Rigged Justice

Rigged Justice

Author: John Vandemoer

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2021-09-28

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0063020122

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The former Stanford University sailing coach sentenced in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal tells the riveting true story of how he was drawn unwittingly into a web of deceit in this eye-opening memoir that offers a damning portrait of modern college administration and the ways in which justice and fairness do not always intersect. For eleven years, John Vandemoer ran the prestigious Stanford University sailing program in which he coached Olympians and All-Americans. Though the hours were long and the program struggled for funding, sailing gave Vandemoer’s life shape and meaning. But early one morning, everything came crashing down when Vandemoer, still in his pajamas, opened the door to find FBI and IRS agents on his doorstep. He quickly learned that a recruiter named Rick Singer had used him as a stooge in a sophisticated scheme designed to take advantage of college coaches and play to the endless appetite for university fundraising—and wealthy parents looking for an edge for their college-bound children. Vandemoer was summarily fired, kicked out of campus housing, his children booted from campus daycare. The next year of his life was a Kafkaesque hellscape, and though he was an innocent man who never received a dime was the first person to be convicted in what became known as the Varsity Blues scandal. A true story that reads like a suspense novel, Rigged Justice lays bare how a sophisticated scheme could take advantage of college coaches and university money—and how one family became collateral damage in a large government investigation that dominated national headlines.


Uneven Justice

Uneven Justice

Author: Raj Rajaratnam

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1637582803

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The inside story of a case that illustrates the horrific perils of unchecked prosecutorial overreach, written by the man who experienced it firsthand. Raj Rajaratnam, the respected founder of the iconic hedge fund Galleon Group, which managed $7 billion and employed 180 people in its heyday, chose to go to trial rather than concede to a false narrative concocted by ambitious prosecutors looking for a scapegoat for the 2008 financial crisis. Naively perhaps, Rajaratnam had expected to get a fair hearing in court. As an immigrant who had achieved tremendous success in his adopted country, he trusted the system. He had not anticipated prosecutorial overreach—inspired by political ambition—FBI fabrications, judicial compliance, and lies told under oath by cooperating witnesses. In the end, Rajaratnam was convicted and sentenced to eleven years in prison. He served seven and a half. Meanwhile, not a single senior bank executive responsible for the financial crisis was even charged. Uneven Justice is the story of his bewildering and confounding prosecution by forces who, quite frankly, were looking for bigger game. When Rajaratnam refused to support the narrative that would make that happen, he and the Galleon Group became collateral damage. A cautionary tale with implications for us all, Uneven Justice is both a riveting page-turner and an eye-opening lesson in the vagaries of justice when an unscrupulous prosecutor is calling the shots.


Rigged

Rigged

Author: Mollie Hemingway

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1684512638

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER JUSTICE ON TRIAL Stunned by the turbulence of the 2020 election, millions of Americans are asking the forbidden question: what really happened? It was a devastating triple punch. Capping their four-year campaign to destroy the Trump presidency, the media portrayed a Democratic victory as necessary and inevitable. Big Tech, wielding unprecedented powers, vaporized dissent and erased damning reports about the Biden family's corruption. And Democratic operatives, exploiting a public health crisis, shamelessly manipulated the voting process itself. Silenced and subjected, the American people lost their faith in the system. RIGGED is the definitive account of the 2020 election. Based on Mollie Hemingway's exclusive interviews with campaign officials, reporters, Supreme Court justices, and President Trump himself, it exposes the fraud and cynicism behind the Democrats' historic power-grab. Rewriting history is a specialty of the radical left, now in control of America's political and cultural heights. But they will have to contend with the determination, insight, and eloquence of Mollie Hemingway. RIGGED is a reminder for weary patriots that truth is still the most powerful weapon. The stakes for our democracy have never been higher.


Injustice for All

Injustice for All

Author: Chris Surprenant

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-06

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1000750523

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

American criminal justice is a dysfunctional mess. Cops are too violent, the punishments are too punitive, and the so-called Land of the Free imprisons more people than any other country in the world. Understanding why means focusing on color—not only on black or white (which already has been studied extensively), but also on green. The problem is that nearly everyone involved in criminal justice—including district attorneys, elected judges, the police, voters, and politicians—faces bad incentives. Local towns often would rather send people to prison on someone else’s dime than pay for more effective policing themselves. Local police forces can enrich themselves by turning into warrior cops who steal from innocent civilians. Voters have very little incentive to understand the basic facts about crime or how to fix it—and vote accordingly. And politicians have every incentive to cater to voters’ worst biases. Injustice for All systematically diagnoses why and where American criminal justice goes wrong, and offers functional proposals for reform. By changing who pays for what, how people are appointed, how people are punished, and which things are criminalized, we can make the US a country which guarantees justice for all. Key Features: Shows how bad incentives, not "bad apples," cause the dysfunction in American criminal justice Focuses not only on overincarceration, but on overcriminalization and other failures of the criminal justice system Provides a philosophical and practical defense of reducing the scope of what’s considered criminal activity Crosses ideological lines, highlighting both the weaknesses and strengths of liberal, conservative, and libertarian agendas Fully integrates tools from philosophy and social science, making this stand out from the many philosophy books on punishment, on the one hand, and the solely empirical studies from sociology and criminal science, on the other Avoids disciplinary jargon, broadening the book’s suitability for students and researchers in many different fields and for an interested general readership Offers plausible reforms that realign specific incentives with the public good.


Arc of Justice

Arc of Justice

Author: Kevin Boyle

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 1429900164

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes. And so it began-a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweet's story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times.


Justice on Trial

Justice on Trial

Author: Mollie Hemingway

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2019-07-09

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1621579840

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER! Justice Anthony Kennedy slipped out of the Supreme Court building on June 27, 2018, and traveled incognito to the White House to inform President Donald Trump that he was retiring, setting in motion a political process that his successor, Brett Kavanaugh, would denounce three months later as a “national disgrace” and a “circus.” Justice on Trial, the definitive insider’s account of Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, is based on extraordinary access to more than one hundred key figures—including the president, justices, and senators—in that ferocious political drama. The Trump presidency opened with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to succeed the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. But the following year, when Trump drew from the same list of candidates for his nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, the justice being replaced was the swing vote on abortion, and all hell broke loose. The judicial confirmation process, on the point of breakdown for thirty years, now proved utterly dysfunctional. Unverified accusations of sexual assault became weapons in a ruthless campaign of personal destruction, culminating in the melodramatic hearings in which Kavanaugh’s impassioned defense resuscitated a nomination that seemed beyond saving. The Supreme Court has become the arbiter of our nation’s most vexing and divisive disputes. With the stakes of each vacancy incalculably high, the incentive to destroy a nominee is nearly irresistible. The next time a nomination promises to change the balance of the Court, Hemingway and Severino warn, the confirmation fight will be even uglier than Kavanaugh’s. A good person might accept that nomination in the naïve belief that what happened to Kavanaugh won’t happen to him because he is a good person. But it can happen, it does happen, and it just happened. The question is whether America will let it happen again.


Saving Justice

Saving Justice

Author: James Comey

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1250799139

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

James Comey, former FBI Director and New York Times bestselling author of A Higher Loyalty, uses his long career in federal law enforcement to explore issues of justice and fairness in the US justice system. James Comey might best be known as the FBI director that Donald Trump fired in 2017, but he’s had a long, varied career in the law and justice system. He knows better than most just what a force for good the US justice system can be, and how far afield it has strayed during the Trump Presidency. In his much-anticipated follow-up to A Higher Loyalty, Comey uses anecdotes and lessons from his career to show how the federal justice system works. From prosecuting mobsters as an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York in the 1980s to grappling with the legalities of anti-terrorism work as the Deputy Attorney General in the early 2000s to, of course, his tumultuous stint as FBI director beginning in 2013, Comey shows just how essential it is to pursue the primacy of truth for federal law enforcement. Saving Justice is gracefully written and honestly told, a clarion call for a return to fairness and equity in the law.


The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice

The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice

Author: Colleen Murphy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-04-19

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1108228607

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Many countries have attempted to transition to democracy following conflict or repression, but the basic meaning of transitional justice remains hotly contested. In this book, Colleen Murphy analyses transitional justice - showing how it is distinguished from retributive, corrective, and distributive justice - and outlines the ethical standards which societies attempting to democratize should follow. She argues that transitional justice involves the just pursuit of societal transformation. Such transformation requires political reconciliation, which in turn has a complex set of institutional and interpersonal requirements including the rule of law. She shows how societal transformation is also influenced by the moral claims of victims and the demands of perpetrators, and how justice processes can fail to be just by failing to foster this transformation or by not treating victims and perpetrators fairly. Her book will be accessible and enlightening for philosophers, political and social scientists, policy analysts, and legal and human rights scholars and activists.


The Chickenshit Club

The Chickenshit Club

Author: Jesse Eisinger

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-07-11

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1501121383

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the 2018 Excellence in Financial Journalism Award From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jesse Eisinger, “a fast moving, fly-on-the-wall, disheartening look at the deterioration of the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission…It is a book of superheroes” (San Francisco Review of Books). Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed “Too Big to Fail” to almost every large corporation in America—to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. The Chickenshit Club—an inside reference to prosecutors too scared of failure and too daunted by legal impediments to do their jobs—explains why in “an absorbing financial history, a monumental work of journalism…a first-rate study of the federal bureaucracy” (Bloomberg Businessweek). Jesse Eisinger begins the story in the 1970s, when the government pioneered the notion that top corporate executives, not just seedy crooks, could commit heinous crimes and go to prison. He brings us to trading desks on Wall Street, to corporate boardrooms and the offices of prosecutors and FBI agents. These revealing looks provide context for the evolution of the Justice Department’s approach to pursuing corporate criminals through the early 2000s and into the Justice Department of today, including the prosecutorial fiascos, corporate lobbying, trial losses, and culture shifts that have stripped the government of the will and ability to prosecute top corporate executives. “Brave and elegant…a fearless reporter…Eisinger’s important and profound book takes no prisoners” (The Washington Post). Exposing one of the most important scandals of our time, The Chickenshit Club provides a clear, detailed explanation as to how our Justice Department has come to avoid, bungle, and mismanage the fight to bring these alleged criminals to justice. “This book is a wakeup call…a chilling read, and a needed one” (NPR.org).


Rigged

Rigged

Author: David Shimer

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0525659013

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The definitive history of the covert struggle between Russia and America to influence elections, why the threat to American democracy is greater than ever, and what we can do about it. This is "the first book to put the story of Russian interference into a broader context.... Extraordinary and gripping" (The New York Times Book Review). Russia's interference in the 2016 elections marked only the latest chapter of a hidden and revelatory history. In Rigged, David Shimer tells the sweeping story of covert electoral interference past and present. He exposes decades of secret operations—by the KGB, the CIA, and Vladimir Putin's Russia—to shape electoral outcomes, melding deep historical research with groundbreaking interviews with more than 130 key players, from leading officials in both the Trump and Obama administrations to CIA and NSA directors to a former KGB general. Throughout history and in 2016, both Russian and American operations achieved their greatest success by influencing the way voters think, rather than tampering with actual vote tallies. Understanding 2016 as one battle in a much longer war is essential to comprehending the critical threat currently posed to America's electoral sovereignty and how to defend against it. Illuminating how the lessons of the past can be used to protect our democracy in the future, Rigged is an essential book for readers of every political persuasion.