Confronting Failures of Justice
Most murderers and rapists escape justice, a horrifying fact that has gone largely unexamined until now. This groundbreaking book tours nearly the entire criminal justice system, examining the rules and practices that regularly produce failures of justice in serious criminal cases. Each chapter outlines the nature and extent of justice failures in present practice, describing the interests at stake, and providing real-world examples. Finally, each chapter reviews proposed and implemented reforms that could balance the competing interests in a less justice-frustrating manner and recommends one—sometimes completely original—reform to improve the system.
A systematic study of justice failures is long overdue. As this book discusses, regular failures of justice in serious criminal cases undermine deterrence and the criminal justice system’s credibility with the community as a moral authority. The damage caused by unpunished crime is immense and, even worse, falls primarily on vulnerable minority communities. Now for the first time, students, researchers, policymakers, and citizens have a resource that explains why justice failures occur and what can be done about them.
Confronting Failures of Justice is accessible for use by college freshman through graduate students and law students and is designed to be main text for a course on justice failures, but it could be used in conjunction with other texts in a broad range of courses touching on criminal justice. It presents arguments in a highly-organized fashion and provides dozens of case studies, many with photographs, to gain student interest and to bring the academic discussions to life.
Paul Robinson is one of the world’s leading criminal law scholars. He is a member of the American Law Institute and a former federal prosecutor and counsel for the US Senate Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures. A prolific writer and lecturer, Robinson has published twenty books and articles in virtually all of the top law reviews, lectured in more than 110 cities in thirty-four states and twenty-seven countries, and had his writings appear in fifteen languages. Robinson is the lead editor of Criminal Law Conversations (Oxford) and the author of Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert (Oxford); Mapping American Criminal Law (Praeger); Distributive Principles of Criminal Law (Oxford); and Structure and Function in Criminal Law (Oxford). He also writes popular books for general audiences, such as Would You Convict? (NYU), Law Without Justice (Oxford), Crimes That Changed Our World (Rowman & Littlefield), Shadow Vigilantes (Prometheus), and American Criminal Law (Routledge). Robinson recently completed three criminal code reform projects in the U.S. and two modern Islamic penal codes, including one under the auspices of the U.N. Development Programme.
Jeffrey Seaman is a researcher and writer on the U.S. criminal justice system and a JD student at the University of Pennsylvania. He is committed to bringing an interdisciplinary approach to the problem of criminal justice reform to make the system more just for all.
Muhammad Sarahne, SJD, LLM, LLB, is an attorney in the Criminal Department of the State Attorney's Office in Israel, representing the state in criminal matters before the Israeli Supreme Court. He previously worked as a prosecutor in the Economic Crime Department and was an assistant to the Israeli Deputy Attorney General (Criminal). He is an adjunct teacher at the Law School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has published a number of articles in American and British law reviews.