A senior federal judge’s incisive, unsettling exploration of some of the paradoxes that define the judiciary today, Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free features essays examining why innocent people plead guilty, why high-level executives aren’t prosecuted, why you won’t get your day in court, and why the judiciary is curtailing its own constitutionally mandated power.
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?
The federal judge Jed S. Rakoff, a leading authority on white-collar crime, explores these and other puzzles in Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free, a startling account of our broken legal system. Grounded in Rakoff’s twenty-four years as a federal trial judge in New York in addition to the many years he worked as a federal prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer, Rakoff ’s assessment of our justice system illuminates 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. A fundamental problem, he reveals, is that the judiciary is constraining its own constitutional powers.
Like few others, 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.
The ABA Jnl interviews the Judge
Judge Jed Rakoff.
Jed Rakoff tells me that he has “the world’s greatest job.” Lucky for him, he can have it for life.
Rakoff’s good fortune is to be a U.S. district judge. Next month, he’ll celebrate his 25th year at it.
The jurist for the Southern District of New York attributes his enjoyment to whom he represents. “I cannot tell you how satisfying it is,” he says, “to have the rule of law as your client.”
But Rakoff is no Pollyanna. His client is unwell. This he tells us in his new book, Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free. But wait—the diagnosis gets bleaker. There’s a subtitle: And Other Paradoxes of our Broken Legal System.
Over the course of an hourlong phone interview from his chambers at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse in lower Manhattan, the 77-year-old Clinton appointee, now on senior status, held court on a variety of subjects, including some of the system’s most serious ills, his road to publishing a 200-page dissection of them and the impact of the pandemic on trial practice.
It is true that some innocent people plead guilty. And some guilty go free. But is a sitting federal judge really allowed to say that? What about a 10-page chapter with this cheery-sounding title: “Don’t Count on the Courts.” However, Rakoff is not misbehaving.
He points me to the Code of Conduct for federal judges, which, he explains, “encourages judges, in the area of the administration of justice, to speak out when they think there are important improvements that need to be made.”
Read full article. https://www.amazon.com/Why-Innocent-Plead-Guilty-Free/dp/0374289999
