40 pages • 1 hour read
Crook County
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Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Race in Everyday Legal Practices”
Chapter 3 describes how defense attorneys adapted their practice to accommodate the racialized culture of the Cook County Courts. Seeking to understand the role of defense attorneys in racialized justice, Gonzalez Van Cleve clerked for the Public Defender’s Office to observe their actions firsthand. On her first day, she was handed a packet that included the Public Defender’s credo to advocate rigorously for the indigent. This credo contrasted starkly with the behavior she witnessed in court, where defense attorneys actively participated in the racialized culture. Gonzales Van Cleve tasked her researchers with interviewing defense attorneys about race, class, and fairness at the court. Some interviewees gave ambivalent or open-ended answers, others stressed the good intentions of court professionals. Those who admitted that bias existed blamed the system, rather than individual prosecutors or judges. Gonzales Van Cleve attributes these responses to colorblind racism, which defers blame away from individuals to avoid complicity in racialized court practices. In their view, it is the system that is racist, not the actors.
Violence plays a central role in governing court behavior. Defense attorneys are bullied, marginalized, humiliated, and punished when they openly challenge or fail to adhere to court culture by overtly advocating for their clients. Fear keeps them in line. However, defense attorneys use their knowledge of court culture to their benefit by reflecting the culture back at prosecutors and judges. For example, they typically start by situating themselves in the “us” camp, or on the same side as their courtroom colleagues. Next, they incorporate a morally respectable person into their narrative, such as a defendant’s mother, and present this person as the true beneficiary of any deal. They sometimes even feed into the narrative of the subhuman mope or openly mock their clients to garner favor with judges. As Gonzalez Can Cleve notes, by speaking the cultural language of the court, defense attorneys gain leniency for their clients. The process often involves a form of bartering, with an offer of leniency for one client resulting in a harsh sentence for the next.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Focusing on defense attorneys, Chapter 3 highlights the culture of Colorblindness in the Courts and The Role of Court Professionals in Racialized Justice. Keen to understand the role of defense attorneys in racialized justice, Gonzalez Van Cleve “changed allegiances” by going to work for the Cook County Public Defender’s Office (95). As she did in her previous field work, Gonzalez Van Cleve crafted interview questions that promoted candor in interviewees, diffusing the issue of race with the topic of class. She also fostered candor by selecting young, white female researchers to conduct the interviews. According to Gonzalez Van Cleve, “[t]here was no shortage of attorneys who wanted to explain their version of justice in the court system to a young female clerk” (96). Gonzalez Van Cleve provides the results of these interviews in tables incorporated within the chapter. Defense attorneys were reluctant to discuss racism in the court. Those who admitted that racism exists blamed the system, not individuals. As Gonzales Van Cleve notes, these responses are typical of colorblind culture, which shifts blame away from individuals, allowing them to avoid being complicit in racialized justice.
Through participant observation and interviews, including those conducted by other researchers, she determined that defense attorneys reflected the racialized culture of the court back at judges and prosecutors to gain favor for their clients. Going to work for the Public Defender’s Office changed Gonzales Van Cleve’s understanding of defense attorneys. Before this time, she viewed defense attorneys with anger and contempt for their part in racialized justice:
Some of my greatest contempt for the culture of the courts was directed at the defense attorneys […] They cowered during plea bargains. They sold out their clients with the same slurs and stereotypes that prosecutors used to denigrate mopes. Often they mocked their client’s poverty and laughed at the racist jokes in the room (93).
Over the course of her research, Gonzales Van Cleve realized that what she mistook for complicity is, in fact, strategic and that defense attorneys use their understanding of court culture to their advantage: “Public defenders were fighting dirty. But they were fighting a dirty game where they did not claim to make the rules; they just had to play by them” (125). This requires never appearing to lobby too hard for a client, using racialized language, and ignoring, silencing, and at times berating clients to gain favor with judges. Gonzalez Van Cleve’s analysis suggests that defense attorneys face a common dilemma as actors within an unjust system: They can either wholly denounce the system, but thereby curtail their own agency within it, or they can work within the system and strategically abide by its unjust norms and expectations in an effort to achieve some positive outcomes.
Gonzalez Van Cleve discloses a newfound understanding for the complicated situation defense attorneys are in, no longer believing that they are simply unbothered by the unjust system in which they are active participants. Gonzalez Van Cleve furthermore notes that she also participates in court culture simply by being present and not calling out abuse and unfairness. She concludes by pondering her complicity in court culture, which she describes in vivid language: “I realized that there was no way to do a study of these courts without getting my hands dirty or feeling dirty […] I played in the guts of the file and thought about the consequences. Even the term ‘playing in the guts’ made it sound like I was an accessory to a crime where you revel in a gory tragedy of your criminal act” (125). Through the use of this vivid language, Gonzalez Van Cleve emphasizes the ethical ambiguity of participating in an unjust system. She suggests that, despite her newfound sympathy for those working within the court system, she recognizes that one’s good intentions do not necessarily amount to an unambiguous justification for this participation.
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