David S Rudolf

David Rudolf spent his career as a defence lawyer in North Carolina and reached a wide public when the French documentary series The Staircase followed his defence of Michael Peterson through a homicide trial and the long appeals after it. American Injustice, published in 2022, collects cases he worked and uses them to argue that the failures are structural rather than accidental: prosecutors who withhold what would help the defence, forensic evidence presented with more confidence than it can carry, and defendants whose outcome turns on what their lawyer can afford to spend on experts. He co-hosts a podcast on the same subject.