Taking Back the Courts

A Flawed Justice System Exposed by One of America s Most Controversial and Successful Trial Lawyers.

Taking Back the Courts is a searing, thoughtful, keenly intelligent but accessible critique of America s criminal justice system, an insider s account that takes no prisoners while offering many insightful and necessary remedies.

With preface and introduction by legendary attorneys F. Lee Bailey and Gerry Spence, renowned civil rights and criminal defense lawyer author Norm Pattis blows the whistle on many of the system's maladies including:

Profiteering experts-for-hire offering flawed and deceptive science

Criminal juries have been marginalized almost to the point of irrelevance

Civil rights are too often collateral damage in prosecutorial and judicial power wars

Poor defendants have little hope for justice in a system hijacked by the wealthy

The morally bereft backroom horse trading of the plea bargaining process

Sexophrenia that has addled the brains of judges and legislators who imprison people far from evil

All manner of outrageous immunities for those who can claim to be agents of the state

Racial prejudice is rampant, we elevate the incompetent, and other travesties of justice.


Trial attorney Pattis is a provocative social philosopher writing with a pen warmed in Hell, but his case against the courts is unwaveringly wise, sober, principled, balanced, and compulsively readable. In Taking Back the Courts, We the People have a voice for American justice trial attorney Norm Pattis.