Emily Galvin Almanza, Executive Director of Partners for Justice discusses her new book The Price of Mercy with Neil Chase, CEO of CalMatters. An attorney and former public defender, Almanza weaves hard data and unforgettable stories, dark humor and compelling evidence to tell us the truth about what’s really going on behind the closed doors of America’s criminal courts.

Provocative and eye-opening, The Price of Mercy lifts the curtain on the way our laws really operate and presents a path forward for true transformation of the American criminal court system. Justice, and the law itself, is not some static thing. It is something enacted together, decision by decision, in acts of inhumanity or mercy.

Almanza shows us how jails actually increase future crime, how a man could spend decades in prison because scientists mistook dog hair for his own, the perverse incentives that push prosecutors to seek convictions even when they themselves don’t want to, and how judges may decide cases differently after lunch.

She also outlines what's working too: how public defenders can improve public health and even economic mobility, and how planting more trees can reduce a neighborhood’s murder rates. But a lone defender winning a case won’t change the system. Galvin Almanza argues that we need an engaged public to confront the stark reality of our crime-generating, poverty-entrenching, health-destroying legal apparatus and rebuild it into something that can save our collective present and prevent our future from being torn apart.

The Price of Mercy publication date is February 17. Books will be available at the event and at Orinda Books.

This program is supported in part by our Program Sponsors Orchard Nursery and Friends of the Lafayette Library.

The Price of Mercy

Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation