Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free

In this startling and incisive exploration, Judge Jed S. Rakoff, a leading authority on white-collar crime, exposes the paradoxes and injustices that define the American judiciary today.
How can we be proud of a system of justice that often pressures the innocent to plead guilty? How can we claim that justice is equal when we imprison thousands of poor Black men for relatively modest crimes but rarely prosecute rich white executives who commit crimes having far greater impact? How can we applaud the Supreme Court's ever-more-limited view of its duty to combat excesses by the president?
In Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free, Rakoff draws on his twenty-four years as a federal trial judge in New York, as well as his experience as a federal prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer, to illuminate some of our most urgent legal, social, and political issues: plea deals and class-action lawsuits, corporate impunity and the death penalty, the perils of eyewitness testimony and forensic science, the war on terror and the expanding reach of the executive branch. He reveals a fundamental problem: the judiciary is constraining its own constitutional powers.
With a unique insider's perspective, Rakoff understands the values that animate the best aspects of our legal system—and has a close-up view of our failure to live up to these ideals. But he sees within this gap great opportunities for practical reform and a public mandate to make our justice system truly just.