My name is Mandy Matney. We all want to drink from the same cup of justice and it starts with learning about our legal system.

With tales from the newsroom and the courtroom, journalist Liz Farrell, attorney Eric Bland and I invite you to gain knowledge, insights, and tools to hold public agencies and officials accountable.

Together, our hosts create a fire lit to expose the truth wherever it leads.

Search for Cup of Justice wherever you get your podcast or visit Cup of Justice

pod.com.

This is a CBC podcast. It's July 2017,

July 2017, and I'm standing on a muddy embankment

next to an old part of the Mississippi River

that formed some time over the past few millennia.

What kind of swallows are those?

I think they might be banks' swallows.

Really?

I'm here with my 17 year old son Owen who's been to Mississippi with me many times over the years but never to this spot.

We've just come from picking wildflowers up on the levy, the engineered

Anaconda hump of earth that protects the land along the river from flooding.

That's a nice one. where'd you get that one? Dead-end riverbends like this

are called oxbows and they form over time as rivers meander, their overwhelming force of flow and volume,

causing new paths and cutting off older ones.

The Mississippi River reaches as far north as the border with Canada snaking from Minnesota all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Today here, a place now called Parker's Landing.

It's sunny with cicadas and the waters green and swampy and impenetrable.

There are some open boats with ancient outboards floating at makeshift docks or repurposed logs.

...