Case Explained: “The Price of Mercy” by Emily Galvin Almanza – Legal Perspective

She’s working to transform our criminal justice system by lifting the veil on the ways our laws are actually generating crime, entrenching people in poverty, and destroying their health. In her new book The Price of Mercy, she shares these truths as well as how we can rebuild a path forward. Former public defender and co-founder of Partners of Justice, Emily Galvin Almanza shared more! For more information about Emily, click here!

Join Emily for a book event tonight:

• “The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, a Violent System and a Public Defender’s Search for Justice in America”
• Friday, February 20th @7pm
• Powell’s City of Books
• 10th & West Burnside in Portland
• For more information click here!

About the Book:

As Americans, we are told a rose-tinted story about our criminal courts — that these are the hallowed halls of justice, that the purpose of our legal process is to find the truth, and that those who enforce the law are both equitable and heroic. But what if the reality is purposely obscured to hide something rotten at the system’s core?

In The Price of Mercy (Crown), attorney and former public defender Emily Galvin Almanza weaves hard data and unforgettable stories, dark humor and compelling evidence to tell us the truth about what’s really going on behind the closed doors of America’s criminal courts. She shows us how jails actually increase future crime, the dirty tricks police use to make millions in overtime pay, how a man could spend decades in prison because scientists mistook dog hair for his own, the perverse incentives that push prosecutors to seek convictions even when they don’t want to, and how judges may decide cases differently before and after lunch.

We’ll learn what’s working, too: how public defenders can improve public health and even economic mobility, and how planting more trees can reduce a neighborhood’s murder rates. But a lone defender winning a case won’t change the system. Galvin Almanza argues that we need an engaged public to confront the stark reality of our crime-generating, poverty-entrenching, health-destroying legal apparatus and rebuild it into something that can save our collective present and prevent our future from being torn apart.

Provocative and eye-opening, The Price of Mercy lifts the curtain on the way our laws really operate and presents a path forward for true transformation of the American criminal court system. Justice, and the law itself, is not some static thing. It is something enacted together, decision by decision, in acts of inhumanity or mercy.