Rick Tulsky, Injustice Town with Rainy Day Books

Join Rainy Day Books at Unity Temple to celebrate Injustice Town with author Rick Tulsky and journalist Peggy Lowe.

This event includes a conversation between Rick and Peggy in Unity Hall, along with an opportunity to get your book signed and personalized.

“Yet another maddening, frustrating, overwhelming, outrageous, and unbelievable story of corrupt justice in America. This one, though, is handled by Rick Tulsky, a dogged investigator, journalist, lawyer, advocate, and gifted writer.”—John Grisham, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Firm and Framed

The powerful story of a falsely imprisoned man and a sweeping indictment of a city and the criminal justice system by a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist.
When the bodies of two Black men were found sitting with a crackpipe in a parked car in a rundown section of town in 1994, it seemed just another day in Kansas City, Kansas. The swift arrest and conviction of a seventeen-year-old Black kid from a broken home raised no eyebrows either.
And yet, thirty years later, Lamonte McIntyre would prove to be the David that took down the Goliath of corruption that had long controlled the city’s power structure and enveloped the city’s justice system
But the effort to prove Lamonte’s innocence opened a Pandora’s box. Before it was over, the fight to win Lamonte’s exoneration exposed corrupt police and prosecutors, incompetent court-appointed defense lawyers, and a judge who violated ethical standards by his secret past relationship with the prosecutor, whom he favored in his rulings.
Injustice Town follows Lamonte’s case from its harrowing beginning to its triumphant end and beyond, including the legal tsunami that came in its wake, that engulfed prosecutors, attorneys, and judges. Most shockingly, the lead cop on the case was indicted by the Department of Justice for the widespread abuses he had committed years earlier on women in the Black community of Kansas City Kansas. Abuses documented by Lamonte’s team. The criminal case ended, literally, with a bang, denying Lamonte and those whom the detective hurt, the chance for them to seek their own justice.
Rick Tulsky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, goes beyond the courthouse, exposing the ways in which corruption flourished for decades in an erstwhile quiet Midwest town, a town once dedicated to justice and equality.
A lawyer by training as well as a reporter, Tulsky's narrative not only brings Lamonte's story to vivid life, it will empower cities, counties, states, and everyday citizens with a blueprint for equal justice. At a time when the federal government is abdicating its responsibility for demanding fairness and justice, it is up to states, local governments, and we the people look to ways they can act. Vivid and unforgettable, Injustice Town tells the story of one man and shows us a vision of what a better future could be.
“Among the most vicious and systemic civil rights train wrecks in an American city.”—Barry Scheck, cofounder of the Innocence Project

"A tour de force of reporting and revelation: it is the best expose of corruption I have ever read. Anybody who cares about what is happening in America should read it."—Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights and The Mosquito Bowl

Rick Tulsky began writing about abusive police and unjust court systems as a young reporter in Jackson Mississippi and that focus has defined his work ever since. Rick became a lawyer in Philadelphia and he continued exposing injustices on the staff of newspapers in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Jose. His work has won more than two dozen national awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, and he was a Pulitzer finalist two additional times. In 2011 Rick moved back to his hometown and joined the faculty of Northwestern University’s journalism school and co-founded a nonprofit newsroom, Injustice Watch in 2015. It was there that Rick first heard about Lamonte McIntyre, a story that took over his professional life. Rick lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife, Kim. They have two terrific children, Eric and Elizabeth, and one fabulous dog, Jasper.

Peggy Lowe is an investigative reporter based at KCUR, NPR in Kansas City. She’s worked at the Associated Press, The Denver Post, where she was on the team that won a Pulitzer for Columbine, The Rocky Mountain News and The Orange County Register. Lowe was the Mike Wallace Fellow for Investigative Reporting at the University of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace Fellowship in 2008-2009. Her podcast on the Golubski case, Overlooked, won top honors at Investigative Reporters and Editors and Public Media Journalists Association.

Please Note: There are no refunds for this event. If you are unable to attend, your book will be available for pickup at the shop the following day. If you are not local, we'll be happy to mail it to you. Thank you for your support!

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