Public Defenders

Now that is a thankless job. [Link]

Journalist Kevin Davis’ book Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago’s Cook County Public Defender’s Office should make readers reconsider the contempt routinely heaped on public defenders. Perhaps, given recent headlines, there’s actually some merit to the public defender’s familiar complaints about inadequate funding, heavy caseloads, and prosecutorial misconduct.

Davis spent the better part of a year shadowing the lawyers on Chicago’s Murder Task Force, the elite office where the city’s best public defenders eventually end up, representing defendants in high-profile homicide cases. Davis writes in the preface that he wants to get beyond what public defenders sometimes call “the Cocktail Party Question,” namely, “How can you defend those people?” He introduces his discussions of that question with the Murder Task Force lawyers by describing some gruesome homicides committed by people the task force has defended. In one particularly horrifying example, the young parents Joan Tribblet and Everette Johnson choked their infant girl to death to stop her from crying and then, to cover up the crime, cut her body into small pieces, breaded and fried them, and fed them to alley dogs. Task force lawyers were successful in sparing both from the death penalty. In another case, a man sexually assaulted a little girl with a shotgun, then fired the weapon during the act.

So how can they defend those people? Davis finds a wide range of motives. Some public defenders are building careers, and value the trial experience they can get right out of law school. Some fight simply out of opposition to the death penalty. Others subscribe to a broader, vaguer notion of representing the powerless against the powerful. Some just relish the challenge.

But most rightly see themselves as an indispensable part of a fair criminal justice system.

Their level of funding should probably be closer to that of the prosecution's than it is.