The Price of Mercy
Unfair Trials, a Violent System, and a Public Defender's Search for Justice in America
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A former public defender takes us behind the closed doors of America's criminal courts, revealing how the institutions that claim to protect us are doing the exact opposite—and offering a blueprint for finally fixing it.
“A searing, compassionate, and utterly necessary book that pulls back the curtain with the clarity of a lawyer and the heart of someone who’s seen the criminal legal system’s devastating consequences up close.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
As Americans, we are told a rose-tinted story about our criminal courts—that these are the hallowed halls of justice, that the purpose of our legal process is to find the truth, and that those who enforce the law are both equitable and heroic. But what if the reality is purposefully obscured to hide something rotten at the system’s core?
In The Price of Mercy, attorney and former public defender Emily Galvin Almanza weaves hard data and unforgettable stories, dark humor and compelling evidence to tell us the truth about what’s really going on behind the closed doors of America’s criminal courts. She shows us how jails actually increase future crime, the dirty tricks police use to make millions in overtime pay, how a man could spend decades in prison because scientists mistook dog hair for his own, the perverse incentives that push prosecutors to seek convictions even when they themselves don’t want to, and how judges may decide cases differently after lunch.
We’ll learn what’s working, too: how public defenders can improve public health and even economic mobility, and how planting more trees can reduce a neighborhood’s murder rates. But a lone defender winning a case won’t change the system. Galvin Almanza argues that we need an engaged public to confront the stark reality of our crime-generating, poverty-entrenching, health-destroying legal apparatus and rebuild it into something that can save our collective present and prevent our future from being torn apart.
Provocative and eye-opening, The Price of Mercy lifts the curtain on the way our laws really operate and presents a path forward for true transformation of the American criminal court system. Justice, and the law itself, is not some static thing. It is something enacted together, decision by decision, in acts of inhumanity or mercy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former public defender Galvin Almanza debuts with a hard-hitting investigation of problems facing the U.S. criminal justice system. Opening with her own experience as a teen defendant luckily granted a second chance by a compassionate judge whom she positions as an outlier in an overloaded, unequal system, the author goes on to methodically survey the justice system's flaws, including understaffing that overwhelms both prosecutors and defenders, false confessions elicited by police interrogations, inaccurate forensic science, and judicial bias (which can be as mundane as "a judge's favorite sports team los" leading to "harsher sentences"). Drawing on stories of former clients, she emphasizes that "the process is so bad that everyone gets punished" regardless of whether they're guilty, like one client wrongfully accused of "an elaborate insurance scheme" after getting a date wrong when her car was stolen, resulting in years of court dates and a job suspension. At times, the ineptitude Galvin Almanza exposes is mind-bogglingly disconcerting, as when she recalls having to wear loud bangle bracelets in order to ensure that a notoriously distracted judge paid attention. The latter half covers possible solutions, including a successful program in Denver that sends out "behavioral health clinicians and paramedics" rather than police to handle certain cases. This trenchant and surprisingly hopeful explainer outlines not only how the system is broken but how to fix it.
