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"We are better than this" has been the rallying cry since Donald Trump was elected. But as New York Times-bestselling author Mychal Denzel Smith shows, Americans are too comfortable imagining our greatness. We like to believe in the rightness of our path and the inevitability of choosing our better angels. But historically, we've only come close to living up to the ideals we profess after we've been dragged, kicking and screaming, toward justice....
Author
Description
From one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time comes an unforgettable true story about the redeeming potential of mercy. Bryan Stevenson was a gifted young attorney when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending the poor, the wrongly condemned, and those trapped in the furthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man sentenced...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Physical Desc
416 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Description
"A small town. A big secret. In December 1957, the wife of a Florida citrus baron is raped in her home while her husband is away. She claims a 'husky Negro' did it, and the sheriff, the infamous racist Willis McCall, does not hesitate to round up a herd of suspects. But within days, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle, mentally impaired white nineteen-year-old. Soon Jesse is railroaded up to the state hospital for the insane, and locked...
Author
Pub. Date
[2017]
Formats
Description
"An Emmy Award-winning news anchor and New York Times best-selling author argues that there are really two Americas--a Colony and a Nation,"--NoveList.
"America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure--wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation--reveals that racial inequality has barely improved since 1968, when Richard Nixon became our first "law and order" president. With the clarity...
Author
Formats
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"Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Description
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR and THE WASHINGTON POST
"Compelling, insightful and important, Beneath a Ruthless Sun exposes the corruption of racial bigotry and animus that shadows a community, a state and a nation. A fascinating examination of an injustice story all too familiar and still largely ignored, an engaging and essential read." —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy
From the author...
"Compelling, insightful and important, Beneath a Ruthless Sun exposes the corruption of racial bigotry and animus that shadows a community, a state and a nation. A fascinating examination of an injustice story all too familiar and still largely ignored, an engaging and essential read." —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy
From the author...
Author
Formats
Description
"In 1908 an elderly woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow apartment. The police found a convenient but innocent suspect in Oscar Slater--a Jewish cardsharp--who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, already the world-famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, was outraged by this injustice and became obsessed with the case. Over the years he scoured trial transcripts, newspaper accounts, and police diaries, meticulously...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Physical Desc
vi, 506 pages : map ; 24 cm
Description
"The first collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration."--
"Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present. Abolition Geography moves...
Author
Pub. Date
[2023]
Physical Desc
xi, 427 pages ; 25 cm
Description
"The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan's war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey's exacting work exposes the undeniable links between the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement and the consequences we live with today--a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality. When...
13) Redeeming justice: from defendant to defender, my fight for equity on both sides of a broken system
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Physical Desc
viii, 292 pages ; 25 cm
Description
"He was seventeen when an all-white jury sentenced him to prison for a crime he didn't commit. Now, in this unforgettable memoir, a pioneering lawyer recalls the journey that led to his exoneration--and inspired him to devote his life to fighting the many injustices in our legal system. Seventeen years old and facing nearly thirty years behind bars, Jarrett Adams sought to figure out the why behind his fate. Sustained by his mother and aunts who brought...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Physical Desc
288 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Description
"They didn't know who they had. So begins Yusef Salaam telling his story. No one's life is the sum of the worst things that happened to them, and during Yusef Salaam's seven years of wrongful incarceration as one of the Central Park Five, he grew from child to man, and gained a spiritual perspective on life. Yusef learned that we're all 'born on purpose, with a purpose.' Despite having confronted the racist heart of America while being 'run over by...
15) Blind injustice: a former prosecutor exposes the psychology and politics of wrongful convictions
Author
Pub. Date
[2017]
Physical Desc
ix, 254 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Description
"In this unprecedented view from the trenches, prosecutor turned champion for the innocent Mark Godsey takes us inside the frailties of the human mind as they unfold in real-world wrongful convictions. Drawing upon both psychological research and shocking--yet true--stories from his own career, Godsey shares how innate psychological flaws and the "tough on crime" political environment can cause investigations to go awry, leading to the conviction...
Pub. Date
2020.
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (101 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
This hybrid fiction-documentary engaged the services of two actual legal teams to create a rigorous, legally based fictional, yet unscripted, trial that never happened for one of the nation's most disturbing tragedies.
Author
Pub. Date
[2019]
Physical Desc
xxxi, 409 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Description
"The American criminal justice system is supposed to be a contest between two equal adversaries, the prosecution and the defense, with judges ensuring a fair fight. But in fact, it is prosecutors who have the upper hand, in a contest that is far from equal. More than anyone else, prosecutors decide who goes free and who goes to prison, and even who lives and who dies. The system wasn't designed for this kind of unchecked power, and in Charged, Emily...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Physical Desc
306 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Description
"An original and consequential argument about race, crime, and the law today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics--and their impact on people of color--are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role...
Author
Pub. Date
©2012
Physical Desc
x, 434 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Description
In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps. So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as "Mr. Civil Rights," into...
20) Just mercy
Pub. Date
[2020]
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (137 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
Appears on list
Description
A powerful and thought-provoking true story follows young lawyer Bryan Stevenson and his history-making battle for justice. After graduating from Harvard, Bryan had his pick of lucrative jobs. Instead, he heads to Alabama to defend those wrongly condemned or who were not afforded proper representation, with the support of local advocate Eva Ansley. One of his first and most incendiary cases is that of Walter McMillian.
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