Book 45: Badlands by Cynthia Reeves. Linked tweet pretty much says it all.
Book 46: Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur. See below.
Book 47: Where the Water Goes by David Owen. Water rights are weird, but necessary. A decent chunk of the country's land is served by the Colorado River basin. The book tells how.
Book 48: Adnan's Story by Rabia Chaudry.
Like many, I became aware of Adnan's story through the podcast Serial. If you became interested in Adnan's case, this is definitely a book for you. There is far more detail and history in this book than they were able to put into Serial and it blows apart the notion that there's any real justice in this case. Combined with reading Assata immediately before, it has become clear to me that our law enforcement, our courts, our prosecutors and our system of imprisonment is broken. Convictions are pursued with more fervor than the truth; and when powerful people have an agenda, they will ruin lives in pursuit of that agenda.
In the case of Adnan Syed, representation initially did not pursue an alibi. When the perfect alibi witness took the stand after the initial trial, the State of Maryland still deemed Adnan guilty beyond reasonable doubt. They had their conviction, they'd be damned if they'd let a technicality like an alibi get in the way of keeping it.
In the case of Assata Shakur, trumped up charge after trumped up charge kept her in prison without a conviction for years upon years of her life. Immediately after being released from one jurisdiction because she was found innocent or had charges dropped, some other jurisdiction somewhere was ready to put her behind bars to start the whole charade over. It took a case where the judge cut off funding for her expert witnesses mid-trial to finally get a conviction.
Adnan Syed is still in prison, approaching 20 years for a crime where he has an alibi. Assata Shakur fled to Cuba and still has a $2M bounty on her head. These are just two cases in which the system failed initially and continues to fail. There are many more (West Memphis Three, Emmett Till, etc) and more come up everyday that don't get book deals. I once heard Ta-Nahisi Coates say he didn't know enough about ending prisons to know if it's a good idea, but that he's as open to it now as he's ever been. I find myself increasingly feeling the same about our criminally unjust criminal justice system.
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