By Amy Bach, whose book Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court received the Green Bag Award for exemplary legal writing for 2009. She lives in Rochester, NY.
I got the idea to write Ordinary Injustice when I was reporting a series of articles about civil rights for The Nation magazine in 2001. I ended up sitting in a court in Greene County, Georgia where I saw a public defender plead 48 people guilty in just over a day. He simply conveyed the prosecutor's offer with little inquiry into the circumstances or facts of most of his clients' cases. In court, it was obvious that defendants didn't understand what was happening to them. One woman stopped in the middle of pleading guilty and said that she didn't realize she had agreed to do jail time (her case was continued until she had time to talk to her lawyer.) Afterwards, I asked the judge, the prosecutor and the defense attorney how they thought things went. And they all said the same thing: fine. The defense attorney said one thing I will never forget: "Nobody could say that they didn't have their day in court."
What astonished me, and what made me want to write a book, is that smart, committed hard-working professionals could routinely act in ways that fell short of what it is people in their positions were supposed to be doing. And not even realize that anything is missing. Or that their behavior had devastating consequences for peoples' lives. This notion became the seed for what I now call "ordinary injustice": mistakes had become routine and the legal professionals could no longer see their role in them.