This excerpt is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

A central question at the center of our political moment is what happens when state power operates without meaningful accountability? We are living through a period of profound distrust in institutions, from courts to law enforcement to political leadership, and in today’s political climate,  where arguments about “law and order” often crowd out conversations about fairness, it is worth asking who bears the cost of that momentum. 

Below, I tell the story of Jannell, a Bronx public school employee charged with felony insurance fraud based largely on a mistaken date and a false prosecutorial theory.  Her case was eventually dismissed. But it took years — and in the meantime she lost her job, her stability, and nearly her life.

In a time when debates about crime, public safety, and prosecutorial authority dominate headlines, Jannell’s story — excerpted from my new book The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, A Violent System, and a Public Defenders Search for Justice — shows how easily ordinary people can be swept into the machinery of accusation. Unfortunately, this is not a unique story of sensational miscarriage of justice, it reflects routine damage inflicted by a dysfunctional “justice” system. Jannell’s story is a reminder that the system’s reach is already vast and has profound collateral consequences, even if the defendant’s case is dismissed or if they are found not guilty. 

A central question at the center of our political moment is what happens when state power operates without meaningful accountability? We are living through a period of profound distrust in institutions, from courts to law enforcement to political leadership. In today’s political climate,  where arguments about “law and order” often crowd out conversations about fairness, it is worth asking who bears the cost of that momentum. 

Below, I tell the story of Jannell, a Bronx public school employee charged with felony insurance fraud based largely on a mistaken date and a flawed prosecutorial theory.  Her case was eventually dismissed. But it took years — and in the meantime she lost her job, her stability, and nearly her life.

As debates about crime, public safety, and prosecutorial authority dominate headlines, Jannell’s story — excerpted from my new book The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, A Violent System, and a Public Defenders Search for Justice — shows how easily ordinary people can be swept into the machinery of accusation. Unfortunately, this is not a singular story of some rare-but-sensational miscarriage of justice. It reflects routine damage inflicted by a court system focused on punishment instead of safety, accuracy, or equal justice. Jannell’s story is a reminder that the system’s reach was already vast long before 2026, and bears the capacity to destroy lives even without a conviction.

If you’ve been lucky enough to never have to interact with the criminal legal system in America, you might envision a case process as something straightforward: a person gets arrested, they report to the courthouse and appear in front of a judge, they take a plea or assert their right to trial, and ultimately the case is finished with exoneration or punishment. In actuality, it’s nothing like this. It is hell, and sometimes it goes on forever. 

A few years ago in the Bronx, my client Jannell found herself navigating this web of leverage and neglect. A family support specialist with the New York Department of Education, Jannell loved her job and did it while raising three kids of her own. One morning, Jannell woke up and realized that her car was gone. She had been having trouble with the payments, so she assumed it had been repossessed. But after calling tow lots and the bank, it became clear that no one had any idea where her car was. 

She waited endlessly on hold, was bounced from department to department, and spent days trying to figure out the proper next steps. The bank told her to call a local tow lot, and the tow lot actually quoted her a price to get her car back, but she couldn’t pay it, so she decided to just try to get her belongings........

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