The Elusive Right to Healthcare Under US Law

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-25-2015

Abstract

"Most murderers, rapists, and other serious criminals escape justice in America. Legal academia has traditionally focused on the problem of injustice, where the legal system punishes wrongly through punishing the innocent or over-punishing the guilty. But the problem of failures of justice, where the legal system fails to punish criminal offenders, has been largely ignored. This is unfortunate because, as the book discusses, the damage caused by unpunished crime is immense, and even worse, falls disproportionately on vulnerable poor and minority communities, thus damaging equity as well as justice. Regular failures of justice increase crime by undermining deterrence and the criminal justice system’s credibility with the community as a moral authority. A government that allows rampant failures of justice is ignoring one of its most basic duties. No society should allow its members to be murdered, raped, and robbed without consequence. Yet that is what the American legal system does in most cases. Confronting Failures of Justice dares to ask why getting away with murder and rape is the norm, not the exception, in America. The book’s seventeen chapters tour nearly the entire criminal justice system, examining the rules and practices that regularly produce failures of justice in serious criminal cases. Topics covered include flawed police investigations, inadequate financing, statutes of limitation, judicial restrictions on investigation, failures to utilize new technology, the exclusionary rule, speedy trial rules, pretrial release, plea bargaining, sentencing procedures, early release on parole, executive clemency, witness intimidation, police-community relations, non-enforcement policies, distributive principles, and more. Each chapter outlines the nature and extent of justice failures caused by the rule or practice, provides real-world examples, and describes the competing societal interests upheld or neglected by the status quo. Finally, each chapter reviews proposed or 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 failures of justice is long overdue. Now for the first time, scholars, students, policymakers, and citizens have a comprehensive guide to the problem—and possible solutions."

Publication Title

New England Journal of Medicine

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMhle1412262

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