A review by siena_j_p
Doing Justice: A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law by Preet Bharara

informative reflective medium-paced

3.5

This book was SO FRUSTRATING. In many ways I agreed with elements, at least, of the author’s arguments (for what it’s worth I am an aspiring human rights/defense attorney, so it is conceivable elements of my worldview are fundamentally incompatible with this author’s perspective). But he seemed uninterested in interrogating some of his assumptions. Two of the ones that I found particularly frustrating: the idea that people overblow the importance of Miranda Rights (I don’t know, maybe federal crime is different, but there are a whole lot of people out there who don’t know their constitutional rights by heart and it is NOT overblown to say that they should know that). The problem was, he seemed to be focused on the legal perspective – whether it matters to have evidence obtained without Miranda Rights thrown out – as opposed to the part where the reason that evidence gets thrown out is because to ignore Miranda Rights is to fundamentally undermine the Constitutional right to not incriminate oneself, which is confusing because supposedly justice is the entire point of this book?? Similarly, he discussed how one could connect with cooperating witnesses by giving them food corresponding to their ethnic identity, and then use that connection to convince them to testify or cooperate. Which like. Really, really rubbed me the wrong way. I suppose yes, from a consequentialist standpoint, maybe you get more people thrown in prison that way. But from a deontological system – and keep in mind that Constitutional law is VERY deontological in nature, that’s exactly why an entire verdict can be thrown out because of a relatively small infraction – that is an incredibly unjust thing to do to an individual, weaponizing racial and ethnic identities in an effort to essentially trick them into cooperating. This is especially exacerbated by the fact that in many of these cases, the person is already in prison, where they are certainly not being provided with food from home. I don’t know, maybe I’m overblowing this, but it really bothered me that in a book that is supposedly all about justice, the author seemed to completely gloss over some very serious issues of justice. So I don’t know, I just spent the whole book being like “Well that’s a fascinating story and an interesting observation” and then turning the page and thinking “Dude, seriously?”