by Roy Black (1999)
Roy Black is one of America's toughest and shrewdest criminal defense lawyers. Whether defending a wealthy celebrity or an indigent death row inmate, Black sees his job as doing whatever it takes to get his clients fair trials. In Black's Law, he takes us behind the scenes of four difficult and dangerous cases to reveal the legal strategies, no-holds-barred tactics and courtroom psychology he used to make sure his clients received every protection promised by the law. Black's cases illustrate the life-and-death struggles that occur every day in our criminal courts. In Alvarez, Black has to convince a jury to put aside poisonous pre-trial publicity, the threat of a race riot and almost universal pressure for a conviction in order to keep a young Hispanic police officer out of jail for killing a young black hoodlum in the line of duty.^ In Knight, Black must contend with issues of class and race as he wages a four-year struggle to persuade federal appeals court judges to overturn the death sentence imposed on an insane, brutal killer because of the incompetence of his first lawyers. In Hicks, Black has to prove the innocence of a client who is his own worst enemy by convincing a jury that the police conducted a sloppy murder investigation. And in De La Mata, Black must persuade jurors to disregard the damaging testimony of admitted drug dealers who have plea-bargained for lesser sentences in order to save a former bank president caught in the crosshairs of a federal prosecutor waging his own relentless war on drugs. At a time when the public and its elected officials are giving prosecutors and judges more power to put criminals behind bars, defense lawyers are often seen as being on the side of the bad guys.^ But Roy Black believes that when we chip away at the rights of the accused, we diminish our own rights as well. In our adversarial system, all too often the only person standing between a defendant and jail -- or the death penalty -- is the criminal defense lawyer. In these accounts, Black demonstrates in riveting detail how a defense attorney must investigate criminal cases by sifting through evidence and preparing for trial. (It's like preparing for a war.) He shows us how the principles of law, cross-examination and evidence -- as well as careful jury selection and skillful use of expert witnesses -- can level the playing field to counter the enormous resources that state and federal prosecutors have at their disposal. Black's Law reveals what really goes on in our criminal courts and makes resoundingly clear the crucial role that criminal defense lawyers play in safeguarding the basic right to a fair trial for all.
Linn Washington
The views of leading African American jurists from around the country on the way our judicial system works. Included is an interview with Abigail R. Rogers, South Carolina's first female African American judge.
Jerome F. Buting
"Interweaving his account of the Steven Avery trial at the heart of Making a Murderer with other high profile cases from his criminal defense career, attorney Jerome F. Buting explains the flaws in America's criminal justice system and lays out a provocative, persuasive blue-print for reform. Over his career, Jerome F. Buting has spent hundreds of hours in courtrooms representing defendants in criminal trials. When he agreed to join Dean Strang as co-counsel for the defense in Steven A. Avery vs. State of Wisconsin, he knew a tough fight lay ahead. But, as he reveals in Illusion of Justice, no-one could have predicted just how tough and twisted that fight would be--or that it would become the center of the documentary Making a Murderer, which made Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey household names and thrust Buting into the spotlight. Buting's powerful, riveting boots-on-the-ground narrative of Avery's and Dassey's cases becomes a springboard to examine the shaky integrity of law enforcement and justice in the United States, which Buting has witnessed firsthand for more than 35 years. From his early career as a public defender to his success overturning wrongful convictions working with the Innocence Project, his story provides a compelling expert view into the high-stakes arena of criminal defense law; the difficulties of forensic science; and a horrifying reality of biased interrogations, coerced or false confessions, faulty eyewitness testimony, official misconduct, and more. Combining narrative reportage with critical commentary and personal reflection, Buting explores his professional and personal motivations, career-defining cases--including his shocking fifteen-year-long fight to clear the name of another man wrongly accused and convicted of murder--and what must happen if our broken system is to be saved. Taking a place beside Just Mercy and The New Jim Crow, Illusion of Justice is a tour-de-force from a relentless and eloquent advocate for justice who is determined to fulfill his professional responsibility and, in the face of overwhelming odds, make America's judicial system work as it is designed to do"-- "In contextualizing the complex, morally ambiguous true crime story driving Netflix sensation Making a Murderer--and weaving in many other cases from his colorful career--this book by Steven Avery's defense attorney, Jerome Buting, will combine top-tier reportage, untold aspects of the Avery and Brendan Dassey trials, and personal memoir with a provocative, ground-breaking call for reform within America's criminal justice system, which in principle presumes innocence, but in practice presumes guilt. Description"--
Jack Fuller
"In the wake of Watergate, Gerald Ford appointed eminent lawyer and scholar Edward H. Levi to the post of attorney general--and thus gave him the onerous task of restoring legitimacy to a discredited Department of Justice. Levi was famously fair-minded and free of political baggage, and his inspired addresses during this tumultuous time were critical to rebuilding national trust. They reassured a tense and troubled nation that the Department of Justice would act in accordance with the principles underlying its name, operating as a nonpartisan organization under the strict rule of law. For Restoring Justice, Jack Fuller has carefully chosen from among Levi's speeches a selection that sets out the attorney general's view of the considerable challenges he faced: restoring public confidence through discussion and acts of justice, combating the corrosive skepticism of the time, and ensuring that the executive branch would behave judicially. Also included are addresses and Congressional testimonies that speak to issues that were hotly debated at the time, including electronic surveillance, executive privilege, separation of powers, antitrust enforcement, and the guidelines governing the FBI--many of which remain relevant today. Serving at an almost unprecedentedly difficult time, Levi was among the most admired attorney generals of the modern era. Published here for the first time, the speeches in Restoring Justice offer a superb sense of the man and his work"--Provided by publisher.
Melvin I. Urofsky
The first full-scale biography in twenty-five years of one of the most important and distinguished justices to sit on the Supreme Court--a book that reveals Louis D. Brandeis the reformer, lawyer, and jurist, and Brandeis the man, in all of his complexity, passion, and wit. Louis Dembitz Brandeis had at least four "careers." As a lawyer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he pioneered how modern law is practiced. He, and others, developed the modern law firm, in which specialists manage different areas of the law. He was the author of the right to privacy; led the way in creating the role of the lawyer as counselor; and pioneered the idea of pro bono publico work by attorneys. As late as 1916, when Brandeis was nominated to the Supreme Court, the idea of pro bono service still struck many old-time attorneys as somewhat radical. Between 1895 and 1916, when Woodrow Wilson named Brandeis to the Supreme Court, he ranked as one of the nation's leading progressive reformers. Brandeis invented savings bank life insurance in Massachusetts (he considered it his most important contribution to the public weal) and was a driving force in the development of the Federal Reserve Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the law establishing the Federal Trade Commission.Brandeis as an economist and moralist warned in 1914 that banking and stock brokering must be separate, and twenty years later, during the New Deal, his recommendation was finally enacted into law (the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933) but was undone by Ronald Reagan, which led to the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s and the world financial collapse of 2008.We see Brandeis, who came from a family of reformers and intellectuals who fled Europe and settled in Louisville. Brandeis the young man coming of age, who presented himself at Harvard Law School and convinced the school to admit him even though he was underage. Brandeis the lawyer and reformer, who in 1908 agreed to defend an Oregon law establishing maximum hours for women workers, and in so doing created an entirely new form of appellate brief that had only a few pages of legal citation and consisted mostly of factual references.Urofsky writes how Brandeis witnessed and suffered from the anti-Semitism rampant in the early twentieth century and, though not an observant Jew, with the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, became at age fifty-eight head of the American Zionist movement. During the next seven years, Brandeis transformed it from a marginal activity into a powerful force in American Jewish affairs. We see the brutal six-month confirmation battle after Wilson named the fifty-nine-year-old Brandeis to the court in 1916; the bitter fight between progressives and conservative leaders of the bar, finance, and manufacturing, who, while never directly attacking him as a Jew, described Brandeis as "a striver," "self-advertiser," "a disturbing element in any gentleman's club." Even the president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, signed a petition accusing Brandeis of lacking "judicial temperament." And we see, finally, how, during his twenty-three years on the court, this giant of a man and an intellect developed the modern jurisprudence of free speech, the doctrine of a constitutionally protected right to privacy, and suggested what became known as the doctrine of incorporation, by which the Bill of Rights came to apply to the states. Brandeis took his seat when the old classical jurisprudence still held sway, and he tried to teach both his colleagues and the public-- especially the law schools--that the law had to change to keep up with the economy and society. Brandeis often said, "My faith...