Back Talk: Amy Bach

ADRIAN BELLESGUARD

In Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court (Metropolitan; $27), legal writer and erstwhile law professor Amy Bach uncovers a clubby system in which overworked lawyers and law enforcement officers are often more loyal to each other than to their clients, and become blind to the human consequences of routine error ;and business as usual.   --Christine Smallwood

What was the genesis of this book?

I was reporting a series of civil rights articles and went to Greene County, Georgia, in 2001, where I watched a public defender plead forty-eight people guilty in a little over a day. And I saw several people break down. People would start to cry and say, Wait, I didn't realize I was going to jail. They didn't understand what they were pleading guilty to, and that was because the attorney had never talked to them about the facts of their cases. Afterward the public defender said something I will never forget: "Nobody could say that they didn't have their day in court."

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