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Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction Hardcover – October 16, 2018

by Lara Bazelon (Author)

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Makes a powerful argument for adopting a model of restorative justice as part of the Innocence Movement so exonerees, crime victims, and their communities can come together to heal.

In Rectify, a former Innocence Project director and journalist Lara Bazelon puts a face to the growing number of men and women exonerated from crimes that kept them behind bars for years - sometimes decades - and that devastate not only the exonerees but also their families, the crime victims who mistakenly identified them as perpetrators, the jurors who convicted them, and the prosecutors who realized too late that they helped convict an innocent person.

Bazelon focuses on Thomas Haynesworth, a teenager arrested for multiple rapes in Virginia, and Janet Burke, a rape victim who mistakenly IDed him. It took over two decades before he was exonerated. Conventional wisdom points to an exoneration as a happy ending to tragic tales of injustice, such as Haynesworth's. However, even when the physical shackles are left behind, invisible ones can be profoundly more difficult to unlock.

In the midst of Bazelon's frustration over the blatant limitations of courts and advocates, her hope is renewed by the fledgling but growing movement to apply the centuries-old practice of restorative justice to wrongful conviction cases. Using the stories of Thomas Haynesworth, Janet Burke, and other crime victims and exonerees, she demonstrates how the transformative experience of connecting isolated individuals around mutual trauma and a shared purpose of repairing harm unite unlikely allies. Movingly written and vigorously researched, Rectify takes to task the far-reaching failures of our criminal justice system and offers a window into a future where the power it yields can be used in pursuit of healing and unity rather than punishment and blame.

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Editorial Reviews

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“Rectify takes perhaps the first fair and balanced look at the unique and devastating harm that wrongful convictions inflict. From the original victims and the innocent men and women to our families and wider communities, Lara Bazelon’s groundbreaking work demonstrates that by collectively showing up and bearing witness to each other’s trauma, we can unpack our grief, restore our voices, and become strong and powerful wounded healers.”
—Jennifer Thompson, author of Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption and founder of Healing Justice

“Lara Bazelon is a personal hero of mine. She fearlessly tackles treacherous legal issues with her brain and her pen, and the results are profound. In Rectify, she shines a light on the ‘second punishment’ that follows exoneration: the stigmas and obstacles that former prisoners and crime victims face even though they’ve already paid a terrible price. I highly recommend this book.”
—Jason Flom, CEO of Lava Records and host of Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom

“Almost always, discussions of restorative justice consider only its role in mending the lives of victims, offenders, and the community when guilt is clear and accepted. But, to paraphrase a senior legislator this vital book quotes, in courts it is not only justice that we do; it is injustice too. Now Lara Bazelon focuses her remarkable ability to tell stories on that overlooked rip in the fabric: the cases in which the convict is innocent, in which the person in prison is not the offender at all. As she shows movingly and simply, the principles of restorative justice have an invaluable role in mending there too. Starting today, no examination of restorative justice will be adequate without considering what Lara Bazelon has added with Rectify.”
—Dean Strang, defense lawyer in State of Wisconsin v. Steven Avery and author of Worse Than the Devil

“The innocence movement transformed the way we think about the criminal justice system by exonerating thousands of wrongfully convicted men and women. Rectify asks what healing looks like, for them and for the crime victims whose lives have been upended. It is a story about restorative justice that is by turns tragic, inspiring, and triumphant.”
—Barry Scheck, cofounder and director of the Innocence Project

About the Author

Lara Bazelon is a writer and associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she is the director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinics. A 2016 MacDowell Fellow and a 2017 Mesa Refuge Langeloth Fellow, she is the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent. Bazelon is also a nonresident fellow with Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Politico, and Slate, where she is a contributing writer and has a long-running series about wrongful conviction cases. This is her first book.

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press (October 16, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0807029173
ISBN-13: 978-0807029176
Product Dimensions: 6 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 2 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,034,955 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2556 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Civil Rights & Liberties
- #4768 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Sociology > Race Relations > Discrimination & Racism
- #4943 in Books > Law > Criminal Law

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Interesting ideas - have an open mind and try to filter the rhetoric from the logic to get at the meat of the arguments

September 5, 2018

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

I found the book interesting. You must, must, must read this book with an open mind and try to filter the political slant to get to the meat of the arguments.

Professor Bazelon has written a book about how to go beyond overturning false convictions. She advocates "rectifying" wrongful convictions through restorative justice. She has spent her entire adult life defending those who have little resources to defend themselves. Bazelon started as a public defender and now is a college professor and an executive in several social change organizations.

The book is over 210 pages long and has 12 pages of footnotes and citations. These are mostly legal citations, but the rest are spread from publications such as: the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, Slate, and other progressive publications.

The premise is an interesting one. We all have a sense of justice, and, when one is falsely convicted, then we all feel that some restitution should be made in addition to the state saying, "sorry about that." Eighteen of the US States do not have formal restitution laws. This does seem like something that should be addressed.

She identifies the root causes of the overturned cases that she is aware of. An astonishing 55% of them involved false testimony. Professor Bazelon is justifiably angry and outraged about this. We all should be.

A little past the half-way point in the book Bazelon, makes an argument for sending less people to prison for offenses and make more of an effort to have the two aggrieved parties meet and work something out even in cases where a crime was clearly committed. One example she gives is the Black Lives Matter protesters trespassing, endangering people, and causing mayhem in San Francisco. The judge in the case, recognizing the gravity of their social cause, ruled that a simple apology would be sufficient for the defendants' lawlessness. Professor Bazelon applauded this and would like to see this high minded, compassionate approach to the law applied much more broadly.

That argument is a bit over-broad for me. There is no discussion of societal good and return. There is just an assertion based on the gravity of the feelings of those violating the law. That may very well have been the best possible decision in that particular case, but we need to be careful not to rely solely on emotional appeal for determining when to apply laws and maintain civil safety and when to ignore the common good.

Racism is bad, and it should be eliminated where it exists. That said, some of the false conviction rates can be attributed to statistics. A single false conviction is one too many. That said, if of 100 convicted felons, 90 are identified as belonging to subset A and 10 to subset B then we would be correct to assume that there would tend to be nine times as many false convictions amongst group A. You lose credibility when you do not state the whole case. This book loses some credibility with incomplete arguments, strawman arguments, etc. A great, politically neutral book to read is The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.

Some of Professor Bazelon's observations feel less than neutral; more to the point, she seems anti-Caucasian and anti-conservative. Bazelon identifies one of the largest issues with false convictions is the inability of white people to differentiate between black faces. Statistics in these cases are taken out of context. The logic becomes incomplete. The author notes several times that she is surprised when conservative leaning legislatures and legislators lead the way in developing fair and equitable strategies for restitution. Readers familiar with the racial equality passed by a largely conservative US Congress in the mid-sixties will find themselves less surprised and astonished than the author. If you don't self identify as a progressive, these passages could potentially ruin the book for you.

While I liked the book and found it engaging, Professor Bazelon's arguments and logic (as exemplified by some of the cases already mentioned) are unevenly applied in this book.

All in all, Professor Bazelon has devoted her life to helping the helpless, and she should be applauded for this. This book has many interesting ideas that can generate thoughtful discussion. There are clearly things that should be address such as getting restitution laws in the remaining eighteen states.

What you put into this book is what you will get out of it. If you can get past the rhetoric and anti-conservative, anti-Caucasian slant, the book is an interesting read.

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Powerful and challenging book needs to be required reading for Criminal Justice courses.

August 24, 2018

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

The title of this soon-to-be-published book caught my eye, as I have spent the better part of 20 years working in and around the justice system in a small town in Mississippi. Most of my work has been educational and spiritual, but it has brought me into close contact and relationship with offenders. Many of these individuals have been incarcerated without trial as a result of a plea-bargain system that scares young offenders into pleading guilty rather than face a jury.
From the first page, I found myself drawn in by the stories of pain and anguish felt by both victims and those exonerated. Injustice, it appears is a knife that cuts both ways and the path to healing, resolution and 'closure' ( I hate that word!) seems interminable.
Lara Bazelon has done a superb job in articulating the challenge that faces those struggling to overturn wrongful convictions, and her skillful use of episodic storytelling carries the reader through this painful, yet ultimately inspirational book. You will be introduced to many faces as you read and the courage and character of many of them will inspire you. This book should be required reading for all Criminal Justice courses, across the length and breadth of this country.
The greater theme of the book deals with how individuals deal with the aftermath of cases where wrongful convictions are overturned. It makes clear that even after that seemingly overwhelming victory there are many more obstacles to overcome. As you read you are likely to be taken through a whole gamut of emotion as this Ms. Bazelon masterfully challenges the Right-Left pre-suppositions about law and order and American justice.
I hope that this book will gain an even broader readership, as the focus of this - "Restorative Justice" - needs to become a social issue for our times.

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