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|
 First edition | |
| Author | Alec Karakatsanis |
|---|---|
| Genre | Law |
| Publisher | The New Press |
Publication date | 2019 |
Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (2019) is a non-fiction law book by civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis. The book concerns injustice and inequality in the American legal system.
After a brief introduction, the book is broken into three essays with citations and footnotes, written over the course of Karakatsanis' career.
The first essay is The Punishment Bureaucracy: How to Think About "Criminal Justice Reform". [1] It was published in the Yale Law Journal in 2019. In it, Karakatsanis describes perceived injustices of the American criminal system. These include cash bail, unequal treatment under the law, and a lack of rigorous evidence. He calls the criminal system "the punishment bureaucracy".
Although the system individually requires "beyond a reasonable doubt" before someone may be convicted, in aggregate, the system does not require this for its punishments. Karakatsanis argues there is no evidence that criminalizing drug use "address[es] any social ill whatsoever". [ citation needed ]
Karakatsanis argues that the outcomes the criminal system creates are the result of choices made by politicians, prosecutors, police, and "elites". He cites several examples that were or were not prosecuted, including waterboarding, the NSA's wiretapping program, Tim DeChristopher's non-serious bid on a federal land auction, the Killing of Eric Garner, and the prosecution of Ramsey Orta following the killing.
Karakatsanis cautions against reform that does not substantially shrink the criminal system's budget and influence. He recommends working with "deeper politics" rather than the "silo" of reforming prosecutors or prisons. Among others, he approves of programs that build power and employment for formerly incarcerated people, reparations for those harmed by punishment, and reducing the number of operational jails (thus reducing the number of people in prison).
The second essay describes a fictional "human lawyer" who remembers the human beings affected by her career choices. [2] [3]
The third essay argues that lawyers should dedicate their time to causes that match the values of the profession. [2] [4]
The book was favorably reviewed by Bernice B. Donald in Law360. [5] A former prosecutor in Slate agreed with the book. [2] Karakatsanis was interviewed by National Public Radio. [6] An excerpt of the introduction, focusing on cash bail, was published in Time. [7]
Criminal justice is the delivery of justice to those who have been accused of committing crimes. The criminal justice system is a series of government agencies and institutions. Goals include the rehabilitation of offenders, preventing other crimes, and moral support for victims. The primary institutions of the criminal justice system are the police, prosecution and defense lawyers, the courts and the prisons system.
Bail is a set of pre-trial restrictions that are imposed on a suspect to ensure that they will not hamper the judicial process. Bail is the conditional release of a defendant with the promise to appear in court when required. In some countries, especially the United States, bail usually implies a bail bond, a deposit of money or some form of property to the court by the suspect in return for the release from pre-trial detention. If the suspect does not return to court, the bail is forfeited and the suspect may be charged with the crime of failure to appear. If the suspect returns to make all their required appearances, bail is returned after the trial is concluded.
A bail bondsman, bail bond agent or bond dealer is any person, agency or corporation that will act as a surety and pledge money or property as bail for the appearance of a defendant in court.
The Criminal Court of the City of New York is a court of the State Unified Court System in New York City that handles misdemeanors and lesser offenses, and also conducts arraignments and preliminary hearings in felony cases.
Within the criminal justice system of Japan, there exist three basic features that characterize its operations. First, the institutions—police, government prosecutors' offices, courts, and correctional organs—maintain close and cooperative relations with each other, consulting frequently on how best to accomplish the shared goals of limiting and controlling crime. Second, citizens are encouraged to assist in maintaining public order, and they participate extensively in crime prevention campaigns, apprehension of suspects, and offender rehabilitation programs. Finally, officials who administer criminal justice are allowed considerable discretion in dealing with offenders.
In legal history, an animal trial was the criminal trial of a non-human animal. Such trials are recorded as having taken place in Europe from the thirteenth century until the eighteenth. In modern times, it is considered in most criminal justice systems that non-human animals lack moral agency and so cannot be held culpable for an act.
Rob Warden is a Chicago legal affairs journalist and co-founder of three organizations dedicated to exonerating the innocent and reforming criminal justice: the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of California-Irvine, and Injustice Watch, a non-partisan, not-for-profit, journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. As an investigative journalist in the 1970s, he began focusing on death penalty cases, which led to a career exposing and publicizing the injustices and misconduct in the legal system. Warden's work was instrumental in the blanket commutation of death row cases in Illinois in 2003 and in the abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011.
Bail in the United States refers to the practice of releasing suspects from custody before their hearing, on payment of bail, which is money or pledge of property to the court which may be refunded if suspects return to court for their trial. Bail practices in the United States vary from state to state.
Amy Bach is an American a journalist, attorney, and author of Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court, for which she won the 2010 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Measures for Justice, a nonprofit that collects and publishes county-level criminal justice performance data. She founded the organization after she published her book.
Jonathan A. Rapping is an American criminal defense attorney, founder and president of Gideon's Promise, professor of law at Atlanta's John Marshall Law School, and visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School. Rapping received the MacArthur "Genius" Award in 2014.
Criminal justice reform seeks to address structural issues in criminal justice systems such as racial profiling, police brutality, overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and recidivism. Reforms can take place at any point where the criminal justice system intervenes in citizens’ lives, including lawmaking, policing, sentencing and incarceration. Criminal justice reform can also address the collateral consequences of conviction, including disenfranchisement or lack of access to housing or employment, that may restrict the rights of individuals with criminal records.
Equal Justice Under Law is an American civil rights impact litigation nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., which accepts cases on a national basis. The organization was founded in 2014 by Alec Karakatsanis and Phil Telfeyan, two 2008 Harvard Law School graduates. The mission of Equal Justice Under Law is to achieve equality in the criminal system and break cycles of poverty for those involved with the legal system. The organization works on a range of issues, including money bail, fees for expungement, and suspension of driver's licenses. Equal Justice Under Law and its small team of lawyers seek to drive change in the legal system through impact litigation and class action lawsuits. The firm's work has received national attention in news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Detroit Free Press, in addition to strong local coverage of its lawsuits.
Alec Karakatsanis is an American civil rights lawyer, social justice advocate, co-founder of Equal Justice Under Law, and founder and Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps, a Washington D.C. impact litigation nonprofit. Karakatsanis' recent work has targeted the American monetary bail system. He also opposes copaganda.
Measures for Justice is a United States, 501(c)(3), nonprofit organization designed to gather data from every county in the USA on the criminal justice system and to run that data through a series of standardized performance metrics. Their aim is to foster more data-driven decision-making based on the performance and differences among counties. By the end of 2020, Measures for Justice had gathered data for 20 states. The data are publicly accessible on a user-friendly web portal.
In re Kenneth Humphrey was a case decided by the California Supreme Court concerning whether it is a violation of due process and equal protection to imprison defendants prior to trial solely because they cannot afford to pay bail.
Eli Savit is an American lawyer, law professor, and politician. He is currently serving as the Prosecuting Attorney in Washtenaw County, Michigan. His areas of expertise include civil rights, education law, environmental protection, state and local government, and criminal-justice reform.
Decarceration in the United States involves government policies and community campaigns aimed at reducing the number of people held in custody or custodial supervision. Decarceration, the opposite of incarceration, also entails reducing the rate of imprisonment at the federal, state and municipal level. As of 2019, the US was home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. possessed the world's highest incarceration rate: 655 inmates for every 100,000 people, enough inmates to equal the populations of Philadelphia or Houston. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinvigorated the discussion surrounding decarceration as the spread of the virus poses a threat to the health of those incarcerated in prisons and detention centers where the ability to properly socially distance is limited. As a result of the push for decarceration in the wake of the pandemic, as of 2022, the incarceration rate in the United States declined to 505 per 100,000; meaning that the United States no longer has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but remains in the top 5.
Cynthia Ellen Jones is a criminal defense attorney and professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law specializing in criminal law and procedure as well as bail reform. Jones is an expert in racial disparities in the pretrial system and was previously the Director of the Public Defenders Service in Washington, D.C. She is a leading scholar in criminal procedure. In 2011, she was awarded the American University Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching. Jones was the director of the Stephen S. Weinstein Trial Advocacy Program at the university. She has written three textbooks related to criminal law and procedure.
The Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act, commonly known as the SAFE-T Act, is a state of Illinois statute enacted in 2021 that makes a number of reforms to the criminal justice system, affecting policing, pretrial detention and bail, sentencing, and corrections. The Act's section on pretrial detention, which took effect in full on September 18, 2023, is also known as the Pretrial Fairness Act.
Scott Hechinger is an American civil rights attorney, former public defender and the founder and executive director of Zealous, a nonprofit organization that trains public defenders and activists to use media, technology, the arts, and storytelling to shape criminal justice policy. Hechinger teaches at Columbia Law School as an adjunct professor.
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