Chicago's a good place to follow crime and punishment. My shelf includes not only Chicago mystery authors but also nonfiction courthouse stories from Steve Bogira and John Conroy. So I'm surprised I missed Kevin Davis' 2007 book on public defenders till we both wound up working at the same place. Davis displays a novelist's pacing in following an accused cop killer's case when Illinois' death penalty was still in force. Cook County provides a colorful cast in the elite squad known as the public defender's Murder Task Force. In many of their cases a life sentence was a victory. Davis unravels the reasons they kept plugging away.

5343. Defending the Damned Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office, by Kevin Davis (read 14 Jan 2016) This 2007 book tells of the work of the public defender's office in Chicago. Much of the book tells of the defense afforded to Aloysius Oliver, who is accused of killing a policeman. One stands in admiration of the hard work the public defender goes through to see that the accused gets a fair trial. The work of the defenders is especially draining since the State was seeking to imitate killers by killing the accused. The book details the effort of the State to do unto the accused what they say the accused did--kill. I found the book riveting at times and also appalling. I conclude that a public defender who works in a state which does not seek to kill, such as Iowa, should be grateful, and could not help but agree with Pope Francis that the death penalty should be abolished. ( )

Welcome to Murder Task Force, the elite division of the Chicago office of public defenders. Attorneys on this force take on the city's worst cases as clients--serial killers, couples who kill their babies, teenagers who kill cops. And they all believe strongly in what they're doing.

Television almost never portrays PDs accurately; they're either inundated with too many cases or incompetent or both. But Davis shows that the attorneys with the Murder Task Force are highly trained and passionate about their jobs. They're fighters. They kind of have to be, since everyone, sometimes even their own clients, roil with hatred for them. As for the public, it has nothing but contempt for them.

While Davis offers details of several different cases (he opens with a riveting, if nauseating, one), he mainly follows the case of Aloysius Oliver, a then-teenager accused of killing Chicago cop Eric Lee. Not only did Davis show the inner workings of the case, he balanced the views of Lee's family and Oliver's family nicely. I think he also showed how easy it is for everyone--politicians, the public, the victim's family--to crowd cases with their own agendas. At one point, then-Mayor Daley encouraged a jury to give Oliver the death penalty, even though the jury was supposed to be sequestered from all news media of the case. Well, wink wink nod nod, I guess.

Davis also shows the inner workings of the public defender's office and just how taxing the job can be on those who work in it. Two jobs I had no idea existed: investigators and mitigators for the defense. Investigators are employed to see just how well the stories of the case shake out, and mitigators piece together facts and stories of the perp's lives in order to mitigate a sentence. When the death penalty was in effect in Illinois, mitigators were used to help perps get life instead of the death penalty.

All in all, an engaging, informative read. ( )

An excellent book on the criminal justice system. Read it along with Courtroom 302 to get a really good picture of how the criminal courts are working (or not working). The author is careful to be objective about the defendants, who generally have done horrific things. The heroes of the book are the public defenders, who take these cases and push them as hard as they can. If there is a "bad guy" in the book, it is the death penalty, which has dramatically increased the stakes for both sides. Meanwhile, mistaken death sentences have undermined the credibility of the system. Smith's book is not a screed against the death penalty, but rather is a wonderful description of unusual and courageous people who do an almost unthinkably difficult job. ( )

The subtitle tells what this is about: "Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office," and it is utterly fascinating. It has an amazing woman at the center of it - what a character! - who pulls out all the stops to defend some truly awful people, as well as some who aren't. The writer has done an amazing job of reporting the story so it reads like a novel, but never straying from good journalism into making things up. I had never heard of this book, but I bumped into when searching for something else and am really glad I did. It's not for the faint of heart. Some of the crimes that go through that courthouse make the most gruesome mystery pale in comparison. But through it all the message is clear that we owe PDs a debt of gratitude for taking on a job that most people despise and giving it their best regardless of what they think of their clients.

I wonder if the author will turn to crime fiction - three of the five blurbs on the cover are from crime fiction authors. If he does, I'm there. ( )