EP 689 A Crusader for Justice for the Poor in Our Criminal Justice System

Bryan Stevenson(“Just Mercy”) considers him his mentor.  He’s been the subject of books and a film for his work to correct the injustices that race and poverty play in our criminal justice system.  In that pursuit, he has fought and won capital cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and was the recipient of the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award.  A professor of law at Yale and Georgetown Universities, our guest, Stephen Bright, is a legendary figure in jurisprudence.  He is also the co-author of a new book, along with James Kwak, “The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts.”  In it they show the many ways the US criminal legal system fails to live up to the ideal of ‘blind justice’ and fairness.  Innocent people are condemned to death and convicted of crimes because they cannot afford lawyers and because of the color of their skin.  In the book we travel through the labyrinth of the system and meet powerful prosecutors, overworked public defenders, politicized judges and the many roadblocks put in the way of equal protections under the law.  It is an indictment of a system in which Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black reminded us 70 years ago that there “can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the money he has.”  And while there are pockets of improvement and good practices shared, we have not wiped away the stains of the past in the most important system available to each of us: justice.

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