Saturday, January 05, 2008 2:50 PM
Blawg Book Highlighter #17: Snitch: Informants, Cooperators and the Corruption of Justice
Right and wrong. Good and bad. Black and white. Guilty and innocent.
That's how politicians, the news media and Hollywood tend to draw the world we live in.
But it's rarely that clear cut, as Ethan Brown illustrates in his new book, Snitch: Informants, Cooperators and the Corruption of Justice (PublicAffairs, December 2007).
The New York journalist, who previously explored connections between the rap music industry and the drug underworld in Queens Reigns Supreme, now tackles the war on drugs.
Brown's target: federal sentencing guidelines established in the 1980s that make cooperation in drug-related crimes the central basis for lenience in sentencing.
As portrayed by Brown, the very laws designed to put the clamp down on drug dealers "have unintentionally created a 'cottage industry of cooperators,' and led to fabricated evidence." The result, Brown writes, is that "the innocent are often falsely implicated in crimes, and worse, dangerous defendants are sent back to the streets simply because they offered information in a case."
Carlo Wolff writes for the Chicago Sun-Times that Snitch "will make you angry, even despairing," and notes that "Brown draws provocative parallels between the wars on drugs and on terror, suggesting both are more bark than bite."
To learn more about the book, visit the author's blog, read a short excerpt from Snitch on the publisher's website, or listen to an interview with the author on NPR.
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Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's “Fresh Voices” Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.
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