Bad Minds / High Places

"Bad Minds, High Places" is the story of America's failed legal culture and the FBI raids on Cleveland from 2008 to the present. It portrays the foibles of American public life from Ohio to Washington State and the ethos under which its legal system operates. The book is an absorbing, non-fiction account of an attorney subjected to fraudulent charges, arrest, extradition, jail and coordinated aggression on a national basis after he published an editorial critical of a Cleveland, Ohio judge. The author forces the reader to see a new model for state judiciaries as self-serving interest groups with the most gruesome failures in jurisdictions where judges are elected and heavily politicized. "Bad MInds," is not only about individual failure on the part of one judge. It tells how politicized judges, prosecutors, attorneys and police cooperated at the state and federal level to commit serial offenses and obstruct accountability for their failures. The originality of the book is in the magnitude and irony of the failures it exposes and the uncomprehending persona of the author as a character distinct from the consensus which created the failures besetting him.