Everyone Against Us

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 blackmail. Believe me, most people who serve time in the Cook County Jail are ready to do whatever it takes to get out. They will take pleas, forgo investigations, agree to draconian probationary conditions, waive procedural rights, even acquiesce to prison sentences just to “get out of county.”

Sometimes the first meeting with a client is oddly rote and perfunctory, like when the defendant is a frequent flier who wants to plead out a simple case. There is a vast underclass of people who seem accustomed to being arrested, and both they and many courthouse apparatchiks become numb to the revolving door and inevitability of being in the system. Allegations of racism and classism gain a lot of traction in this situation, especially when you see who comes through the door and the mechanized way they are processed for what the staff calls “disposal.”

Other times the clients are people who have never been arrested before, who have no idea what they’re being charged with, even after a month in jail, or who have been charged with extremely serious offenses. They can be scared, ashamed, angry, hurt. They are entering the worst experience of their lives — maybe the defining experience of their lives — and their PD might be the first somewhat friendly person they can talk to for help. Even so, to them you represent “the system.” We try to establish trust by being part psychologist, part medic, part cleric.

The most intense pressure that ate at me as a criminal defense attorney came from the split in reality that occurred depending on whether I won or lost a trial. It strains every boundary of expression to attempt to describe the difference between incarceration and freedom, and it defies all reason to consider just how thin the line can be. Especially if I thought I should win, defeat was devastating. Crying on the floor of the lockup is not a good look for any lawyer, but I’ve been there, and I can promise you I’m not alone.

Most cases simply never get to any kind of hearing or trial due to plea agreements. Among the cases that do, there is an old unwritten rule floating around Cook County defense practitioners: Take winners to a bench, take losers to a jury. “Heaters” — cases with intense public pressure — usually have to go to juries. And there are times when judges will tell the defense attorney, either point-blank or via hints, that he or she will not get a good outcome from them and should not try a bench trial.

The inverse is known as a “jury tax.” I’ve also heard it referred to as the “asshole penalty.” Judges have been known to sentence defendants more harshly after a jury loss than they would have if the defendant pleaded guilty.

Public defenders don’t get the limitless resources and an international array of specialist agencies like the prosecution does. In the public defender’s office, most of us work with a single investigator who is shared with other attorneys.

My right-hand man was a guy from the Far South Side who had extensive experience on both sides of the law. Unfortunately, he did not actually have a complete right hand. Ralph lost four fingers — but not his thumb — in an industrial accident in the 1970s when he worked at the Sun-Times printing plant. Surgeries that initially sewed his hand to his stomach to regenerate his skin had left him with a stump of doughy folds pulled over and sealed shut. The irregular hairs and patchy circulation gave the whole thing a look somewhat like a large, dry, gelatinous turkey drumstick with a single opposable digit. He took great joy in thrusting that thing out at introductions, offering what he could as his form of handshake.

For a very high portion of PD investigations, it’s absolutely critical to just go check. Check the details of the narrative that the police have laid out, and check what the defendant tells you. Go to the scene and observe the physical layout to view sightlines, lighting, cameras, distances, and see what else isn’t in the reports. People might be surprised to learn just how often the defense finds some evidence to suggest that the police “clean up” their cases with exaggerations, simplifications, convenient omissions, and outright lies.

It strains every boundary of expression to attempt to describe the difference between incarceration and freedom, and it defies all reason to consider just how thin the line can be. Especially if I thought I should win, defeat was devastating.

In 1997, Ralph and I needed to visit the scene of an arrest in the Cabrini-Green public housing project for a client. It was a drug case of a somewhat serious variety — possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, or “PCS w/I” — that involved a substantial amount of cocaine. The defendant was looking at serious time, and since he was accused of dealing out of a Chicago Housing Authority apartment, his family faced being evicted too.

As a way around the constitutional requirement that they get warrants to search houses, the police were claiming that they were simply walking down the hallway when they looked in the window of our client’s apartment and saw him weighing and packaging cocaine in plain view. They also claimed that he was doing this with his apartment door open, so they hadn’t needed a forced entry.

Our client went by the street name “Deuce.” He didn’t deny he was packaging cocaine at his kitchen table, but he insisted that he was not doing it brazenly in the open; that not only had he covered his windows with taped-up sheets and garbage bags, but he had closed and locked his door, as you might expect for someone engaged in illegal activities.

We went to the CHA management offices, where they had records of giving Deuce citations for repeatedly covering up windows. We also talked to the maintenance man who had been assigned to repair Deuce’s door after his arrest. The maintenance crew had taken pictures that clearly showed damage to the doorjamb, backing up Deuce’s claim that the door had been kicked in.

We proved that the search and arrest were done in violation of the Constitution, and so the evidence collected during the arrest could not be used at trial. The charges had to be dropped.

When it comes to plea deals, the holy grail is to keep a clean record for your client by getting the charges dropped in exchange for something nonjudicial like an apology, restitution, classes, or some offsetting charity act. If that’s out of reach, the next best thing is to avoid a felony conviction by getting those charges reduced to a misdemeanor.

For many years illegal gun possession in Illinois was a misdemeanor. As gun crimes began to escalate and garner more media and political attention, new felony enhancements were created. When those didn’t end the violence plaguing Chicago, a new strategy was devised: an unwritten policy in the state’s attorney’s office to forbid any plea deals that reduced felonies to misdemeanors, a practice previously used in cases deemed worthy of discretionary mercy.

Charges for gun possession in Chicago are labeled as “unlawful use of a weapon,” or UUWs. Just after this unwritten policy took effect, I had a UUW client who was a 20-year-old Black kid from the Southwest Side. He’d never been in trouble before and was not in a gang. He had a grandmother who lived on the North Side, more than an hour’s ride on the CTA. She was very ill and had a doctor’s appointment that she could not get to by herself, so my client took the bus to her house in order to take her the next morning.

Grandma lived in a gang-infested neighborhood. And when the kid got off the bus, he was immediately confronted by a small group of bangers demanding to know his affiliation: “Rep yo set!” It was about four blocks from the bus stop to his grandmother’s house, and although he tried to ignore the bangers at first and then denied any gang ties when that didn’t work, they followed him, shouting threats.

One of them had a pit bull and unleashed it. The animal clenched onto the kid’s arm, dragging him to the ground. As he kicked and screamed in pain, he was bitten on the arm, hand, and near his hip. He managed to shake off the dog before the guys running behind could catch up. He got up and stumbled forward, dodging between parked cars and signposts while leaving a trail of blood.

The guys chased him up the stoop of his grandma’s house, where he barreled through the door. Grandma kept a small revolver in the front hall closet. Feeling the need for his own show of force, my client grabbed the gun and went back outside, intending to shoot the dog. Approaching sirens convinced the chasers to grab the animal and retreat, but the kid waved the pistol while shouting a few choice warnings of his own.