Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court
Metropolitan Books, September 2009

Excerpt: “‘I didn’t know I was going to jail,’ I heard a defendant say as she stood before the judge in Greene County, Georgia. Of course she didn’t. No one had told her the consequences of pleading guilty. Most people, educated or not, often have no idea what a guilty plea actually means: the conviction of a crime that subjects them to incarceration, fines, probation, a criminal record with unforeseen future consequences.”

Praise: “Amy Bach sets out to uncover and … explain widespread failures of the legal process. That she achieves this is reason enough to read and respect Ordinary Injustice. But she does it in a way that turns a necessary study into a hard-to-put-down narrative that sometimes reads like a screenplay. Best of all, Bach exudes understanding, even empathy, for those bad actors who she rightly concludes shouldn’t be blamed alone—because, as she writes, ‘pinning the problem on any one bad apple fails to indict the tree from which it fell.’” —Steven Brill, founder of Court TV and The American Lawyer magazine