San Antonio College Library

Essays that view wrongful convictions not as random mistakes but as organic outcomes of a misshaped larger system that is rife with faulty eyewitness identifications, false confessions, biased juries, and racial discrimination. Together the contributors reveal the dramatic consequences as well as the daily realities of breakdowns in the law's ability to deliver justice swiftly and fairly, and calls on us to look beyond headline-grabbing exonerations...

In Shades of Freedom, Higginbotham provides a magisterial account of the interaction between law and racial oppression in America from colonial times to the present, demonstrating how the one agent that was entrusted to guarantee equal justice under the law - the judicial system - instead, more often played a dominant role in enforcing the inferior position of blacks, and, on some occasions, eradicated racial injustice. The precept of racial inferiority...

"Through a profile of a reform-minded public defender's office in Newark, NJ, one of the nation's most crime-ridden smaller cities, Wice examines the public defender system and shows how even the smallest reforms, especially those that address quality of life and work for public defenders, can make a big difference. Comparing the smaller defender's office to larger ones in such cities as New York and Chicago, which have not instituted significant...

Criticizes a legal system in which only the wealthy can afford essential services from the country's numerous attorneys. As legislators cut budgets for legal-aid providers and as prestigious law firms reduce their pro bono commitments to mere lip service, the poor find themselves represented by unqualified and negligent lawyers in criminal cases and by no one at all in civil courts and bureaucratic proceedings. Makes the case for reforms which include...

Matthew, Angelia, and Charlie are just three children among the thousands who appeared in Judge Mark A. Ciavarella's courtroom between 2003 and 2008 and were sent away to a detention facility in which, it later came to light, Ciavarella had a personal financial stake. The author shows how this miscarriage of justice underscores a multitude of problems with our juvenile justice system, which too often criminalizes standard adolescent behavior, treats...

Presents the efforts of Joel Carlson, a Johannesburg civil rights attorney, to challenge the legality of a forced labor system under which blacks were arrested and sent to farms as slave labor, and caused the government to suspend it. Documents the struggle for civil rights in South Africa.

In a nation-building operation, outside states invest much of their resources in establishing and maintaining the host country's police, internal security forces, and justice system. This book examines post-Cold War reconstruction efforts, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and assesses the success of U.S. and allied efforts in reconstructing internal security institutions.