Allen Goodman saw it all during his years as a public defender. In Everyone Against Us: Public Defenders and the Making of American Justice, the lawyer describes a system stacked against not only the accused but also the attorneys who represent them. From 1996 to 2004, he worked in the Cook County public defender’s office, primarily in Skokie, where he handled criminal cases from Chicago’s North and West Sides. He later joined a private firm and then opened his own practice. Though Goodman (who practiced law as Allen Gutterman, using the surname of his adoptive parents) left Chicago more than a decade ago and now lives in Israel, the flawed legal system he portrays feels as familiar as ever.
Chris Rock once had a riff about injustice in America that included a punch line about the charade of police reading detainees the Miranda warnings. He suggested how the proper wording should go: If you can’t afford to hire an attorney, then the government will happily provide you with the worst lawyer on earth. It stung.
The reason it stung was because it was as true as a generalization can be, which is to say it wasn’t factually accurate but it centered on an element of common experience. We had many lawyers in the public defender’s office who were not interested in reading constant legal updates, who were not invested in delving into intricate details about procedures or even case facts. We had plenty who were there because it’s where the flotsam of lawyers washes up.
Being a public defender may be unrewarding in terms of both pay and respect, but it is a noble calling. Protection of the accused isn’t charity. It’s necessary because of the possibility of mistakes, farcical legal processes, and the weaponization of false accusations. For public defenders, it’s a special badge of American pride to work for the government and against the government at the same time. We work to try to counteract state abuses; that’s our contribution.
It’s typically more than a month after an arrest before your first meeting with a client. The practical effect is that the defendant has been in the Cook County Jail for an extended stretch. It’s a sprawling place rife with gang pressures, sadistic violence, punitive procedures, retrenched health care, sordid food, constant noise and stench, systemic sleep deprivation from the constant glare of fluorescent lights, and all the other attendant features of urban incarceration. This is why the bond system is a form of
