Book Preview: Ordinary Injustice
I’ve begun reading Amy Bach’s new book, Ordinary Injustice, How America Holds Court.  She’s had me by the end of the introduction.  When I’m done, I’ll write…
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Simple Justice
I’ve begun reading Amy Bach’s new book, Ordinary Injustice, How America Holds Court. She’s had me by the end of the introduction.

When I’m done, I’ll write a proper review, but I’m just so darned excited about the book that I want to post something immediately. This is the first book I’ve ever read that is steely clear that the failure of our the criminal justice system isn’t found in the spectacular but the mundane. It’s our routine, the acceptance of doing things the way they’ve always been done, moving people through the system like cattle and shrugging off the details that distinguish justice from the assembly line.

Amy Bach has a post up at Huff Po which gives a slight, though somewhat misleading, view of what she’s up to. In this teaser piece, she talks about a few of the higher profile cases reflecting failure of the system. This really doesn’t reflect what she does in the book, which avoids the low hanging fruit of big time failures for the less gaudy, but infinitely more pervasive, banal failures.

Consider:

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. There are times when an alarming miscarriage of justice does come to light, and exposes the complacency within the system, but in such instances the public often blames a single player, be it a judge, a prosecutor, or a defense attorney.

While it is convenient to isolate misconduct, targeting an individual only obscures what is truly going on from the scrutiny change requires. The system involves too many players to hold only one accountable for the routine injustice happening in courtrooms across America.

Never has it been said so clearly, and so well. Ordinary Injustice has the potential to be the wake-up call that all of us involved in the criminal justice system need. Bach leaves no one in the system untouched, as well she shouldn’t.

While I will withhold judgment until I’ve finished the book, my reading thus far leads me to believe that this book is the real McCoy, and that Amy Bach has nailed it. I had almost given up on book review, having read a number of books which appeared to have great promise, only to be sorely disappointed that the content failed to live up to its promise. This doesn’t appear to be the case with Ordinary Injustice. It’s already surpassed my expectations.

This book could be the “must read” we’ve been waiting for. I just thought you ought to know.