Richard Jaffe's explosive second edition of Quest for Justice: Defending the Damned affirms the vital role criminal defense lawyers play in the balance between life and death, liberty and lockup. It is a compelling journey into the legal and human drama of life or death criminal cases that often reads more like hard to imagine fiction, yet these cases are real. Quest for Justice invites readers into the courtroom and into the field with Richard Jaffe, a powerhouse Alabama defense attorney with more than four decades of experience, who has successfully defended hundreds of individuals accused of murder, including more than seventy cases where the defendant faced the death penalty, including the Olympic bomber Eric Robert Rudolph. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, in Alabama, nine people have been exonerated from death row-Jaffe represented four of them: James Willie "Bo" Cochran, Randal Padgett, Gary Drinkard, and Wesley Quick. Though every chapter reveals more alarming, gut-wrenching cases, and impediments to justice, Jaffe's unwavering determination, hope, and strategies in the courtroom yield many momentous victories for his clients and the cause of justice. In Quest for Justice: Defending the Damned, Richard Jaffe offers all audiences an accessible, page-turning perspective borne out of a life representing the damned in America's criminal justice system.

This book is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends. The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies. Those consequences include the steady and dangerous erosion of fundamental principles of freedom -- amounting to a quiet repeal of the American revolution. The Quest for Cosmic Justice is the summation of a lifetime of study and thought about where we as a society are headed -- and why we need to change course before we do irretrievable damage.

This volume is composed of transcripts from the secret recordings that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made of White House meetings and phone conversations about the violent Civil Rights crisis. As fly-on-the-wall history, this book gives an unprecedented grasp of the way the White House affected civil rights history and consequently transformed America.

A young deputy sheriff goes to law school to become the people¿s lawyer. Then teams up with some sharp cops to tackle crime, first in his community and later nationally. Each step brings controversy as he progresses from county prosecutor to U.S. Attorney¿to Director of the U.S. Marshals Service¿ ultimately to Federal District Judge. You¿ll be shocked to learn how one prominent person tried to tube his career! Greta Van Susteren of Fox News says ¿crime news junkies will love Quest for Justice, . . . a thrilling tale of crime fighting adventure.¿ And Ollie North says, ¿Henry Hudson weaves a suspenseful tale that reads like a novel, but it¿s all true.¿ An insider¿s view of the world of criminal prosecution¿the good and the bad. He really strips the varnish off. Very entertaining!

On March 18, 1963, in one of its most significant legal decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that all defendants facing significant jail time have the constitutional right to a free attorney if they cannot afford their own. Fifty years later, 80 percent of criminal defendants are served by public defenders. In a book that combines the sweep of history with the intimate details of individual lives and legal cases, veteran reporter Karen Houppert movingly chronicles the stories of people in all parts of the country who have relied on Gideon’s promise. There is the harrowing saga of a young man who is charged with involuntary vehicular homicide in Washington State, where overextended public defenders juggle impossible caseloads, forcing his defender to go to court to protect her own right to provide an adequate defense. In Florida, Houppert describes a public defender’s office, loaded with upward of seven hundred cases per attorney, and discovers the degree to which Clarence Earl Gideon’s promise is still unrealized. In New Orleans, she follows the case of a man imprisoned for twenty-seven years for a crime he didn’t commit, finding a public defense system already near collapse before Katrina and chronicling the harrowing months after the storm, during which overworked volunteers and students struggled to get the system working again. In Georgia, Houppert finds a mentally disabled man who is to be executed for murder, despite the best efforts of a dedicated but severely overworked and underfunded capital defender. Half a century after Anthony Lewis’s award-winning Gideon’s Trumpet brought us the story of the court case that changed the American justice system, Chasing Gideon is a crucial book that provides essential reckoning of our attempts to implement this fundamental constitutional right.

"Based upon oral history interviews conducted by Laura McCreery, California Supreme Court Oral History Project."