Rights at Risk

Starred review from January 16, 2012
In this fascinating and provocative account, scholar and former New York Times reporter Shipler (The Working Poor) investigates the current state of the average American’s rights, and probes the more extreme boundaries where constitutional freedoms often slip. We meet an American terror suspect abused and held indefinitely without access to attorneys, three Rwandan prisoners who falsely confess to FBI agents to avoid further torture by interrogators in their own country, a 17-year-old Long Island boy who does the same after a cop lies to him about his father’s last words, and legal immigrants forced out of the country over petty infractions for which they’d years ago paid the fines and done the time. We watch as prosecutors, according to the author, armed with unfair sentencing guidelines, stack the deck against those who maintain their innocence rather than plea bargain, or who can’t afford adequate legal counsel in an overtaxed public defense system. Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens find their rights to free speech and privacy eroded as biased restrictions curtail political demonstrations and keep students from voicing dissent, and as post–September 11 fears usher in a new era of warrantless wiretapping and government surveillance. This book is a must for readers who want to stay informed of their rights in the shadowy territory where the government’s need for order and security overstep constitutional protections. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

January 15, 2012
A Pulitzer Prize winner resumes his well-reported account of the assault on our constitutional rights in a post-9/11 world. In this companion volume to The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties (2011), Shipler turns to the First, Fifth and Sixth Amendments and the constitutional rights "routinely overwhelmed" during this, the sixth era in our history when liberties have been especially at risk. Citing national security or public safety, the executive branch has historically in times of national crisis chipped away at the Bill of Rights to deal with an immediate threat, leaving us impoverished for the long term. Shipler chronicles our current drift away from constitutional principles by taking us into interrogation rooms where suspects may, without being informed of their rights, fall prey to the manipulations and deceptive techniques of professional interrogators. He exposes the eagerness with which police and prosecutors embrace false confessions, notwithstanding the inaccuracies and contradictions they contain. He examines the criminal courts, where systemic flaws in our laws have diminished the right to jury trial, where the forfeiture of assets and the revocation of probation are too easily accomplished, where the right to effective assistance of counsel has been shortchanged. Frightened officials, after years of lax enforcement, have now mobilized immigration laws to target entire groups. We have also stifled free speech in our schools and universities, Shipler argues, where authorities regularly ignore Supreme Court precedents, choosing order and discipline over vigorous debate. The same impulse accounts for constricting the public square, where so-called free-speech zones and zealous police surveillance chill the right to petition for redress of grievances. No matter the issue, Shipler humanizes the discussion throughout, linking each topic to stories of real people silenced, marginalized, neglected, bullied, even brutalized by a government that should know better. A colorful account of our early-21st-century faithlessness to principles we at least pretend to revere.

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October 1, 2011

Following hard on the heels of Shipler's The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties, out in trade paperback in February 2012, this book expands on Shipler's argument that our civil liberties are under attack. Shipler's examples include an Iraqi refugee arrested on transparently false charges and an impoverished woman sentenced to life in prison owing to her lawyer's conflict of interest. Sobering reading for the serious-minded.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2012
In Rights of the People (2011), Shipler explored violations of the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches. Here he examines the many ways the criminal justice system fails to live up to the principles of the Constitution. He details how the war on terrorism and the resulting Patriot Act have eroded individual rights and led to suspects designated enemy combatants being denied access to the courts. On a more local level, he details how police and prosecutors who rely on questionable evidence and coerced confessions have also eroded rights and damaged confidence in the justice system. He warns that lack of attention and sympathy for the current victims of curtailed rights puts the entire justice system at risk for all of us. He begins by looking at the right against self-incrimination from the perspective of torturers, from Chicago police to CIA agents. He goes on to examine violations of rights to counsel and a speedy trial and the arrest and indefinite incarceration of undocumented immigrants held for deportation. An eye-opening and troubling look at failures in the criminal justice system that put at risk the rights of all citizens.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)