40 pages • 1 hour read
Crook County
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Chapter 5-ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Rethinking Gideon’s Army: Defense Attorneys in the Criminal Courts”
Chapter 5 looks at how defense attorneys at the Cook Country Courts determine the worthiness of their potential clients. It starts with a description of the courtroom lockup, where desperate defendants appear behind bulletproof glass. According to Gonzalez Van Cleve, this fishbowl environment is a key place where defense attorneys assess defendants to determine who is and isn’t worthy of zealous advocacy. Gonzalez Van Cleve explains how attorneys arrive at their assessments. Time, capital, and goodwill are in limited supply. Thus, defense attorneys, especially public defenders with high caseloads, have to determine which client deserve more attention. Repeat offenders, also called “garden variety or ordinary offenders” (161), receive less attention than clients deemed unique, who warrant slowing the process and receiving better representation. Middle-class markers trigger a better quality of representation, regardless of the defendant’s race, as evidenced by the case of Marquise Thompson, a Black man charged with unlawful use of a weapon. According to Gonzalez Van Cleve, Mr. Thompson’s saving grace were his Calvin Klein eyeglasses. Mr. Thompson had spent months in jail when he met his attorney, Sandra. Despite being stripped of all other markers of class, Sandra treated Mr. Thompson as a unique offender. Sandra introduced Gonzalez Van Cleve as a graduate student and asked Mr. Thompson for permission to have her listen to their discussion. Sandra also agreed to pursue a jury trial rather than coercing Mr. Thompson into accepting a plea deal. Finally, Sandra carefully explained courtroom norms to Mr. Thompson, engaging with him as an equal.
According to Gonzalez Van Cleve, defense attorneys rationalize their behavior using the mope construct, which allows them to view their clients as undeserving. Attorneys read their clients’ attempts to engage in their own defense as ignorance or as a move to gain prestige among their peers. These preconceived views affect how defense attorneys treat their clients. Attorneys ignore clients, give them the silent treatment, or reprimand them when they try to participate in their cases. They also pressure clients they deem undeserving into accepting plea bargains to expedite their cases, freeing up time for deserving clients, who are typically middle class. These practices, argues Gonzalez Van Cleve, make defense attorneys active participants in racialized justice. Moreover, as Gonzalez Van Cleve points out, this unequal treatment has a long-term impact on defendants. Inadequate representation means awaiting trial in jail, which can cost defendants their jobs. Lost income can, in turn, cost defendants their homes and cast them into poverty.
Conclusion Summary: “Racialized Punishment in the Courts”
In her conclusion, Gonzalez Van Cleve shifts the emphasis away from court professionals to defendants. She revisits the wall of mugshots from the start of her book, which alerted her to the problem of racialized justice as an undergraduate. For many of the defendants she interviewed, justice was synonymous with punishment. One defendant Gonzalez Van Cleve interviewed expressed concerns that the Cook County Courts would become even more secretive after she exposed its racialized culture. Gonzalez Van Cleve ends her book by stressing the risk of wrongful conviction racialized courts pose. She urges readers to visit local courts to challenge the insularity of court culture.
Chapter 5-Conclusion Analysis
Chapter 5 highlights The Intersection of Race and Class in the Criminal Justice System. Gonzalez Van Cleve addresses the ways in which defense attorneys at the Cook County Courts determine the worthiness of their clients. Attorneys classify their clients as “garden-variety” or “unique” offenders. Garden-variety offenders are overwhelmingly poor and Black. Many are repeat offenders. By contrast, unique offenders were typically middle class. Only unique offenders are deemed worthy of zealous defense. Gonzalez Van Cleve’s analysis highlights that even in an effort to seek better, more just outcomes for defendants, defense attorneys still adopt a system for assessing defendants that is imbued with racial and class bias.
As with other parts of her analysis, Gonzalez Van Cleve underscores, however, the complexity and difficulty of this issue, noting the challenges that public defenders face in their position. Gonzalez Van Cleve cites statistics to capture the pressure Cook County’s public defenders face, noting that their caseloads are well above the national average:
In 2005, for instance, the Public Defender’s Office achieved resolution (on average) in 229 felonies for each public defender—well above the nationally mandated 150 felonies per year figure. These caseload standards far exceed the annual caseloads for other notoriously busy states, including Minnesota (100–120), Arizona (100–120), and even New York (150) (159).
With large caseloads and limited resources, public defenders have to choose which clients deserve a zealous defense. Gonzalez Van Cleve compares this process to the triage system used in hospitals (158). Clothing and accessories are the most visible markers of class. How a defendant speaks also matters. One attorney described the triage process as a “careful calculus” that determines a client’s worth and the amount of capital, or street cred, that he wants to expend (158). This capital might come in the form of goodwill from other court professionals, whose cooperation he needs if he takes the case to trial. Most defendants, however, do not warrant special treatment. These garden-variety offenders, most of them Black and Latinx, all of them poor, receive subpar representation. This unequal treatment has significant repercussions. Inadequate representation means awaiting trial in jail. This, in turn, means missing days at work, possibly losing a job, and being unable to pay rent and being evicted. Even middle-class defendants can slide into poverty and homelessness in these circumstances. Importantly, defendants can suffer these consequences simply by being accused of a crime. Advocacy, argues Gonzalez Van Cleve, is critical to ending America’s two-tiered system of justice. Gonzalez concludes her book with an impassioned call to action, urging readers to “[G]o to the courts. Bear witness to what attorneys and judges do and bear witness en masse” (189).
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