An author looking for more justice in local court systems

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Author Amy Bach will read and sign copies of "Ordinary Injustice" at the East Hampton Library on Sunday, September 6, at 3 p.m.

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Amy Bach is not angry, nor is she cynical, but she is determined. Her determination is focused on bringing more sanity and ... well, justice to the criminal justice system, beginning at the local level.

“There are no easy fixes,” she stated. “That being said, communities have to take responsibility for their court systems. To do that, they need to have the tools. Right now, the tools just don’t exist.”

One such tool does exist, actually, and it is “Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court,” the new book by Ms. Bach published by Metropolitan Books. She will be reading from the book and answering questions about her experiences as an attorney and victims’ advocate at the East Hampton Library on Sunday, September 6, at 3 p.m.

While Ms. Bach, currently a resident of Rochester, is not including the South Fork in her list of problem legal areas, she is very familiar with the East End. Her parents have long owned a home in Wainscott and she spent many summers and weekends here that included surfing in Montauk.

After graduating from Stanford Law School, Ms. Bach pursued a dual career. One as a lawyer, and the other as a journalist writing for New York magazine, The Nation, and The American Lawyer. Frustrated with a system that she saw as taking an assembly-line approach that rewards shoddiness and sacrifices defendants and victims to keep the court calendar moving, she decided to combine careers to take a hard look at that system.

“To really understand the justice system, you can’t just go to a law library,” she said. “You’ve got to go to the court, which is really the factory floor of the justice system, and watch the cases unfold. Had I not been a journalist, I would not have been able to spend the time I did over the years. Had I not been a lawyer, I would not have known what to ask.”

To help underwrite the eight years of work on “Ordinary Injustice” and take time from her teaching duties at the University of Rochester, Ms. Bach was able to obtain a Soros Foundation Award and a Radcliffe Fellowship as well as a special J. Anthony Lukas citation. Then it was a matter of wearing out the gas pedal, traveling to observe legal systems around the country.

“Courts are the great unexamined institutions,” Ms. Bach said. “With other institutions we have gauges to tell us how they are doing, such as test scores for schools, our water supply, and hospitals. But the court system is largely unobserved. What I say in the book is that we need to start measuring what goes on in court.”

And what goes on is for the most part not pretty, nor is it just. Defendants at the poverty level are forced into guilty pleas without a lawyer present. The bail for a man arrested for riding a bike on a sidewalk is set at $25,000. Two 17-year-old boys, later found to be innocent, are sentenced to 27 years for rape and murder. Because of overflowing court dockets and jails, cases are just dropped and criminals walk free.

Ms. Bach recalled visiting a court system in Mississippi “where most cases are not prosecuted. A court clerk gave me a list of cases where people hadn’t even been charged. I started driving around, going on dirt roads and knocking on doors. One woman, for example, had been beaten with a tire iron by her husband, who wasn’t even arrested. I went back to the court and asked when was the last domestic violence case prosecuted, and it turned out to be 21 years ago. Nobody’s keeping track of this. We can’t change what we can’t see. We have to be able to see inside our court system.”

“Because of the lack of visibility, lawyers and judges are allowed to make the same mistakes over and over again,” she continued. “What happens then is that the flawed system becomes normal, and the system that works right is the exception, or even an accident.”

The book has already created a stir in legal circles. Among those who have reviewed or commented on it are the authors Doris Kearns Goodwin and Anthony Lewis, Court TV founder Steven Brill, Rev. Joseph Lowery, president emeritus of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project. Christiane Amanpour of CNN is hosting a gathering for Ms. Bach in Manhattan. Ms. Goodwin wrote that “Ordinary Injustice” could do for the court system in the U.S. what Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” did for car safety.

Is there a danger that a book that details so many abuses of the system and routine victimization would make those involved simply throw up their hands and feel hopeless about changing the courts?

“It was dispiriting when I talked to the ordinary people who were not well served by the system,” Ms. Bach conceded. “But the legal people are well-trained and well-intentioned, and they are eager to share the hope for the system that motivated them to become lawyers in the first place.”