RaveWashington PostPatricia Sullivan puts Robert Kennedy near the center of the nation’s struggle for racial justice. She offers a moving and enlightening account of a life of public service marked by ambition and marred by serious errors in judgment, but more than redeemed by a sincere, powerful and enduring commitment to social justice ... Justice Rising ends on a plaintive note, inviting us to wonder what might have been had Kennedy lived to beat Richard Nixon, whose punitive \'law and order\' politics metastasized to become today’s crisis of mass incarceration and abusive policing.
Benjamin Rachlin
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleGhost of the Innocent Man reads like an inverted police procedural, where the criminal conviction comes first, before the detectives discover the facts and where justice arrives only at the end — long delayed and therefore, in an important sense, forever denied. Willie Grimes, convicted on flimsy evidence for a rape he did not commit, gives the victims of our overconfident and needlessly punitive criminal justice system a human face ... offers a hopeful story of bipartisan support for the Innocence Inquiry Commission and its mission to correct wrongful convictions. It also chronicles the skepticism and resistance of some prosecutors, judges and victims’ rights advocates ... By showing us that the specter of wrongful convictions involves flesh and blood human beings, Ghost of the Innocent Man confronts us with the cruelest injustices of the criminal justice system, even as it also holds out hope for a more humane future.
James Forman Jr.
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle...[a] poignant and insightful new book ... Forman deftly moves between examples of black community support for a law-and-order crackdown and the dire present-day consequences of our increasingly punitive and aggressive war on crime.
