About the Book

Attorney and journalist Amy Bach spent eight years investigating the widespread courtroom failures that each day upend lives across America. In the process, she discovered how the professionals who work in the system, however well intentioned, cannot see the harm they are doing to the people they serve. In a sweeping inquiry that moves from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Mississippi to Chicago, Ordinary Injustice shows us the tragic consequences that result when communities mistake the rules lawyers play by for the rule of law.

Here is the public defender who pleads most of his clients guilty with scant knowledge about their circumstances; the judge who sets outrageous bail for negligible crimes; the prosecutor who habitually declines to pursue significant cases; the court that works together to achieve a wrongful conviction. Amy Bach goes beyond the usual explanations of bad apples and meager funding to reveal a clubby legal culture of compromise. She exposes an assembly-line approach to justice that rewards mediocre advocacy, bypasses due process, and shortchanges both defendants and victims to keep the court calendar moving. It is time, Bach argues, to institute a new method of checks and balances that will make injustice visible—the first and necessary step to reform.

Full of gripping human stories, sharp analysis, and a sense of urgency, Ordinary Injustice is a major reassessment of the health of the nation’s courtrooms.

“Most people are in no position to do the tedious leg work necessary to find the pattern of ordinary injustice and show that a particular kind of crime is lost to follow up or that the accused is being denied an adequate defense.”