Woodson Maher is neither an attorney nor a law-enforcement officer. He has never sat on a jury nor spent much time learning living-room law from the likes of Perry Mason, Judge Faith, or Andy Griffith.
None of that matters in Curious Crimes. What matters is that Maher wrote this book based on his own experience dealing with the vagaries and vexations of a criminal justice system that is anything but blind, and seemingly tone deaf and downright dumb.
Maher, a longtime marketing professional, recent public school teacher in Memphis, and author of Margin of Error, a 2017 book that shines light on the civil rights issue of standardized testing in public schools, this time takes on the United States' criminal justice system.
Maher openly shares his own case of how he was charged with driving drunk in an isolated, West Tennessee community. What ensued was a bizarre case of stereotypical small-town, kangaroo-court 'justice' featuring a clueless defense attorney and a case that was at first dismissed only to be resurrected and prosecuted by an elected district attorney and an accommodating judge.
As a result, Maher's professional career was effectively terminated. Only later did he also discover a court error in which his conviction and sentencing dates had been incorrectly recorded. It was a bone-headed error that for years kept showing up in background checks at the most inopportune times, such as when Maher was interviewing for a jobs or seeking rental housing.
Curious Crimes isn't just about Maher's drunk-driving case--It's also a primer of sorts, offering a brief history of criminal justice from biblical times through the early 21st century. This expose on lawfulness shares insights into boards of responsibility and the sway of justice among the races. His open record requests provide evidence that something is definitely wrong with America's current, rigged system of democracy.
Maher also covers everything you want, and need, to know about the fallacies and subtleties of how drunk driving laws have evolved and how they are administered, to all that is frightening and unforgiving about background checks, to the corruption and mismanagement of private, for-profit prisons.
In Curious Crimes, Maher doesn't shine a spotlight from 30,000 feet while examining and expounding on how criminal justice works (or malfunctions). Instead, he reports from the front lines, utilizing open-records requests while sharing his own experiences dealing with the baffling, troubling world of law and order. Included here is his experience with a head-scratching DUI charge straight out of The Dukes of Hazzard.
Among the topics Maher covers in Curious Crimes:
- An historical overview and analysis of legal ethics that begins with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and goes through the early 21st century, where a decades-old "War on Drugs" continues to wreak prejudicial chaos.
- How the U.S. leads the world in incarceration rates, accounting for only about 5 percent of the world's population yet 25 percent of the its prison population.
- How antiquated DUI/DWI laws still fall well short of addressing other types of distracted driving every bit as dangerous as boozing and taking the wheel.
- Corruption and mistreatment of prisoners inside private, for-profit prisons, which burn through billions in taxpayer dollars while remaining protected from public scrutiny.
- A look at how boards of responsibility really operate, seemingly more concerned with protecting their own vs. serving the citizenry.
- Why everyone in America should be as adamant in checking their criminal history as they are their credit history; you never know what might be erroneously lurking on your paper trail.
