Most murderers and rapists escape justice. This horrifying fact has gone largely unexamined until now. In seventeen chapters, this groundbreaking book tours nearly the entire criminal justice system, examining the rules and practices that regularly produce failures of justice in serious criminal cases. Justice-frustrating rules usually exist for a reason, and each chapter outlines the interests at stake and different views on balancing them. It then describes the nature and extent of justice failures in present practice, providing numerous real-world examples of how the existing rules produce damaging results. Finally, each chapter reviews proposed and implemented reforms that could balance the competing interests in a less justice-frustrating manner and recommends one—sometimes completely original—reform to improve the system.
A systematic study of justice failures is long overdue. As this book discusses, regular failures of justice in serious criminal cases undermine deterrence and the criminal justice system’s credibility with the community as a moral authority. The damage caused by unpunished crime is immense and, even worse, falls primarily on vulnerable minority communities. Now for the first time, students, researchers, policymakers, and citizens have a resource that explains why justice failures occur and what can be done about them. The book make no assumption that the reader has a background in criminal law, but it can also serve as the textbook for a course on criminal justice. There are many good books focused on the problem of injustice, when the system punishes wrongly. But there is also a desperate need to examine when and why the system fails to appropriately punish crime and what can be done to reduce such justice failures. Getting away with murder and rape is the norm in America today. This book aims to change that.
Author Biography:
Paul Robinson is one of the world’s leading criminal law scholars. A prolific writer and lecturer, Robinson has published 20 books and articles in virtually all of the top law reviews, lectured in more than 110 cities in 34 states and 27 countries, and had his writings appear in 15 languages.
He is a former federal prosecutor and counsel for the US Senate Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures. He is the author or editor of 19 books, including the standard lawyer’s reference on criminal law defenses, three Oxford monographs on criminal law theory, a highly regarded criminal law treatise, and an innovative case studies course book. He has authored more than a hundred scholarly articles that have appeared in essentially every major law review and his work has been published in 15 languages.
A member of the American Law Institute, Robinson is the lead editor of Criminal Law Conversations (Oxford), with contributions from more than 100 scholars around the world, and the author of Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert (Oxford); Mapping American Criminal Law (Praeger, also in Chinese); Distributive Principles of Criminal Law (Oxford, also in Spanish and Chinese); and Structure and Function in Criminal Law (Oxford, Clarendon, also in Chinese). Robinson recently completed three criminal code reform projects in the U.S. and two modern Islamic penal codes, including one under the auspices of the U.N. Development Programme. He also writes popular books for general audiences, such as Would You Convict? (NYU), Law Without Justice (Oxford), Crimes That Changed Our World (Rowman & Littlefield), Shadow Vigilantes (Prometheus), and American Criminal Law (Routledge).
Jeffrey Seaman is a researcher and writer on the U.S. criminal justice system. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (2022) and a Master of Science in Behavioral and Decision Sciences (2023) from the University of Pennsylvania. He is committed to bringing an interdisciplinary approach to the problem of criminal justice reform to make the system more just for all.
Muhammad Sarahne: S.J.D., 2020, and LL.M., 2017, University of Pennsylvania Law School; LL.B. (Law) and B.A. (Psychology), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2011. Sarahne is currently an attorney in the Criminal Department of the State Attorney's Office in Israel, representing the state in criminal matters before the Israeli Supreme Court. He previously worked as a prosecutor in the Economic Crime Department and was an assistant to the Israeli Deputy Attorney General (Criminal). He is an adjunct teacher at the Law School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has published a number of articles in American and British law reviews.
