Laura Coates

The pursuit of justice creates injustice

Laura Coares worked as a federal prosecutor for the Department of Justice (DOJ) in Washington for four years. As a Black woman who knew the inequities in the system especially against Black men, she began the job with the hope that she could bring more justice to the most vulnerable. She quickly learned that the system would not easily be fixed.

In her book Just Pursuit A Black Prosecutor’s Fight for Fairness, she looks at several cases in her time at show more the Justice Department. She discusses several different cases showing not only how the pursuit of justice can affect the victim negatively but the collateral damage it can have eg a man who is picked up by ICE at the court house after a 20 year-old-old deportation warrant is discovered when he agrees to testify against the man who stole his car and the Black mother who tries to have the sentences reduced on the men who killed her son because, as she tries to explain, young men do dumb things but they shouldn’t have their lives ruined because of it.

Coates accepts that being Black doesn’t necessarily mean innocence but racism has an effect on how defendants are treated as in the case of a man charged with an offence who insists that, despite having the same name as the suspect, it isn’t him. No one believes him but the ridicule he receives from everyone including the judge makes Coates decide to at least look into it especially after she learns no one seems to have seen a picture of the actual suspect. Turns out he looks nothing like the man arrested.

The story is interspersed with details of her own life as she and her husband, Dale, start a family, her fears when she is told tests show her baby might have spina bifida, and the difficulties of balancing her work with being a mother to two small children. She also tells the story of when a White colleague decides to mansplain to her about how to interrogate a Black suspect.

The cases in this book are all tragic and some are hard to very read about like the young girl testifying against her stepfather who has been sexually abusing her since prepubescence, a fact her mother was aware of, only to have the female judge find against her because of the clothes she wore to court. But they all give insights to a system that is not only complex but fallible.

Despite the subject matter, I found Just Pursuits an engossing read due in great extent to Coates’ writing style. Unlike many nonfiction books which tend to be dry often pedantic tomes meant for those who work within the system, Coates makes it more personal, recreating conversations with victims, families etc, giving the book the flow of a novel. That is not to say the book isn’t an important and serious look at the subject matter - it is that -biut one that those with little or no experience with the system can read and understand that law doesn’t always equal justice.

Thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review show less

Just Pursuit is an excellent, fast-paced memoir of Laura Coates’ career as a prosecutor. She does not sugarcoat her role and in the first chapter tells of how a man was deported because she did what she was required to do, even though he was the victim of the crime, a witness whose life she tore apart by following procedure. Much of her memoir is about how frustrating it was to work for justice in an unjust system.

She gives some fraught examples of racist abuses such as a colleague showing show more her the ropes, doing an interrogation for no purpose other than terrorizing the young man being questioned. She begins to assert herself, intervening at times. She is frustrated by the biases, the racism and misogyny such as when a rape victim is pilloried by a judge who didn’t like what the young girl was wearing.

Lauren Coates is an engaging writer and I very much enjoyed Just Pursuit as a memoir. Effective trial lawyers have to be able to tell a story clearly, engaging the jury and the judge. It pays off when they write for the public, they already know how to organize their facts and present them well. From the first page, Coates had me hooked.

As a consideration of the prosecutorial role, I appreciate that she is able to see her role critically and recognize the flaws in the system. I was disappointed, though, that she did not more directly address the fact that prosecutorial discretion is the single greatest contributor to racial disparities in incarceration. To be fair, most of those disparities are from the decisions of local and county prosecutors, not federal prosecutors, but the bias runs throughout the system. Prosecutorial decisions are such an egregious source of bias that I am disappointed she did not spend much time on it.

I enjoyed her memoir and am sad that she left the Department of Justice. After all, we need people with a strong sense of what justice could be to work for Justice and reform its practices.

I received an e-galley of Just Pursuit from the publisher through Edelweiss

Just Pursuit at Simon & Schuster
Laura Coates author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2022/03/06/just-pursuit-by-lauren-co... show less

Laura Coates, currently CNN’s Senior Legal Analyst, served as a prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice for four years, hoping to make a difference, but she realized that even with its lofty goals, “[t]he pursuit of justice creates injustice.” Through Ms. Coates’s sixteen vignettes, based on her professional experience, we are shown tragedies that demonstrate that justice is not always equal and it is certainly not colorblind. That no matter how fair you try to fight, show more ”blackness is an implicit charge in the criminal justice system.” But she also shows how womanhood and motherhood are often at odds in the justice system.

Although she “thought that the job would be an uncomplicated act of patriotism and that justice was what happened when a person was fairly tried and convicted for their crime,” Ms. Coates quickly saw the differences in how Black communities are policed, Black cases are prosecuted, Black defendants are treated differently, and Black and Brown defendants are overrepresented in the criminal justice system in general. For example, she describes the time when a white colleague took her to a holding cell to mansplain how she—a Black woman--should interrogate a Black defendant.

But the book is not only about race. Not only does Ms. Coates admit her own complicity, in addition to explaining the times she successfully bucked the system, but she also describes incidents that show how others in the system either abused their authority or were abused by it. Some examples of that include the time she was instructed by her superiors to call an undocumented witness for trial so that he could be arrested by ICE; or the time a judge victim-blamed a teenager who was sexually abused by her mother’s live-in boyfriend for years because of the way she was dressed in court.

Through these and other scenes from the courtroom Ms. Coates explores the tension between the idealism of the law and the reality of working within the parameters of our flawed legal system. Because of Ms. Coates’s fresh and flowing prose, these stories read more like a literary novel than non-fiction. show less

For four years, Coates served as a federal prosecutor for the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in the District of Columbia. This gave her an up-front view on social ills plaguing America. As the title reveals, she, herself black, wrestles at length in this book with the dynamics of race and justice in the legal system. Her analysis does not provide easy answers. Someone surely is not guilty just because he/she is black, but neither is that person automatically innocent. Justice and fairness show more lies somewhere in between, and in her portrayal, it is difficult even for the best lawyers to tell the difference.

In this book, Coates provides 16 short essays (along with an introduction and conclusion) that describe various cases she encountered as they intersect with events around her own life. The cases are deeply embroiled in the details of life and legalities. Likewise, her emotions are understandably involved with her personal life while she and her husband were starting a family. She sees race and gender as heavy, inescapable realities through which the governing system must dimly search through towards justice.

The stories she shares are profoundly tragic and can cause unease in many readers. Only those who are willing to have their eyes opened should open this book. Human nature does not come off as admirable, and errors lie not just in criminals but also in the “good people.” In the text, police, prosecutors, judges, and even the author have their actions questioned rigorously in pursuit of a better, fairer way. Coates’ pursuit of justice is admirable but arduous.

Not everything is about race; indeed, the middle of the book veers towards primarily other areas of injustice. Racial topics begin and end the book, and the author is at her best when dissecting and describing these. She tells stories about visiting rural Mississippi during the 2012 federal elections as a monitor. She talks about identifying with black defendants while also identifying with the DOJ, her employer. She wonders about the fates of her husband and children in our imperfect society. Those involved in her cases sometimes walk around rather blind to racial matters and come off as not very self-aware. Problems are readily acknowledged with no easy solutions forthcoming.

This book contains no simple narratives, just a relentless contention for justice. Obviously, those involved in the legal system can benefit from perusing this book as well as readers interested in racial matters and wider social issues. This book is serious in tone and content, and potential audiences should include only mature readers. I can only hope that other federal prosecutors approach their work with a similar seriousness that Coates pursues hers with. She readily acknowledges her own faults and tries to imbue in readers the ability to acknowledge their own, whether racial or otherwise. Rather than inspiring through lofty ideals, her narrative challenges readers to reflect on how their own actions fit in the historical arc towards justice. show less