Emily Galvin Almanza — The Price of Mercy (DC)
Public defender and co-founder of Partners for Justice exposes the systemic failures inside criminal courts that no one with power wants to see.
Why we picked this
Galvin Almanza writes from inside the system, not about it from a distance. Her account of what criminal courts actually do is precise and damning.
Emily Galvin Almanza spent years as a public defender before co-founding Partners for Justice, an organization that embeds legal advocates alongside social workers in public defense offices. Her book “The Price of Mercy” draws on those years to document what the criminal justice system looks like from the inside — the systemic failures, the impossible caseloads, the ways the system consistently punishes poverty.
Galvin Almanza is not writing a policy report. The book is grounded in specific cases, specific clients, and specific moments of institutional failure. That specificity is what gives it force. She makes visible the gap between how the system presents itself and what it actually does to the people who move through it.
The talk will be open to audience questions. This is a conversation about criminal justice that goes beyond familiar talking points into the daily mechanics of a system that most people encounter only as defendants or jurors, if at all.