Rights at Risk:
The Limits of Liberty in Modern America” by David K. Shipler
By Jeffrey Rosen,
“Rights at Risk” is David K. Shipler’s second book about the human stories behind the great constitutional cases that have shaped our civil liberties before and after Sept. 11, 2001. As in his first book, “The Rights of the People,” Shipler, a former chief diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, combines a journalist’s eye for detail with a sense of moral indignation about what he argues are the many ways the U.S. legal system has curtailed the rights of the accused, many of them poor and powerless minorities.
“Using legally approved tricks and lies, the detective coerces a false confession,” Shipler writes. “Hiding facts that support innocence, the prosecutor forces a dubious plea of guilt. The judge sentences for acquitted conduct, as she is allowed to do. The defense attorney for the poor, overworked because of underfunding by the state, fails to summon sufficient resources to investigate and rebut. The legal immigrant is deported with no meaningful access to constitutional rights. These intrusions are woven into the statutes and enabled by courts.”
(Knopf) - ‘Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America’ by David K. Shipler
Shipler is especially convincing about flaws in the system that led to systemic failures of justice, such as the false confessions that were identified in around 20 percent of the 271 convictions later reversed by DNA evidence of actual innocence. He tells stories like that of Martin Tankleff, a 17-year-old who falsely confessed, under police pressure, to killing his parents in their Long Island home and was released after serving 17 years of a 50-year term when new evidence of his innocence came to light. Shipler identifies a series of reforms that could deter false confessions, including forbidding the police to lie to suspects by making up evidence, forbidding subtle suggestions of leniency in exchange for confessions, barring the questioning of children without a parent or a lawyer, and videotaping interrogations from beginning to end.
There are, of course, many books about the stories behind Supreme Court cases. Shipler’s distinctive contribution is the thoroughness and originality of his reporting: By interviewing the protagonists in landmark cases, he uncovers some surprising and relevant facts. Writing about Snyder v. Phelps — the 2011 case in which the Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, held that the First Amendment protects the Westboro Baptist Church’s right to engage in hateful, homophobic protests at military funerals — Shipler tells of reaching the daughter of Fred Phelps, the church leader, while she is driving to picket one of the funerals. Shirley Phelps-Roper tells Shipler that the police often kept the protesters away from the funerals, and she wasn’t disturbed that few surviving family members would see the hateful signs because the survivors weren’t her targets. “It’s not about where we’re standing. It’s about the words,” she told Shipler. This undermines one of the central assumptions of Justice Samuel Alito’s lone dissenting opinion: that the protests could be banned as intentional infliction of emotional distress because the Phelpses “expected that [their] verbal assaults will wound the family and friends of the deceased.”
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