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 front, and at the corner near the Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits. Waves of others marched across California Avenue from the five-story parking garage, some stopping at the stainless steel paneled lunch truck for coffee and pastries.
"Everybody saw him do it," Placek continued. She was telling me about ... read full excerpt from: Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office ebook
