The Fear of Too Much Justice
Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts
The book John Grisham calls “a clear and poignant indictment of criminal injustice in America”
Called “a passionate and eye-opening behind-the-scenes account of the world of criminal justice and the lives impacted by the system’s injustices” by Booklist, The Fear of Too Much Justice, by renowned death penalty lawyer Stephen B. Bright and legal scholar James Kwak, offers a heart-wrenching overview of how the criminal legal system fails to live up to the values of equality and justice. It chronicles innocent people convicted of crimes and condemned to death because of their race and poverty, racial discrimination in jury selection that perpetuates all-white juries, people with mental disorders who are locked up in jails and prisons instead of given the treatment they need, poor people who are processed through courts in assembly-line fashion with no attention to them as individuals, and courts that act as centers of profit whose main purpose is to raise money by imposing fines on poor people who cannot afford them and jailing them in debtors’ prisons when they cannot pay.
In this “invaluable resource” (Publishers Weekly), renowned death penalty lawyer Stephen B. Bright and legal scholar James Kwak also offer examples from around the country of places that are making progress toward justice and call for courts and legislatures to overcome their fear of too much justice and provide a full measure of justice for everyone.
With a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, who worked for Bright at the Southern Center for Human Rights and credits him for “[breaking] down the issues with the death penalty simply but persuasively,” The Fear of Too Much Justice offers a timely, trenchant, firsthand critique of our criminal courts and points the way toward a more just future.
Stephen B. Bright currently teaches law at Yale and Georgetown Universities. He was the longtime director of the Southern Center for Human Rights and has won multiple capital cases in the Supreme Court. A recipient of the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award, Bright has been the subject of two books, Proximity to Death (William S. McFeely) and Finding Life on Death Row (Katya Lexin), and a film, Fighting for Life in the Death Belt (Adam Elend and Jeff Marks). He lives in Lexington, Kentucky. James Kwak is vice chair of the Southern Center for Human Rights, former professor of law at the University of Connecticut, author of Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality, and co-author with Simon Johnson of White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You, and the New York Times bestseller 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. He is also the co-author of The Baseline Scenario, a leading blog on economics and public policy. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
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