". . . The story begins – like so many terrible (but ultimately uplifting) stories – with the morning of September 11, 2001.
On that day, of course, terror rained down on New York City and on Virginia and also on Pennsylvania. And the world has never been the same.
In the aftermath of that awful day, some misguided individuals thought that they would exact vengeance for those acts. A sad spree of hate crimes followed. Three days after 9/11, a man named Frank Roque declared at a bar that he wanted to kill “ragheads”. So he shot and killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American father of three, as he was planting flowers outside the gas station he owned in Mesa, Arizona. . ."
The law is an amazing tool, but it has limits.
Good people, on the other hand, don’t have limits.
The law is not in the business of forgiveness or redemption.
The law cannot compel us to love each other or respect each other.
It cannot cancel hate or conquer evil; teach grace or extinguish passions.
The law cannot achieve these things, not by itself.
It takes people – brave and strong and extraordinary people.
READ MORE > https://www.governancenow.com/views
_________________________________________________________________________________Washington Monthly has its own opinion of the new book:
SPOILER ALERT:
"Real, meaningful reform will require law enforcement officials from the beat cop to the nationally renowned prosecutor to honestly confront the system’s defects and work to make things better. Until then, whatever the criminal justice system is doing, far too rarely can we say that it is doing justice."
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A 4-MINUTE REVIEW ON YOUTUBE:
Doing Justice A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law
Preet Bharara’s Willful Blindness
We’ll never fix the criminal justice system until “liberal” prosecutors recognize how badly it’s broken.
The broad agreement that our criminal justice system is profoundly broken, most recently embodied in a reform bill passed by Congress in December, is a rare contemporary example of genuine bipartisanship. We incarcerate and punish far too many people; we rely on counterproductively punitive sanctions that are often disliked by the very victims in whose name they are imposed; and the system is rife with racial bias at every stage. Thanks to years of work by advocates, academics, and journalists, a broad coalition is now pushing to overhaul how we punish in the U.S.You would not know any of this, however, from reading Preet Bharara’s new book, Doing Justice. Bharara was appointed by President Obama in 2009 as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, perhaps the most prestigious posting a federal prosecutor can get. Although criticized by some for, among other things, not prosecuting the financial fraud underlying the 2008 financial crisis, Bharara aggressively targeted the deep rot of corruption in Albany, convicting both the Democratic head of the assembly and the Republican head of the senate. He was broadly respected by the time President Trump fired him in March 2017. In fact, his abrupt termination, and speculation as to its causes, made him something of a hero to the #Resistance.
In Doing Justice, Bharara explores the criminal justice system by looking at how cases work their way through it, from investigation to trial to punishment. Nearly all the examples and anecdotes come from cases that Bharara’s office handled, which often gives the book the feel of a memoir. But it is clearly intended to be a broad discussion of criminal justice—not just of the rarified world of the federal courts, but of the far messier state systems that handle well over 90 percent of all cases.
READ MORE > https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/april-may-june-2019/preet-bhararas-willful-blindness/
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One extract from Pfaff's book review:
Police violence is a direct product of how officers are trained to use force and the incredibly permissive legal doctrines that insulate them from liability.
