P&P Live! Russell F. Canan | Pursuing the Horizon: Stories of Justice

Pursuing the Horizon offers a collection of essays and courtroom stories from an activist, death penalty lawyer, and Washington, D.C. judge struggling to seek justice in the courtroom, in the fields where migrant farmworkers toil and in the rice paddies of Vietnam. The book explores justice in all its forms from freedom for beaten migrant farmworkers in the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan, to life itself in a death row plea for mercy before Governor George Wallace of Alabama only to witness the client killed in a botched execution in the electric chair that shocked the world. Justice from the other side of the bench looks at the challenge for a judge wrestling with the age-old quandary of whether the ends justify the means when strictly following the law would result in a miscarriage of justice.

“Russ Canan’s book is a powerful testament as to . . .how the cause of justice can only be advanced if we love mercy”—Bryan Stevenson

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Russell F. Canan served as a health aide for the East Coast Migrant Heath Project and worked in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida, trying to improve the lives of migrant farm workers. As an attorney, Judge Canan practiced criminal defense and civil litigation in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and throughout the South. In 1983, Judge Canan helped establish the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, where he represented prisoners on death row. Judge Canan was appointed to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. Judge Canan is the former Presiding Judge of the Criminal Division and chaired a committee studying wrongful convictions and proposing reforms. Judge Canan is a co-editor and contributing author to Tough Cases: Judges Tell the Stories of Some of the Hardest Decisions they've Ever Made.

Katherine Broderick is Dean Emerita and Joseph L Rauh Chair of Social Justice at the University of District of Columbia School of law.