JUST PURSUIT

A former federal prosecutor depicts a judicial system compromised by racism and ineptitude.

“The pride I felt working for the DOJ was immeasurable, but the bureaucracy was unbearable.” So writes Coates, now a CNN senior legal analyst, of her early work in the federal government, investigating voting rights issues consistently hampered by lobbyists and corrupt elected officials. She enlisted for a four-year term as a litigator with a variety of cases, large and small, on the docket. An early one posed a moral quandary: A crime victim who came forward was found to be in the country illegally. “Turn him in. It will make you look good to the office,” one colleague advised. She did not, but neither did she warn her witness that immigration was on the way to the courthouse to arrest and then deport him, a decision that, she writes, will haunt her forever. In another case, a White supervisor stepped far over the line of racist caricature to mansplain to her, a Black woman, how to interrogate Black suspects. Another: An elderly Black woman, on the stand as the victim of a crime, requested that the young Black man who was on trial for committing it be given clemency. “I know young men like him,” she told the judge. “They were twenty once too…and likely as dumb as this young boy seemed to act that night.” Anecdote after anecdote builds to a moving conclusion: “Justice is an ecosystem, as complex as it is interconnected with those at its helm and at its mercy.” Coates also clearly demonstrates how our sense of justice is conditioned by who we are. A White suburbanite will likely have a different definition of it than a Black man who is sure that a random police stop could end in violence.

Sobering reading and an eloquent case for reform for a more equitable distribution of justice.