Everyone Against Us – Chicago Magazine

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Everyone Against Us

In this exclusive adaptation of his new book, a former Cook County public defender describes what it’s like advocating for the accused — and recounts the injustices he witnessed.

By Allen Goodman

Illustrations by Stephanie Shafer

April 11, 2023, 6:00 am

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,...