Illusion of Justice: Inside Making a Murderer and America’s Broken System

Description

Interweaving his account of the Steven Avery trial on the heart of Making a Murderer with other prime profile cases from his criminal defense career, attorney Jerome F. Buting explains the failings in The united states’s criminal justice system and lays out a provocative, persuasive blue-print for reform.

Over his career, Jerome F. Buting has spent hundreds of hours in courtrooms representing defendants in criminal trials. When he agreed to enroll in Dean Strang as co-counsel for the defense in Steven A. Avery vs. State of Wisconsin, he knew a difficult fight lay ahead. But, as he finds in Illusion of Justice, no-one can have predicted just how difficult and twisted that fight would be—or that it could transform the middle of the documentary Making a Murderer, which made Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey household names and thrust Buting into the spotlight.

Buting’s tough, riveting boots-on-the-ground narrative of Avery’s and Dassey’s cases becomes a springboard to inspect the shaky integrity of law enforcement and justice in the USA, which Buting has witnessed firsthand for more than 35 years. From his early career as a public defender to his luck overturning wrongful convictions working with the Innocence Project, his story provides a compelling expert view into the prime-stakes arena of criminal defense law; the difficulties of forensic science; and a horrifying reality of biased interrogations, coerced or false confessions, faulty eyewitness testimony, official misconduct, and more.

Combining narrative reportage with important remark and private mirrored image, Buting explores his professional and private motivations, career-defining cases—including his shocking fifteen-year-long fight to transparent the name of every other man wrongly accused and convicted of murder—and what will have to occur if our broken system is to be saved. Taking a spot beside Just Mercy and The New Jim Crow, Illusion of Justice is a tour-de-force from a continuing and eloquent advocate for justice who is made up our minds to meet his professional responsibility and, within the face of overwhelming odds, make The united states’s judicial system work as it’s designed to do.