In the opening pages of "Ordinary Justice: How America Holds Court," Amy Bach recounts the story of a Texas defense lawyer, Joe Frank Cannon, who literally fell asleep during the trial of his client, Calvin Burdine.

After being convicted of murder for shooting a man during a convenience-store robbery, Burdine was sentenced to death. But in a sadly comical turn of events, a panel of federal appellate judges vigorously debated whether Burdine's attorney had violated the Constitution by repeatedly falling asleep, chin-to-chest, during his client's trial.

Burdine's death sentence was overturned and he was granted a new trial. But the real question, Bach says, is how did a defense lawyer sleep through a murder trial without a single objection from the judge, prosecutor, jurors, or courtroom witnesses?

After eight years of research, Bach found that such cases are not extraordinary. Instead, she says, they occur with disturbing regularity in courtrooms across the country, and require surprisingly little effort to find.

Bach, who lives in Rochester, is a bit frenzied right now. The buzz about Ordinary Justice following its September release has kicked her schedule into high gear. She will be giving a lecture that is open to the public at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, January 7, at the Pittsford Public Library.

In a phone interview, Bach said she found that the failures of the criminal justice system are not exclusively about overworked public defenders or so-called "show trials" - high-profile trials

Rather, she said, a breakdown in the ability to responsibly carry out even the most mundane and routine tasks integral to a criminal trial is what's threatening the justice system.

"The point is that it takes a community of legal professionals to let a sleeping lawyer sleep," Bach said.

The American system of justice, she said, is based on an adversarial relationship.

"It's basically what you see on 'Law and Order,'" she said. "There's the hard-working prosecutor who investigates cases and would do anything to get the facts. And the defense attorney who counters those facts - and the neutral judge, who protects rights and makes hard calls in between."

Having one attorney counter the assertions of the other should create a check-and-balance.

But what has happened, Bach said, is that lawyers have stopped earnestly challenging each other - which tests the facts in a case - and it has led to a collapse of the adversary system.

"The people who get hurt are not only the people charged with crimes," she said, "but also the victims of crime."

It was while she sat in a courtroom in Greene County, Georgia, where she watched a public defender plead 48 people guilty in one day that, Bach said, she got the idea for Ordinary Justice.

The most basic information wasn't being explained to the defendants, she said, and the public defender didn't seem interested in their cases. The public defender was what Bach calls the quintessential "meet 'em, greet ‘em, and plead ‘em lawyer," meeting his clients only minutes before they stood before the judge.

"In court it was obvious that something was going terribly wrong," she said. "People would start to cry and repeatedly say they didn't know they were going to jail, and they didn't know what was happening to them."

Bach later talked with the public defender, prosecutor, and judge, asking them how they thought things went that day. Specifically, she wanted to know if they thought anything went wrong. They all said basically the same thing, she said, which was that they thought things went fine.

"But the prosecutor said something that I will never forget," Bach said. "He said, ‘No one can ever say that they didn't get their day in court.' And what I realized was that these are smart, hard-working professionals who could no longer see that they fell far afield from what they were supposed to be doing. Mistakes had become routine, and the people who worked in the system could no longer see their mistakes."

In a case illustrating what can happen to victims, Bach said, a prosecutor in Quitman County, Mississippi, was under-prosecuting cases - not bringing cases to trial. There were many people in the county who knew this, Bach said, but didn't do anything about it.

"I met a woman who had been beaten up by her boyfriend under a bridge with a tire iron while her daughter and niece watched," Bach said.

Despite evidence left at the scene and the victim's hospitalization, the prosecutor never took the case to trial, she said. The same prosecutor had not taken a domestic violence case to trial in more than 20 years, Bach said.

While the breakdown of the adversary system of justice is leading to its failure, Bach said, the principal enabler to what she calls "slack justice" is cronyism. The professionals involved are more invested in their relationships to each other, she said, than their jobs. And when professional alliances trump adversarial relationships, ordinary justice takes over.

Bach tells the story of Thomas Breen, a well-known Chicago lawyer who was, in the early 1970's, a young prosecutor on a high-profile case involving the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl. Two young black boys were convicted for the crime, spending most of their lives in prison.

Years later, however, Breen, now a defense attorney, came forward and said that he could have made a mistake. Were he still a prosecutor, the pressure to keep silent might have been too great.

Breen sums up Bach's point about cronyism and professional alliances best: "It's hard to rock the boat when you're in the boat."

After spending more than 20 years in prison, the boys were exonerated and released.

When one person in the system stops doing his or her job, it makes it easier for someone else in another part of the system to stop, as well, Bach said. The issue becomes: When do you stand up?

"When do you have a moral moment and say, 'This can not go on because it's not fair to the people we are supposed to be protecting," Bach said.

The second factor in the breakdown of the justice system is a lack of monitoring and oversight, Bach said. Most residents of Monroe County would probably be able to find the number of cases a prosecutor has brought to trial and won. It's more difficult to find out how many cases weren't brought to trial, and precisely why.

"The amazing thing is there are 47-million people in this country who have criminal records," Bach said. "That's one quarter of the adult population. Can you imagine leaving something that affects one quarter of our adult population unmonitored? We don't do that for our schools, for our hospitals, or for our water supply. Why do we do it for our courts?"