Joe Margulies- "CAST OUT"

For nearly four decades, Joseph Margulies has stood beside people accused and convicted of some of the most violent crimes imaginable. A criminal defense attorney, civil rights litigator, writer, and Professor of the Practice of Government at Cornell University, Joseph has spent his career confronting some of society’s hardest questions. He was Counsel of Record in the landmark cases Rasul v. Bush 2004, which established the right of Guantánamo detainees to challenge their detention in federal court, and Munaf v. Geren 2008 which affirmed that American citizens detained by the U.S. government could also challenge their detention. Today, we discuss Joseph’s powerful new book, Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration. This is not a book that asks us to forget the victims or erase the devastation caused by violent crime. Instead, it challenges us to confront a far more uncomfortable question: What created the person who committed these acts? Through deeply personal conversations with those behind prison walls, Joseph invites us to hear directly from the perpetrators—their childhoods, trauma, choices, regrets, accountability, and the difficult journey of confronting the lives they destroyed. Cast Out is both a cry for justice and a plea for humanity. It refuses easy answers. It asks whether punishment alone can heal a wounded society, or whether true justice also requires us to recognize the possibility of transformation. Can someone who has done terrible things ever become someone capable of doing good? Today’s conversation won’t ask you what to think. It will ask you to think. Because somewhere between the pain of the victims, the failures of our systems, and the lives of those we’ve cast aside, lies one of the most important conversations our society has yet to have.