A nomadic lawyer because of frequent death threats, Sebastian Rudd takes on a case involving a brain-damaged young man accused of murdering two little girls.

Attorney and journalist Amy Bach spent eight-years investigating the widespread courtroom failures that each day upend lives across America. What she found was an assembly-line approach to justice: a system that rewards mediocre advocacy, bypasses due process, and shortchanges both defendants and victims to keep the court calendar moving. Here is the public defender who pleads most of his clients guilty with scant knowledge about their circumstances;...