Defending the Damned
Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office
CHAPTER ONE
Killer Defense
"The odds," Assistant Public Defender Marijane Placek said as she gathered her files for a morning court hearing, "are completely stacked up against us."
It was just after nine on a brilliant blue Tuesday morning in late April 2003, unusually pleasant and warm for Chicago this early in spring. Outside the massive, gray stone Cook County courthouse at Twenty-sixth Street and California Avenue, a stream of government employees, cops, corrections officers, lawyers, social workers, investigators, jurors, witnesses, felons, petty crooks, drug addicts, gangbangers -- the guilty and the innocent -- all converged for another day in the administration of justice. Buses disgorged clusters of people out fro ... read full excerpt from Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office ebook