Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights

Written by Erwin Chemerinsky

Narrated by Perry Daniels

Library Journal - "Books and Authors to Know: Titles to Watch 2021"

Presumed Guilty reveals how the Supreme Court allows the perpetuation of racist policing by presuming that suspects, especially people of color, are guilty.

Presumed Guilty, like the bestselling The Color of Law, is a "smoking gun" of civil rights research, a troubling history that reveals how the Supreme Court enabled racist policing and sanctioned law enforcement excesses. The fact that police are nine times more likely to kill Black men than other Americans is no accident; it is the result of an elaborate body of doctrines that allow the police and courts to presume that suspects are guilty before being charged.

Demonstrating how the prodefendant Warren Court was a brief historical aberration, Erwin Chemerinsky shows how this more liberal era ended with Nixon's presidency and the ascendance of conservative justices, whose rulings have permitted stops and frisks, limited suits to reform police departments, and even abetted the use of chokeholds. Presumed Guilty concludes that an approach to policing that continues to exalt "Dirty Harry" can be transformed only by a robust court system committed to civil rights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Aug 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781696606554

Erwin Chemerinsky

Erwin Chemerinsky is the founding dean of the University of California Irvine Law School. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law School. After teaching law at DePaul College of Law, he moved to the University of Southern California, where he taught from 1983 to 2004. He frequently argued cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals in various jurisdictions and occasionally before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is well known in Los Angeles, where he helped draft a new city charter (he chaired the charter commission), issued a report on the city's police department, and commented on the O.J. Simpson trial. From 2004 to 2008 he taught at Duke University School of Law, before returning to southern California to start the law school at UCI. He is the author of Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies, a widely used law school textbook.

Reviews for Presumed Guilty

[Eric Vought · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I use Chemerinski's Constitutional Law textbook, well-highlighted and tabbed, so I expected much more from this. This is a shallow, flawed, and sometimes factually incorrect analysis that unrelentingly follows a political narrative both to misidentify and misattribute problems, thus making rational consideration of solutions improbable. This is DESPITE the fact that I very much agree that problems exist, that SCOTUS has failed to address them, and was actively hoping for a meaty discussion. I don't just set aside and walk away from books that often; I am doing so here.