About

I fell in love with criminal defense from my first week interning at the Cook County Public Defender’s Office in Chicago, Illinois. Like you, I didn’t know what happened daily in our country’s criminal courts. I had vague ideas about what I thought justice and fairness meant but, at that time, I hadn’t figured out how I would take those ideals and make them a part of my everyday life.

All of that changed when I started working in criminal defense. I held people’s hands and listened to their life stories – their desires, their aspirations, their upbringing, their mistakes. I hugged their mothers and met their friends. I knew this whole person – someone who was so much more than a court case number – and yet, judges and prosecutors saw another “defendant” on their long list of cases. They didn’t know what I knew. They didn’t know that this human being they were trying to throw away into a cage had a mother who loved him and a child who relied on him and decades of trauma that eventually brought him to this courtroom.

I also witnessed how scared they were. They walked into this foreboding courtroom with hands cuffed behind their backs and feet chained together listening to all these people they’ve never met before talk about their fate. They stood there silent not knowing all of the “legal words” that were thrown around without explanation and then after just a minute or two of lawyer talk, an armed deputy walked them back into a jail cell.