truepenny | Review: Davis, Defending the Damned

Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office by Kevin A. Davis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is about the Cook County Public Defender's Office Murder Task Force, i.e., the lawyers who defend indigent murder suspects. Davis interviews a number of the lawyers, who tell him stories of their worst and best cases, and he follows one case, the shooting of Officer Eric Lee, from beginning to as much of an end as it looks likely to have, which is basically a giant question mark. It's not even certain that the man convicted of Lee's murder fired the bullets that killed him. I give Davis kudos for interviewing both sides, both the prosecutor and the defense team, both the widow and the alleged murderer. And I don't know whether I think the alleged murderer is the actual killer or not.

This is also a book about ethics, and about some of the ugliest questions ethics can bring you face to face with. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty; everyone has the right to an adequate defense. Even a man who raped two little girls and then threw them out a window. Even a man who raped his own daughter and beat her to death when she got pregnant. Even a man who tortured his seven year old stepson to death over the course of several months. And of course there's the looming question of the death penalty. Not all of the Murder Task Force are against the death penalty in general; as one of them says, it's wrong when it's MY CLIENT you're trying to kill. But, as with Defending Gary, written by Gary Ridgway's defense team, the defense lawyers' view of the death penalty--of the legal process in general--is starkly different from the ordinary view, and I think this Alice through the Looking-Glass perspective is a good one to have, a good reminder that (a) the American legal process is not infallible and (b) abstract ethics are all well and good, but applying them to non-abstract people is . . . tricky.

This is a good book, but not a great one, and I've been trying to figure out what it is that didn't quite satisfy me about it. It wasn't the ambiguity of the central case; that doesn't bother me and it's not something Davis could control anyway. But I feel as if he could have dug deeper, somehow, as if there's some dimension he left unexplored. This is certainly a great piece of journalism; his coverage of the Lee case is excellent. But as a book, it just didn't quite hang together for me.

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