A distressing account of how power often trumps justice within the American criminal justice system.
Cogent analysis of how privileged individuals skirt criminal prosecution.
After a frustrating attempt to bring a crime-syndicate kingpin to justice, CNN senior legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Honig began to delve into the too-common phenomenon of wealthy, influential people avoiding punishment. Some of this material he covered in his previous book, Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor’s Code and Corrupted the Justice Department. Here, the author assesses the ways that privilege and power are used to game the legal system, exploring the tactics used by savvy, ruthless individuals to exploit flaws in the prosecutorial and judicial processes. In clear, concisely written sections, Honig digs into the evasive tactics employed by the well connected, how jury service can be intimidating, and how human and institutional biases affect how the rules and procedures of a lawsuit are followed (or ignored). Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, is just one of many high-profile villains Honig spotlights. Examining cases involving Steven Bannon, Roger Stone, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and, of course, Trump himself, the author notes the difficulties facing prosecuting attorneys in exacting justice amid a mountain of red tape, legal acrobatics, walls of financial blocks—and often despite smoking-gun evidence. Though Honig devotes attention to the executive privilege of a variety of nefarious billionaires and politicians, he focuses mostly on the bewildering acquittal record of Trump, a “lawless Houdini.” Despite multiple impeachments, damning congressional findings, and hush-money payments, miraculously, Trump has never been formally charged with a crime. He remains “unburdened by ethics, shame, or even a logical sense of self-preservation.” Outside of urging prosecutors to think more like their clients, using “creativity and aggression,” Honig doesn’t offer any solid solutions, but he does provide clarity about how the institutional justice system is “stacked in favor of powerful, wealthy, famous people,” most of whom avoid accountability for their crimes.
A distressing account of how power often trumps justice within the American criminal justice system.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063241503
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
