Brown, having been similarly harassed by the cops countless times before, refuses to provide ID and accept a summons, and is consequently brought into court. Waldorf’s casual contempt for his defendants (and tacit approval of the sloppy policing dragnet that puts them at his mercy) is voiced at the conclusion of a grimly comic vignette worthy of Joseph Heller - one of many deeply reported, highly compelling mini-narratives of dysfunction within the criminal justice system that make “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap” as infuriating as it is impossible to put down.Ī 35-year-old black man named Andrew Brown is arrested for “obstructing pedestrian traffic” in Bedford-Stuyvesant. We never learn his name, but Taibbi calls him Waldorf because he resembles the grouchy old balcony heckler on “The Muppet Show.” Rather, please turn your attention to the person whom Matt Taibbi, in his ambitious new book documenting America’s unequal administration of justice to rich and poor, quotes saying them: a private attorney hired by New York State to defend low-income people in criminal court. “Low-class people do low-class things.” What’s notable in this reflexive dismissal of those with modest means are not the words themselves.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |