Surviving Chilean Justice
A Public Choice Account of Political Persecution

When Dr. John M. Cobin defended himself in an act later confirmed by physical and forensic evidence, he could not have imagined that the Chilean justice system would imprison him for more than five years. In Surviving Chilean Justice, the public policy economist and Baptist pastor turns the analytical tools of public choice on his own ordeal, examining how prosecutors, judges, police, and bureaucrats respond to incentives rather than truth. The result is a rare book: at once a harrowing first-person account of wrongful imprisonment and a clear-eyed scholarly dissection of how state institutions manufacture and sustain injustice. Cobin, an American-born Italian citizen who has lived for years in Chile, writes with the discipline of a public-policy scholar and the moral weight of a man who lived the consequences. This is both a survivor's testimony and a lasting case study in how justice systems fail.