatedly, for countless hours, to talk about their roles and answer questions they might well have preferred to ignore. In their transparency, we can see the outlines for change.”

Those very outlines have been with her ever since and she is using them to draw up her plans for Measures for Justice which she said will look into the heart of America and ask how the people are doing.

Nearly every public institution in America is made accountable to some kind of watchdog system,” Bach said. “There is virtually no comparable assessment of how basic legal services are delivered in America so when a victim or defendant’s case is mishandled, there is no way to prove a pattern. No one is keeping track of what kinds of cases go or don’t go to court, whether people are being forced to plead guilty without lawyers or whether best practices are being adopted.”

No one is measuring the performance of the largest penal system in the world where one in six black men has spent time in prison, compared to one in 39 white men while approximately 30 percent of all American adults have a criminal record, Bach said.

“These disparities and high numbers have been allowed to build up, in part, because routine lapses in the criminal justice system go unchallenged,” she said. “Good data can expose patterns and problems that are otherwise invisible to the casual observer.”

Bach brought in a diverse group of measurement experts from every part of the judicial system to develop the Justice Index. The council met for the first time last month in Rochester.

The index will measure things such as prosecutorial screening, access to justice, fairness and accuracy, interrogation policies, fiscal responsibility and how safe people feel and the amount of confidence they have in the system.

The project will include local trial courts at the county level; misdemeanors and felonies. Bach knows she cannot include all of the more than 3,000 counties in the nation, but plans to get enough for a ranking system other communities can use as comparisons.

She said ultimately, the index will be housed in an institute or center, perhaps associated with a major law school or university with a reputation for unbiased analysis. The center will have a citizen’s campaign to create citizen pressure on the courts, an easy-to-understand website and programs to help under-performing counties.

She is looking for a pilot community which she hopes to have in the next year.

“Rochester would be a perfect place,” she said. “It has a reputation of being pretty decent.”

Bach, a native of New York City, earned a bachelor’s in English from Brown University in Rhode Island where she was editor-in-chief of the Brown Daily Herald. She received her law degree in 1998 from Stanford Law School.

She has written on law for The Nation, The American Lawyer, New York magazine and other publications. She has received a number of fellows including one at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in Massachusetts where she met her husband, Dr. John D. Markman, an associate professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry who leads the Department of Neurosurgery’s Neuromedicine Pain Management Center. The couple live in Rochester with their 3-year-old son Leopold.

In the fall, Bach will teach criminal justice as a visiting professor at the University at Buffalo Law School. She has also taught legal studies at the University of Rochester.

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