Why The Innocent Plead Guilty And The Guilty Go Free by Jed S. Rakoff, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

A senior federal judge's incisive, unsettling exploration of some of the paradoxes that define the judiciary today, Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free features essays examining why innocent people plead guilty, why high-level executives aren't prosecuted, why you won't get your day in court, and why the judiciary is curtailing its own constitutionally mandated power. How can we be fully proud of a system of justice when the innocent are often pressured to plead guilty? How can we claim that justice is equal when we imprison thousands of poor black men for relatively modest crimes but almost never prosecute rich, white, high-level executives who commit crimes that have far greater impact? How can we applaud the Supreme Court's ever-more confining view of its role in combating excess by the President?Federal judge Jed S. Rakoff, a leading authority on the law of white collar crime, explores these and other puzzles in a startling account of our broken legal system. Grounded in his twenty-four years as a federal trial judge in New York, as well as the many years he worked as a federal prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer, Rakoff illuminates some of our most urgent legal, social, and political issues: plea deals and class-action lawsuits, corporate impunity and the death penalty, the perils of eyewitness testimony and forensic science, the War on Terror and executive power. A fundamental problem, he reveals, is that the judiciary itself is constraining its own constitutional powers. Like few others, Rakoff understands the values that animate the best of our legal system-and he has a close-up view of the failure to live up these ideals. In this gap, however, he sees great potential for practical reforms and a public mandate to make our justice system truly just. | Why The Innocent Plead Guilty And The Guilty Go Free by Jed S. Rakoff, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters