Defending The Damned: A PD Stuff Review

Kevin Davis, author of Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago’s Cook County Public Defender’s Office, is next week’s guest on Monday Musings.

The timing is perfect: Defending the Damned, which goes inside the Cook County PD Murder Task Force, goes on sale Tuesday (go to Amazon.com).

Davis was kind enough to get me an advance copy, so I’ve decided to write a review:

Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago’s Cook County Public Defender’s Office focuses primarily on the office’s Murder Task Force, an elite group of indigent defenders and support staff that takes on the unenviable task of defending the accused in Chicago’s overwhelming number of homicide cases. The book is built around one case in particular, a cop killing, and the lead attorney on the case, Marijane Placek. Its author, Kevin Davis, is an accomplished journalist, and he spent more than two years on this project, including practically living at the MTF, where, he has said, nothing was off the record.

The research and writing of the book are excellent. Not only has Davis expertly captured the overall tone of what he learned during his immersion into the MTF environment, he also skillfully weaves in the appropriate back stories and the history of indigent defense in the Chicago area. His inclusion of Placek’s supporting cast adds a depth of understanding to the entire process. (Not to dismiss the people around Placek, but clearly she is a woman who commands attention.)

It is a credit to Davis that his presence at MTF seems to have been such that those being observed got used to the idea of him being there and they clearly opened up. After all, you can only suck in your gut for so long. Eventually everybody seems to have let it all hang out.

And that is where things get a little sticky.

By agreeing to this project, the attorneys and others in the MTF have made themselves the face of public defenders across the country. On the plus side, there are no “public pretenders” here. This is an elite squad, the best of the best. Nobody could read this book and view public defenders as anything less than real attorneys and more. They are highly skilled, experienced and passionate.

There is, of course, a flip side: I kept imagining the reactions of readers unfamiliar with this world.

First, there is the macabre sense of humor.

Everybody who has been involved in indigent defense for more than a couple of weeks (or prosecution or law enforcement or social services or any number of other jobs) knows the value of joking about things that in polite society are simply unspeakable. One of my favorite books, David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, starts with Baltimore homicide detectives joking that a bullet hole in the head of a victim that is oozing blood and brain matter is just a slow leak that can be patched with a bicycle tire repair kit. Tell that joke around the table at a neighborhood dinner party and you put people off their feed.

Some of the jokes, and some of the offhand comments, made by the people in Defending the Damned are right up there. Although Davis is careful to explain the need for the joking, the topics being joked about are themselves truly unspeakable. What the couple did to their infant daughter after accidentally killing her, for example, is not something you’ll want to bring up to anybody outside the office. Turning it into a joke is understandable to those of us in the business, but it will freak other people out.

Then there is the behind-the-scenes look at what goes into defending the damned. That is, of course, the main focus of the book, and Davis does an excellent job with his subject. But seeing how the sausage is made doesn’t usually help anybody appreciate sausage. No doubt some people reading the book will miss the honorable nature of the job and instead see callous anarchists willing to do and say almost anything to thwart Justice and The American Way.

Ultimately, that’s not because of the book or the people it examines, but because too many people don’t buy the underlying premise: that when the Government wants to lock somebody up for the rest of their natural lives, or to kill them, somebody has to ensure justice is in fact done. It is tempting to hope that everybody who reads the book will be proud that we live in a country where such zealous advocacy is guaranteed by the Constitution, no matter how damned the accused may be.

Of course, that dream will not be met. Although Defending the Damned examines the question of actual innocence, most of the people being defended are guilty as charged. Many of them are raw, mean, sociopathic killers you wouldn’t want to meet anywhere, and the thought of them getting their day in court, much less a fair trial, simply doesn’t sit well with a lot of people.

It strikes me that the book’s title could just as easily be talking about the defenders: they are, to be sure, damned nearly as often as the people they defend. And this book does its best to defend them and their work, by showing them as real and flawed human beings. Davis has taken great pains to capture the humanity of, as well as the human cost to, these people. And in the end that is the value of the book. It is like a mitigation presentation, where the goal is to humanize the client to a jury that is about to decide the client’s fate.

All we can do now is await the verdict.