Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People's Justice

Karen Houppert

Aug. 2010 · New Press, The

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The Washington Post reporter delivers a groundbreaking investigation into the nation’s crisis of indigent defense—“a hugely important book” (New York Law Journal).
 
A Nieman Report’s Top Ten Investigative Journalism Books of 2013
 
First published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Gideon v. Wainwright, which guaranteed all criminal defendants the right to legal counsel, Chasing Gideon offers a personal journey through our systemic failure to fulfill this basic constitutional right. Written in the tradition of Anthony Lewis’s landmark work Gideon’s Trumpet, it focuses on the stories of four defendants in four states—Washington, Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia—that are emblematic of nationwide problems. Revealing and disturbing, it is “a book of nightmares” because it shows that the “‘justice system’ that too often produces the exact opposite of what its name suggests, particularly for its most vulnerable constituents” (The Miami Herald).
 
Following its publication, Chasing Gideon became an integral part of a growing national conversation about how to reform indigent defense in America and inspired an HBO documentary as well as the resource website GideonAt50.org.
 
“Chasing Gideon is a wonderful book, its human stories gripping, its insight into how our law is made profound.” —Anthony Lewis, author of Gideon’s Trumpet

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Karen Houppert was a contributing writer at the Washington Post Magazine for many years. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Newsday, the New York Times, Mother Jones, the Village Voice, Salon, and many other publications. She is the author of two other books: Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military—for Better or Worse and The Curse: Confronting the Last Taboo, Menstruation. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she teaches in the MA in Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University and is on the journalism faculty of Morgan State University.