Devil's advocate

In 2001, 26-year-old Aloysius Oliver was charged with fatally shooting undercover Chicago police officer Eric Lee. Both the defendant and the victim had grown up within blocks of each other in the South Side neighborhood of Englewood. Oliver’s public defender was the formidable and flamboyant Marijane Placek, an attorney as well known for her love of well-tailored suits as her sharp wit, bulldog tenacity and shrewd legal expertise.

Placek takes center stage in Kevin A. Davis’s new book, Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago’s Cook County Public Defender’s Office (Atria, $25), an intimate and gripping look at the members of the Murder Task Force, a group of attorneys assigned to represent the accused who are almost inevitably bound for the death penalty or a life sentence.

Roughly 80 percent of people arrested can’t afford a lawyer, according to Davis, and end up in the hands of the public defender’s office. Defending the Damned follows the key players involved in the Oliver case, though Davis admits it was inevitable that Placek would be the most prominent.

“I wanted a case that would really illustrate how public defenders would go to the mat, a case that was draining and complex,” Davis says. “Marijane just evolved into my main character.”

While the case stretched on from 2001 to 2004, prosecutors fought for the death penalty, which, in Illinois, is nearly always granted in a case involving police fatalities. Davis came to know many of the members of all the families involved. It’s a testament to his compassion and integrity—and reporter’s acumen—that Lee’s parents and wife spoke to him at length, knowing fully well that he was writing a book about the public defenders fighting for the life of the man they considered their son’s killer.

Davis worked as a crime reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel for ten years. That led him to his first book, The Wrong Man (1996), about the wrongful conviction of John Purvis, accused of killing Susan Hamwi and her baby daughter in 1983. Purvis was eventually exonerated, but his was a classic case of police abuse of power.

“It never should have gone to trial, it was awful,” says Davis, who now teaches journalism at Loyola. “It was the injustice done to this man that was unlike anything I’d ever seen, and really opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the criminal-justice system, and really seeing how flawed it is.”

The Purvis case eventually inspired Davis to write the new book. Having spent so much time covering the police point of view, he realized how much they were able to control the message.

“I decided to take a look at another side that really remains in the shadows,” he says. “Public defenders are in the margins and kind of a joke—they’re easily stereotyped.”

It took time for Davis to gain the defenders’ trust, but he was eventually granted access to their work and lives. It allowed him to take the less traveled road of considering what a flawed justice system does to everyone whose lives are affected by cases, and the range of complexity makes this story especially engrossing.

Defending the Damned pays particular attention to the emotional toll of such trials on public defenders, many of whom burn out of the system. The stress usually results from having to internalize the shock of particularly horrific crimes. Recounting one case where a man murdered the daughter he had been raping after finding out she was pregnant, even veteran lawyer Robert Strunck confesses, “…you’ve seen them all and get used to it…but that one still scares me.”

As Davis sees it, public defenders aren’t just there to defend those who can’t afford to pay for representation. “Prisoner rights at Guantánamo, habeas corpus,” he says, “those are rights that are in danger of being eroded in our very own country, and those are the rights that public defenders are fighting for every day, whether you realize it or not.”