Since 1989, there have been over 200 post-conviction DNA exonerations in
the United States. On the surface, the release of innocent people from
prison could be seen as a victory for the criminal justice system: the
wrong person went to jail, but the mistake was fixed and the accused set
free. A closer look at miscarriages of justice, however, reveals that
such errors are not aberrations but deeply revealing, common features of
our legal system.
The ten original essays in When Law Fails view wrongful convictions
not as random mistakes but as organic outcomes of a misshaped larger
system that is rife with faulty eyewitness identifications, false
confessions, biased juries, and racial discrimination. Distinguished
legal thinkers Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Sarat have assembled
a stellar group of contributors who try to make sense of justice gone
wrong and to answer urgent questions. Are miscarriages of justice
systemic or symptomatic, or are they mostly idiosyncratic? What are the
broader implications of justice gone awry for the ways we think about
law? Are there ways of reconceptualizing legal missteps that are
particularly useful or illuminating? These instructive essays both
address the questions and point the way toward further discussion.
When Law Fails reveals the dramatic consequences as well as the
daily realities of breakdowns in the law's ability to deliver justice
swiftly and fairly, and calls on us to look beyond headline-grabbing
exonerations to see how failure is embedded in the legal system itself.
Once we are able to recognize miscarriages of justice we will be able to
begin to fix our broken legal system.
Contributors: Douglas A. Berman, Markus D. Dubber, Mary L. Dudziak,
Patricia Ewick, Daniel Givelber, Linda Ross Meyer, Charles J. Ogletree,
Jr., Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, and Robert Weisberg.
