Police are nine times more likely to kill African-American men than they
are other Americans--in fact, nearly one in every thousand will die at
the hands, or under the knee, of an officer. As eminent constitutional
scholar Erwin Chemerinsky powerfully argues, this is no accident, but
the horrific result of an elaborate body of doctrines that allow the
police and, crucially, the courts to presume that suspects--especially
people of color--are guilty before being charged.
Today in the United States, much attention is focused on the enormous
problems of police violence and racism in law enforcement. Too often,
though, that attention fails to place the blame where it most belongs,
on the courts, and specifically, on the Supreme Court. A "smoking gun"
of civil rights research, Presumed Guilty presents a groundbreaking,
decades-long history of judicial failure in America, revealing how the
Supreme Court has enabled racist practices, including profiling and
intimidation, and legitimated gross law enforcement excesses that
disproportionately affect people of color.
For the greater part of its existence, Chemerinsky shows, deference to
and empowerment of the police have been the modi operandi of the Supreme
Court. From its conception in the late eighteenth century until the
Warren Court in 1953, the Supreme Court rarely ruled against the police,
and then only when police conduct was truly shocking. Animating seminal
cases and justices from the Court's history, Chemerinsky--who has
himself litigated cases dealing with police misconduct for
decades--shows how the Court has time and again refused to impose
constitutional checks on police, all the while deliberately gutting
remedies Americans might use to challenge police misconduct.
Finally, in an unprecedented series of landmark rulings in the mid-1950s
and 1960s, the pro-defendant Warren Court imposed significant
constitutional limits on policing. Yet as Chemerinsky demonstrates, the
Warren Court was but a brief historical aberration, a fleeting liberal
era that ultimately concluded with Nixon's presidency and the ascendance
of conservative and "originalist" justices, whose rulings--in Terry v.
Ohio (1968), City of Los Angeles v. Lyons (1983), and Whren v. United
States (1996), among other cases--have sanctioned stop-and-frisks,
limited suits to reform police departments, and even abetted the use of
lethal chokeholds.
Written with a lawyer's knowledge and experience, Presumed Guilty
definitively proves that an approach to policing that continues to exalt
"Dirty Harry" can be transformed only by a robust court system committed
to civil rights. In the tradition of Richard Rothstein's The Color of
Law, Presumed Guilty is a necessary intervention into the roiling
national debates over racial inequality and reform, creating a history
where none was before--and promising to transform our understanding of
the systems that enable police brutality.
