Laura Coates

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, ”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.
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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 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...… (plus d'informations)

Perhaps the first story I have read that comes from the first person point of view of a person on the front lines of the fight for justice. As a black prosecutor for the Department of Justice, Laura Coates, is in a unique position to view cases from the perspective as a woman first and as a minority woman second. Her perspective from the inside on these often difficult cases is unique and interesting. Even though we are all aware of bias baked into the system, it is still stunning to see it documented by someone looking at it as an insider. Perhaps the only thing is missing from this is, if we know that justice is not always fair across the board, and the system has an innate bias, how do we fix it? Thank you to Netgalley for the copy in exchange for an honest review.… (plus d'informations)