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 “passionate and eye-opening” by Booklist, The Fear of Too Much Justice, by the legendary death penalty attorney 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. The book ranges from people convicted of crimes and condemned to death because of their race and poverty to poor people squeezed for cash by private probation companies because of trivial violations. Bright and Kwak also offer examples from places around the country that are making progress toward justice.
With a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, and now in an accessible paperback format, this “urgent call to action . . . is an invaluable resource” (Publishers Weekly).
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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