Arthur Johnson Memorial Library

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Arthur Johnson Memorial Library

Item type Current location Call number Status Date due Barcode
300 - 399 344.73052 Che (Browse shelf) Available 113972

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part I: The Supreme Court, Race, and Policing. 1 "I Can't Breathe" : why courts can't stop police from using chokeholds ; 2. Confronting the realities of race and policing ; 3. The Supreme Court's essential role in enforcing the Constitution and controlling police -- Part II: A Minimal Judicial Role : The Court and Policing Before 1953. 4. Why the Supreme Court ignored policing for much of American history ; 5. Judicial silence on Constitutional protections and remedies before 1953 -- Part III The Warren Court : Finally Enforcing Constitutional Protections and Remedies. 6. "Each era finds an improvement in law for the benefit of mankind" : applying the Bill of Rights to state and local police ; 7. Both limiting and empowering police : the Warren Court and the Fourth Amendment ; 8. Miranda : trying to solve the problem of coercion in police interrogations ; 9. Protecting the innocent from wrongful convictions : safeguards against false eyewitness identifications ; 10. Rights need remedies -- Part IV Retrenchment : The Burger Court Limits Constitutional Rights. 11. "Only the guilty have something to hide" : undermining Fourth Amendment protections ; 12. Hollowing out Miranda ; 13. Refusing to check police eyewitness identification procedures ; 14. Eroding remedies for police misconduct -- Part V Empowering Police : The Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. 15. The police can stop anyone, at any time, and search them ; 16. You don't really have the right to remain silent ; 17. Ignoring the problem of false eyewitness identifications ; 18. The vanishing remedies for police misconduct -- Part VI It Can Be Done : Overcoming the Supreme Court to Reform Policing. 19. The path to meaningful police reform.

Police are nine times more likely to kill African American men than they are other Americans -- in fact, nearly one in every thousand will die at the hands of an officer. As eminent constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky powerfully argues, this is no accident, but the horrific result powerfully argues, this is no accident, but the horrific result of an elaborate body of doctrines that allow the police and, crucially, the courts to presume that suspects -- especially people of color -- are guilty before being charged. Today in the United States, much attention is focused on the enormous problems of police violence and racism in law enforcement. Too often, though, that attention fails to place the blame where it most belongs: on the courts, and specifically, on the Supreme Court. A "smoking gun" of civil rights research, Presume Guilty presents a groundbreaking, decades-long history of judicial failure in America, revealing how the Supreme Court has enabled racist practices, including profiling and intimidation, and legitimated gross law enforcement excesses that disproportionately affect people of color. For the greater part of its existence, Chemerinsky shows deference to and empowerment of the police have been the modi operandi of the Supreme Court. From its conception in the late eighteenth century until the Warren Court in 1953, the Supreme Court rarely ruled against the police, and then only when police conduct was truly shocking. Animating seminal cases and justices from the Court's history., Chemerinsky--who has himself litigate cases dealing with police misconduct for decades--shows how the Court has time and again refused to impose constitutional checks on police, all the while deliberately gutting remedies Americans might use to challenge police misconduct. In an unprecedented series of landmark rulings in the mid-1950s and 1960s, the pro-defendant Warrent Court finally imposed significant constitutional limits on policing. Yet as Chemerinsky demonstrates, the Warren Court was but a brief historical aberration, a fleeting liberal era that ultimately concluded with Nixon's presidency and the ascendance of conservative and "originalist" justices, whose rulings--in Terry v. Ohio (1968), City of Los Angeles v. Lyons (1983), and Whren v. United States (1996), among other cases--have sanctioned stop-and-frisks, limited suits to reform police departments, and even abetted the use of lethal chokeholds. Written with a lawyer's knowledge and experience, Presumed Guilty definitively proves that an approach to policing that continues to exalt "Dirty Harry" can be transformed only by a robust court system committed to civil rights. In the tradition of Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law, Presumed Guilty is a necessary intervention into the roiling national debates over racial inequality and reform,k creating a history where none was before--and promising to transform our understanding of the systems that enable police brutality. --

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