The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

The system gives judges the power to make those determinations. But the reality is that in the squalid halls of courts like Schermerhorn, impossibly high bail is routinely dumped on less-well-off defendants and is just as routinely used (in conjunction with tricks like the “certificate of readiness” gambit) to pressure those defendants into guilty pleas and other forms of cooperation. In the Gen Re case, prosecutors needed the judge to do what judges do a million times a day in inner-city courts: stick to the draconian book. Instead, he treated the defendants like people deserving of mercy.