The Fallacy in the Promise

Book excerpt: Taking his readers through a grueling, eighteen-year-long psycho-legal odyssey, Jabari Gravy recounts the failures of our legal justice system, from legal training to jurisprudence. He also offers a breathtaking portrayal of borderline personality disorder through his relationship with his wife. His story reveals the legal scandal of their divorce and the exploitation of mental illness by his wife and a state court system. In stunning detail, Gravy dissects, exposes, and gives a definitive and vividly dramatic account of furtive judicial abuse of authority, painting a disturbing tableau of what actually happens in our courtrooms: their underlying design, organizational values, and daily operationsillustrating how the clandestine and undocumented come to deny directly and categorically the compelling public court record. Through a revealing window on how innocent people are railroaded to injustice with loss of livelihood, liberty, and life, he inextricably entwines the African-American experience with his other material, demonstrates the ominous secret cracks in our justice system, unveils a monolithic legal culture represented by gladiatorial back-scratching court functionaries who marginalize non-dominate cultures and inflict real casualtiesboth at the micro level, on the lives of ordinary people, and at the national level as our democracy is secretively eroded. Gravy concludes that pretty paper is not justice, and demands change.