Review by Booklist Review
Law professor Tsai traces the groundbreaking and influential career of lawyer Stephen Bright, who directed the Southern Center for Human Rights for decades and whose many cases include four argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Bright has been dedicated to challenging injustices and violations of the Constitutional rights of the incarcerated and those sentenced to death with a focus on violations related to race, poverty, and intellectual disability. Bright, whose beginnings were humble, has not only defended and helped individuals at a disadvantage in the legal system, he has also reshaped legal thought and law through his work. Tsai (Practical Equality, 2019) conveys all the tension and drama of Bright's arguments and how they changed the perspectives of individual justices and the overall court, triumphs illuminated through court transcripts. Tsai chronicles how Bright's tireless and brilliant advocacy for the rights of those convicted of capital crimes is driven by his fluency in the law, his humanity and compassion, and his unwavering goals of ensuring fairness and justice, saving lives, and making certain that his work benefits future defendants.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Boston University law professor Tsai (Practical Equality) takes an admiring look at the professional legacy of civil rights lawyer Stephen Bright, depicting him as a fierce and creative advocate on behalf of those caught up in America's criminal justice system. Born in 1948 and currently a law professor at Yale, Bright spent almost four decades leading the Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that provides legal aid to death row convicts. Tsai narrates Bright's consequential career with a focus on the four death penalty cases he argued before the Supreme Court between 1988 and 2017--all four of which he won. Three of the cases centered on manipulation of the jury process to exclude minorities, while the fourth, McWilliams v. Dunn, dealt with the rights of intellectually disabled defendants to representation in court by an independent mental health expert. Each case revealed bias in the criminal justice system (including direct and dire abuses of power, like how one Georgia district attorney prepared a document explicitly explaining how to underrepresent African Americans and women on juries). Tsai's tight focus on one lawyer's uphill battle against inequity is inspiring, especially as it expands outward to track the implications of each victory. Readers interested in criminal justice reform will want to check this out. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A law professor examines four Supreme Court cases won by a trailblazing Kentucky-born lawyer dedicated to seeking just treatment for those condemned to death. In this follow-up to Practical Equality, Tsai highlights the courtroom achievements of Stephen Bright, whose commitment to exposing the injustice undergirding the American capital punishment system has made him a leading light in the restorative justice movement. Bright's work with the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights focused primarily on defending those most vulnerable to the "legacy of slavery and Jim Crow" within a larger system that saw mass incarceration as key to a well-ordered society. In his work as a capital defense attorney, Bright's approach highlighted "the institutional pathologies in legal representation" caused by "the absence of adequate resources" for poor defendants. The four Supreme Court cases Bright argued--and won--were for individuals he showed had been placed on death row for reasons that, beyond faulty representation, pertained to race, class, and/or intellectual ability. Three of the cases spotlighted how prosecutors could rig juries to be not only unrepresentative, but also racist. In Snyder v. Louisiana, for example, Bright argued that an all-white jury, created by using peremptory strikes, condemned a Black defendant to death. The fourth case, McWilliams v. Dunn, called attention to the potential for judicial bias against people with intellectual disabilities, including Bright's defendant, James McWilliams. At the same time, Bright made a successful case for the value of access to a mental health expert, which the judge presiding over McWilliams' case refused. Thoughtful and well researched, this hopeful and inspiring book will appeal to those in the legal field seeking to end the legacy of mass incarceration, as well as to anyone with an interest in helping to fix America's profoundly broken carceral system. Tsai's book makes an excellent complement to Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy. Provocative, necessary reading. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
