The injustice files

Tales of wrongs, travesties and miscarriages of justice

Imagine you’re a young white prosecutor, engaged to be married, looking forward to the future. Next thing you know, the Rev. Al Sharpton has accused you falsely of raping and abusing a black teenager you’ve never seen or met as part of a racist hate crime. It takes years to clear your name, but by that time, you and your family have been dragged through the mud endlessly, and your faith in the system is broken. Rev. Sharpton never apologizes. Instead, he fields meeting requests from presidents and gets a nationally syndicated radio show.

Or suppose you’re an Egyptian studying computer science in New York City in 2001. Suddenly, you’re accused of unspecified involvement in the 9/11 terror attacks, interrogated by the FBI and held without charge for weeks because a disgraced ex-cop has claimed he found a radio transceiver in your hotel room that “must” have been used to communicate with the airplane hijackers. Eventually, you’re released, but not before you endure the proverbial third degree at the hands of federal agents.

Or perhaps you’re a young black man convicted by an all-white Louisiana jury of a murder you didn’t commit. Your court-appointed lawyers have never handled a single criminal jury trial, and you spend 30 years on death row before DNA evidence exonerates you. You die an angry man. The lawyer who prosecuted you blames himself.

What is injustice? Is it different things to different people? Is it something more than a lack of perfect justice? All these questions, and more, are explored by Joel Cohen in “Broken Scales: Reflections on Injustice.” Mr. Cohen, a former prosecutor and longtime litigator in New York, is also the author of “Blindfolds Off: Judges on How They Decide.” In that 2014 book, he interviewed several prominent jurists, asking them tough and challenging questions about how and why they reach decisions, and about what motives truly lie behind their rulings in several highprofile cases.

In “Broken Scales,” Mr. Cohen trains his unsparing lens on cases where injustice was done, or may have been done. He employs the same technique, asking difficult and probing questions of his subjects. His cross-examination is relentless. It bears fruit. He’s able to excavate thoughts, feelings, motives, that others might gloss over. He doesn’t let his interlocutors off the hook. The result is compelling.

What do we read about? In addition to the stories above — of Steve Pagones, wrongly targeted by Rev. Sharpton and two lawyers eventually disbarred or suspended from practice in the Tawana Brawley hoax; of Abdallah Higazy, freed after 34 days in solitary confinement; of Glenn Ford, whose prosecutor recounts how the revelation of actual innocence changed his own beliefs on life and death — Mr. Cohen gives us many other eye-opening accounts.

There’s Marsha Ternus, former chief justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, defeated in a retention election after she voted to allow same-sex marriage, a right that would be guaranteed by the Supreme Court of the United States a few years later. There’s Michael Wayne Haley, a petty thief who served 14 years longer than his lawful sentence because the state of Texas refused to release him, despite its knowledge of the error. There’s Miriam Moskowitz, a victim of McCarthyism at its peak, hounded mercilessly and prosecuted during the Red Scare, who is still seeking justice as she approaches her centennial.

And there are several more tales of wrongs, of travesties, of miscarriages of justice. Space does not permit recitation of all of them here. Through it all, the magic of the book is that Mr. Cohen pushes the interviews into areas in which his subjects are uncomfortable. That’s where the nitty-gritty is; that’s where the truth comes out.

Kenneth Ireland, imprisoned at 18 for a brutal rape and murder, and exonerated by DNA evidence after 21 years in prison, tells Mr. Cohen how he survived inside, and how he fought for his freedom without ever getting his hopes up. “Do everything you can legally to fight this,” he says, “but don’t go to bed at night thinking you’re going to get out tomorrow. That’s just going to drive you mad.”

These stories won’t drive you mad, but some of them will make you mad. And they’re a good reminder of how our system can fail and how we can always do better. Justice is always a work in progress.

“The Love of Baseball: Essays by Lifelong Fans”

Edited by Chris Arvidson and Diana Nelson Jones McFarland ($19.99) Longtime fans of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter and columnist Diana Nelson Jones know she’s a serious student of baseball in general and the Pittsburgh Pirates in particular. To no one’s surprise, Ms. Jones has co-edited a collection of essays on America’s pastime with fellow baseball enthusiast Chris Arvidson.

Both Ms. Jones and Ms. Arvidson contribute one essay each to “The Love of Baseball: Essays by Lifelong Fans.” They are joined by 28 other writers who feel just as deeply about the game as they do. In “The Girl From Cleveland,” writer Nancy Gutierrez describes the agony and ecstasy of being a Cleveland Indians fan for decades. Writer Kevin Kirkland, also from the Post-Gazette, reminds us of our debt to the Negro League in “How Gus Greenlee, Sonnyman Jackson and the Numbers Barons Saved Baseball.”

But it’s not all about the glories of the game. Contributor Sam Watson writes a charming piece about his indifference to baseball in “Confessions of a Yet-to-Be Fan” that will resonate with those who have yet to be charmed by America’s slowest moving and most ritual-heavy sport. Whether a fair-weather fan or a fanatic, “The Love of Baseball” is a great way to end the season.