English in Australia and New Zealand: An Introduction to Its History, Structure and Use Book

I found this book fascinating. Miami defense lawyer Roy Black shares four of his cases with us, each case quite different than the others. The first is about a black 20 year old shot in an arcade by a Spanish cop. Miami goes crazy; we'll burn the city down if he is acquitted, we shall overcome etc. Roy Black wades into the furor and wins an acquittal. There are some riots but Miami doesn't burn, it is still there. The next case involves the cold blooded murder of two people by a man who is found cowering in a hole with the money he stole from the people he killed. We hear about the mental illness of the defendant and the life he had as a child and the severe beatings he was given which may have given him brain damage. Roy Black gets him acquitted. The third case involves a young man who shoots his girlfriend, leaves her body in her car at a drive through ATM. He claims it was an accident and he was so upset and he couldn't find the hospital ER and he just panicked. Roy Black gets him acquitted. The fourth case is a federal case against a Cuban banker accused of laundering drug money. Terrifying the power the federal prosecutor's office has. And all the drug dealers they give reduced sentences to in exchange for information. As Roy Black says, powerful inducement to lie. Roy Black gets him acquitted but the government goes after him again and this time won't let him hire Roy Black!
This is what Roy Black says about being a defense lawyer.
"When most people see me on the nightly news, I am striding into a courtroom beside a person who has been charged with an awful crime: murder, money laundering, rape at a historic mansion. Time and again I hear friends ask me, "How could you defend him?" Or: "Certainly he must have done something or he wouldn't have gotten in trouble, right?"
The answer is one that comes out of hard experience in the courts. Ours is an adversary system of justice. This means we determine truth through testing both sides of the story at a trial, not by means of a sixty-second news clip or a talk-radio rant or the latest CNN poll. We have INALIENABLE RIGHTS, meaning ones our government can't take away.
Rights are not self-executing. The don't exist unless you have a lawyer to enforce them. Article 125 of the Constitution of the U.S.S.R. issued by Stalin in 1936 provided that "the citizens ...are guaranteed by law a) freedom of speech b) freedom of the press c) freedom of assembly including the holding of mass meetings and d) freedom of street processions and demonstrations." But these were just so many words, because Stalin did not provide for attorneys independent of state control to speak for those rights vigorously. He did not offer his people our crucial Sixth Amendment, which allows the accused to "enjoy...the assistance of counsel for his defense." Lawyers are the ones who transform abstract rights into reality."

I recommend this book.

Upgrading my rating of this book because it is intelligent, thought provoking and stayed bright in my memory while so many other books were quickly forgotten.