"The Humanity of Justice" is possibly the best book I've ever read on
the modern American justice system. Relying on his own experiences as a
Senior Deputy District Attorney in southern California, Burke E.
Strunsky frames it this way: in a democracy, the justice system should
not just be the objective interpretation of laws by professionals and
systematic doling out of punishments based on precedents. The justice
system is also an ongoing pursuit of what justice means. After reading
Chapter 4, "The Jury: The Heart of American Justice," I had a renewed
appreciation for the jury system as a quintessential component of a
democracy. The jury is the "we" in "we the people." That is, the people
have the responsibility and honor of deciding what justice is.
Therefore, justice is a reflection of the moral will of the people. This
book is about the people: the humanistic qualities and components of
our justice system, but it is also a convincing argument that human
emotions are a necessary supplement to logic and reason in deciding the
psychological and sociological implications of crime, punishment and
cultural analysis.
Strunsky doesn't mystify the reader with romanticizations of
courtroom drama and complexities of the law one might find in a
Hollywood crime drama or a law class respectively. It is a
demystification, but an enlightening one. While this seems like an
overzealous or glorifying review, the book deserves this encomium
because it integrates justice and the role of humanity itself within the
ongoing project of American society as the pursuit of justice. When you
finish reading it, to be sure, you will come away with a better
understanding of the American justice system and you will be implored to
look at real and fictional criminal cases with more critical eyes. You
might consider, or reconsider, the very idea of justice, not just as
some drifting abstract signifier, extracted from case law and
dispassionately applied to subsequent crimes, but rather what it really
is in a democratic justice system: something "we the people" reconstruct
with each particular case. Strunsky provides ethical and practical
comments in discussing some of his past cases (often brutal and horrific
crimes he has prosecuted). This commentary never seems partisan and is
always an elucidation. In other words, he does not dazzle you with
incomprehensible court jargon; he explains it. For example, rather than
using tactics to "trick" the jury into seeing a case his way, he
explains (often misunderstood) jargon such as "abiding conviction" and
"reasonable doubt" so the jury knows exactly what the court is talking
about. He wants the jury (and all citizens) to recognize their
individual roles in a social dynamic, to think like humans (thus, the
title).
Among these broad contexts of justice and humanity, are
the cases themselves. Some issues in the examples discussed are: flaws
in capital punishments, the hypocrisy of clergy-penitent privilege, and
the effective use of narrative in arguing the case. Strunsky presents
the argument that we can improve upon these and other issues with a
common sense (humanistic) approach to the pursuit of justice. Strunsky
also devotes considerable time to crime prevention: socially in terms of
gun control (a common sense look at this controversial topic) but also
the economic, individual, and psychological precursors of crime: from
prenatal care to adulthood. Strunsky brings what I think is a
necessarily subjective, human spirit to supplement what is often thought
of as an objective, law-written-in-stone institution.
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