H. Candace Gorman

Last updated
H. Candace Gorman
Education University of Wisconsin
University of Illinois Chicago School of Law (JD)
OccupationCivil rights attorney

H. Candace Gorman is a Chicago, Illinois-based civil-rights attorney, known for representing two Guantanamo detainees and also for her work to uncover secret "street files" maintained by the Chicago Police. [1]

Contents

Education and personal life

Gorman grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and attended the University of Wisconsin where she majored in philosophy. [2] Like her father, Chicago civil-rights attorney Robert J. Gorman, she attended law school, receiving her JD in 1983 from the UIC John Marshall Law School. [3]

After finishing law school, Gorman began a solo general law practice, and ten years later, she limited her practice to civil rights law. [4] In 2008 and 2009, she spent time living in the Netherlands working as a visiting professional for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. [2] [4]

Gorman's husband Chris Ross is a demographer. They have three children. [2]

Donnelley discrimination case and statute of limitations

Gorman was plaintiff lawyer in a discrimination case filed against Chicago-based printing company RR Donnelley that she took all the way to the Supreme Court. [5] [6] [7] According to The Wall Street Journal: [7]

The lawsuit against Donnelley, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago in November [1996], claims that African-Americans were discriminated against when Donnelley closed a Chicago printing plant in 1994 that employed 1,000 people ... Plaintiffs attorney H. Candace Gorman said the company's statistical records clearly show discriminatory employment patterns. She cited personnel records showing that after Donnelley closed the 1,000-employee printing plant in Chicago, transferring some employees to other locations, only 1.2% of those who received transfers were black, compared with 30% of white workers.

Gorman told the Associated Press that in many cases black workers with seniority were fired while less-experienced white workers were kept on: "In fact, some of my clients had to go to facilities to help train these younger employees in how to work the machinery." [8]

Soon after filing the case on behalf of workers from the shut-down plant, Gorman expanded it to a class action suit on behalf of Donnelley black employees nationwide, more than 500 workers from 60 or more different locations, claiming "a long-term pattern of racial discrimination and harassment" and presenting evidence including racial and sexual jokes shared in company emails. [7]

Donnelley responded that displaced workers had missed the two-year statute of limitations to file their claim, a contention that was upheld by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in September, 2002. [5] Gorman appealed that decision to the US Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in her favor in May, 2004. [9]

Gorman many years later (2012) told an interviewer that she was surprised by the Supreme Court's unanimous verdict after the "harsh" questions she got from Justice Antonin Scalia, [4] saying:

I counted him as a “no” vote. I later learned that Justice Stevens--who wrote the opinion changing the statute of limitations in §1981 cases to four years across the country instead of the personal injury statute in each state--thought it was very important for procedural issue decisions to be unanimous so they negotiated around Scalia’s concerns.

The result, according to the Chicago Tribune, was "a $15 million settlement of a racial discrimination suit against R.R. Donnelley Co., the Chicago-based commercial printing company, on behalf of some 600 African-American employees... Donnelley settled after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Gorman that the statute of limitations in civil rights cases should be extended from two years to four." [2] [10]

Guantanamo Bay detainees and habeas corpus

After learning, in October 2005, that more than 200 prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, had no lawyers, Gorman volunteered to represent one detainee. A few months later, she agreed to represent a second, in both cases pro bono. [2] The Center for Constitutional Rights, which provides pro bono lawyers for the Guantanamo detainees [11] connected her to two clients: Abdel Hamid Ibn Abdussalem Ibn Mifta Al Ghazzawi and Abdal Ali Razak. [12]

Gorman told northern Michigan newspaper Northern Express that she represents both men as a civil rights lawyer, seeking a fair trial for them based on the right of habeas corpus . (According to this traditional legal principle, prisoners have a right to know the evidence against them and to request a fair trial, based on that evidence.) At the time, there was debate whether people suspected of war crimes could be excluded from habeas corpus. [13] Ron Suskind, writing in his 2008 book The Way of the World about her first meeting with al-Ghazzawi, makes the same point: her goal in meeting with him is "about due process, about letting the law do its work." [14]

After her first meeting with al-Ghazzawi, a Libyan who had been running a bakery in Afghanistan when neighbors denounced him as a terrorist, she was struck by his bad health. In addition to trying to move his case toward a trial, she sought medical care for him and access to his health records, but was refused on all counts. [2] Eventually, he was one of three Guantanamo prisoners who was transferred to the custody of the nation of Georgia on March 23, 2010. [15]

Her second client, Abdal Ali Razak also known as Razak Ali and as Abdelrazak Ali Abdelrahman, was an Algerian citizen visiting Pakistan, detained because he was staying in the same guest house as Abu Zubaydah, who was believed to be a top Al-Qaida figure. [2] Although Gorman has filed several habeas corpus petitions on his behalf, including Ali v Obama (2013) [16] and Ali v Trump, [17] they have so far been unsuccessful. [17] Ali is one of 40 prisoners still remaining in the Guantanamo prison, according to the New York Times, which notes that he is held in "Indefinite Law-of-War Detention" and not recommended for transfer. [18]

Investigating Chicago Police Department "street files"

In 2014, Gorman sought and received a judge's permission to examine the content of multiple police file cabinets, in order to compare these files to the material given to defendants' lawyers. Based on the Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland (1963), it is illegal for the state to hide from a defendant any exculpatory evidence (evidence that supports the defendant's innocence.) [1]

Chicago's hidden "street files" first became known during a 1983 murder trial, when Chicago Police Detective Frank Laverty revealed that police routinely withheld evidence that could help defendants. [1] [19] According to a Chicago police commander at the time, testifying under oath, "it was standard procedure for detectives to maintain a secret file--the street file--that included reports and documents that might damage the case against their chosen suspect." [20] [21] Therefore, in 1983, according to the Chicago Tribune, "police issued a new general order doing away with street files and instituting what are called general progress reports in which detectives' notes and other updates on the investigation are typed into a form that is inventoried and subject to subpoena." [19]

Nevertheless, more than two decades later, Gorman began a process of discovery that revealed thousands of files on homicide investigations going back to 1944 were still were being kept in hidden file cabinets that police could access but defendants were never told about. [19]

Gorman became aware of the files when she represented Nathson E. Fields (an exonerated Death-Row prisoner) in three federal lawsuits against the City of Chicago and several of its police officers for fabricating evidence against Fields while hiding exonerating evidence in "street files." [22] [23]

Fields and Gorman filed the first lawsuit October 27, 2010. [24] This ended in a mistrial due to misbehavior by a defendant, with the judge assessing defendants $70,000 to cover legal fees for Gorman. [23] The second trial resulted in a award to Fields of only $80,000. [25] Gorman sought and was granted a mistrial, citing evidence that two of the defendants had colluded to have Fields's main accuser released from prison early as a reward for his testimony against Fields. [25] [26]

It was in response to Gorman's appeals, filed after the second trial, that Judge Kennelly made what the Chicago Tribune described as a "potentially bombshell decision," allowing Gorman full access not only to files related to her current case but also to other file cabinets and boxes containing papers retained by police from other cases. [21] Gorman alleged, and Kennelly agreed, that it was relevant to the Fields trial whether or not "the burying of street files was a de facto policy of the Police Department." [1] [27]

Gorman, with a small team of attorneys, began to read through homicide files from about 500 cases that had been stored in a police-station basement, 23 file cabinets full. [1] After comparing, for about 60 cases, material in these police files to the material given to homicide defendants, Gorman said that "more than 90 percent have information in the street file that was not in the defense file...including names and accounts of eyewitnesses that apparently were never disclosed, statements in detectives' notes that contradict later versions of typed reports and lineup cards that were missing or different from what the defense eventually saw." [1]

In the third trial, Gorman was joined by attorneys from another Chicago firm. Together they secured an $11M verdict against the City of Chicago, based largely on evidence Gorman assembled from the 23 file cabinets, that Chicago Police had an "established custom" [28] of hiding evidence from defense attorneys. [24] Fields and Gorman were both featured in a July 7, 2019 episode of CNN's docu-drama series Death Row Stories, which included their "alleging that two Chicago police detectives falsified incriminating evidence and concealed favorable evidence." [29] [30]

Gorman also shared the evidence from old street files with other lawyers who worked on related cases. In at least one case, a prisoner's conviction was reversed based on new evidence that was uncovered. [31]

Gorman, representing the mother of police-shooting victim Divonte Young in a 2018 lawsuit against Chicago, said that the pattern of withholding evidence continues. [32]

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Meisner, Jason (February 13, 2016). "Old police 'street files' raise question: Did Chicago cops hide evidence?". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved August 2, 2020. With the approval of a federal judge, Chicago attorney Candace Gorman has spent much of the last year combing through street files found in the basement of the old Wentworth Area headquarters, trying to match their contents with evidence that was disclosed by police and prosecutors at the time of trials long ago...Gorman and her small team of attorneys have spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars tracking down prisoners whose murder cases were among the stack she was allowed to review.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Hundley, Tom (May 10, 2009). "Gorman vs. Goliath". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved August 2, 2020. Gorman, who practices alone, specializes in civil rights cases. She has been doing this for 25 years, simultaneously raising three kids, the youngest of whom is now in 11th grade...After majoring in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Candace Gorman followed in the footsteps of her brother and father by going to law school.
  3. ↑ "H. Candace Gorman (JD '83) an Attorney in Former Death Row Inmate's Suit". UIC John Marshall Law School. February 19, 2013. Retrieved August 2, 2020.
  4. 1 2 3 Klein, Deborah (2012). "DCBA Law Day Speaker and Guantanamo Detainee Attorney H. Candace Gorman" (PDF). DuPage County Bar Association. Retrieved August 3, 2020. The theme of Law Day 2012 is "No Courts, No Justice, No Freedom." The program will feature a keynote presentation by H. Candace Gorman. Ms. Gorman is a Chicago based attorney who represents several detainees housed at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
  5. 1 2 Miller, James P (March 29, 2003). "Donnelley to settle worker discrimination suits". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved August 2, 2020. black workers filed a race-discrimination suit alleging that the company had treated them unfairly during the shutdown. Among other things, the workers alleged that Donnelley had found alternative jobs for about 31 percent of the plant's white workers, but managed to place just 1 percent of the plant's 575 black workers. The race litigation later grew to include black workers at other Donnelley facilities around the country, who argued more broadly that .. Donnelley had violated civil rights laws by fostering "an atmosphere of racial hostility and ridicule." When Donnelley officials denied the charges, plaintiff attorney H. Candace Gorman snapped that the company was 'in denial.'
  6. ↑ "Chicago's RR Donnelly Printing Company hit with $500 million discrimination lawsuit". Jet (magazine). December 16, 1996. Retrieved August 2, 2020.
  7. 1 2 3 Markels, Alex (December 7, 2018). "Lawyers Claim E-Mail Messages Show Racial Bias at Donnelley". WSJ. Retrieved August 2, 2020. In pursuit of class certification, which was filed Dec. 19, the plaintiff's attorney was contacted by workers at Donnelley's 60 major locations nationwide. So far, more than 500 black workers have joined the action... Plaintiffs attorney H. Candace Gorman said the company's statistical records clearly show discriminatory employment patterns.
  8. ↑ Starks, Tamara (November 26, 1996). "Former Donnelley Employees Sue Company, Allege Race Discrimination". Associated Press. Retrieved August 2, 2020. Candace Gorman, a lawyer representing 22 workers in the federal complaint filed Monday, said more than 500 Donnelley employees were victims of racial discrimination when the company closed a plant on Chicago's South Side...In many cases, the laid-off black workers had more tenure than the retained white workers, according to the lawsuit. 'In fact, some of my clients had to go to facilities to help train these younger employees in how to work the machinery,' Gorman said.
  9. ↑ "Jones v. R. R. Donnelley Sons Co". Casemine.com. 2004. Retrieved August 2, 2020. H. Candace Gorman argued the case and filed briefs for petitioners.
  10. ↑ Supreme Court opinion, Jones v. R. R. Donnelley & Sons Co., 541 U.S. 369 (2004)
  11. ↑ H. Candace Gorman (December 12, 2006). "Reporter Envy (Or Why a Guantánamo Attorney Dreams of Being a Reporter)". Huffington Post . Retrieved 2008-08-13.
  12. ↑ H. Candace Gorman (2008-08-07). "PETITIONER ABDAL RAZAK ALI'S ATTORNEY AUTHORIZATION" (PDF). United States Department of Justice. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-22. Retrieved 2008-08-13.
  13. ↑ "STUCK IN GUANTANAMO". Northern Express. July 27, 2008. Retrieved August 2, 2020. President Bush and his legal counsel have maintained that prisoners of war do not merit a trial, nor do they have a right to see the evidence against them. That right is called habeus corpus [sic]. Bush set up new procedures for war-crime tribunals with new procedures. It allows convictions based on evidence that the prisoner has never seen nor heard, and might be the result of torture...Gorman doesn't believe terrorists should go free, and she has no plans to represent Ali or al-Ghizzawi in a criminal trial because she is not a criminal attorney. Her fight is with getting a fair trial for the men.
  14. ↑ Suskind, Ron (August 4, 2008). The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism . Retrieved August 2, 2020. Her victims of race, age, or sex discrimination were just working people. Mr. al-Ghizzawi could be Taliban, or even al Qaeda. She pushes the thought from her mind. Beside the point. This is about due process, about letting the law do its work.{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  15. ↑ "Abdul al Ghizzawi - The Guantánamo Docket". The New York Times. 18 May 2021.
  16. ↑ Ali v Obama 2013
  17. 1 2 Ali v. Trump; 2018-2020
  18. ↑ 40 Current Detainees NYT
  19. 1 2 3 Meisner, Jason (April 10, 2014). "Old filing cabinet at center of suit alleging police frame-up". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved August 2, 2020. The controversy over buried street files first erupted in 1983 when Detective Frank Laverty blew the whistle during the trial of George Jones in the murder of a 12-year-old girl. Incensed that the prosecution was going forward despite evidence that Jones was innocent, Laverty turned his street file over to defense attorneys in the middle of the trial. The charges against Jones were dropped.
  20. ↑ Conroy, John (January 4, 2007). "The Good Cop: Detective Frank Laverty did the right thing--and paid for it for years". Chicago Reader. Retrieved August 2, 2020. [Chicago police commander Milton] Deas testified that it was standard procedure for detectives to maintain a secret file--the street file--that included reports and documents that might damage the case against their chosen suspect.
  21. 1 2 Meisner, Jason (November 9, 2015). "City attorney ordered to pay $70,000 in sanctions for El Rukn mistrial". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved August 2, 2020. Kennelly also made a potentially bombshell decision, allowing Fields' attorneys to expand their investigation into whether Chicago police have for years buried street files of hundreds of other murder suspects.
  22. ↑ "NATHSON EDGAR FIELDS". U Michigan Law School. January 3, 2018. Retrieved August 2, 2020. Fields received a Certificate of Innocence after serving 18 years in prison – 11 on death row. As a result, he received $199,150 from the Illinois Court of Claims. However, the Illinois Appellate Court set aside the Certificate of Innocence in 2011 and ordered a new hearing to determine whether Fields qualified. In March 2014, a Cook County judge denied the certificate. Fields filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Chicago and in December 2016, a jury awarded him $22 million. In January 2018, a federal judge ordered the city of Chicago to pay an additional $5.57 million in legal fees.
  23. 1 2 Manson, Patricia (February 13, 2013). "Former death row inmate takes on city" (PDF). Chicago Law Bulletin. Retrieved August 2, 2020. Gorman contended that city officials have continued to give her client the runaround during discovery in his civil suit...Fields also claims officials hid a so-called "street file" generated during the murder investigation. In a motion filed Tuesday, Gorman claimed the file was concealed from 1984 until it was produced during discovery in the suit in 2011. Gorman also claimed that the legal team defending the city against the suit has been stonewalling attempts to learn about the handling of the file during those years. Gorman noted that Kennelly in October directed the city to respond fully to Fields' interrogatories concerning the file. She asked Kennelly to deem the city to have admitted it hid the street file from Fields for 28 years in violation of his right to due process.
  24. 1 2 Thomas, David (December 16, 2016). "18 years nets $22M; city to appeal". Chicago Daily Law Bulletin. Retrieved August 3, 2020. The $22 million judgment against the city is borne out of a "street files" policy the Chicago Police Department had maintained throughout the 1980s, 1990s and part of the 2000s, Loevy said. A street file is essentially an unofficial report, which could contain evidence that exonerates a particular suspect and is never turned over to the defense.
  25. 1 2 Hunter, Gary (October 3, 2016). "Illinois: Exonerated Prisoner Calls $80,000 Award a Travesty, Retrial Ordered". Prison Legal News. Retrieved August 3, 2020. Testimony offered at trial showed how the police had doctored lineups and backdated incriminating statements in order to convict Fields; evidence also included the "street file" that prosecutors and police officers had insisted didn't exist. Fields' attorneys asked the jury to consider an award of $1 million for each year he was imprisoned.
  26. ↑ "Killer Cut Secret Deal To Defend Chicago Cops, Defense Attorney Alleges". Chicago CBS Local News. December 19, 2014. Retrieved August 3, 2020. Jurors likely awarded the paltry sum because they were swayed by Hawkins' testimony that Fields was in fact guilty, Fields' attorney Candace Gorman said Thursday...'Hawkins was the main witness for the city,' she said. 'Their crucial witness was paroled just months after they said he wouldn't be, with their help.'
  27. ↑ Janssen, Kim (April 7, 2015). "Wrongfully convicted former Death Row inmate gets second bite at $18 million case". Chicago Sun Times. Retrieved August 3, 2020. Kennelly acknowledged mistakes of his own. Rulings he made improperly restricted Fields' lawyers from arguing that the city had a policy and practice of hiding and fabricating evidence, he wrote.
  28. ↑ Brody, Michael T (July 14, 2020). "The Seventh Circuit Struggles With Applying 'Monell': Under a federal statute, Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, individuals may sue state officials for violations of constitutional rights". Law.com. Retrieved August 3, 2020. A municipality may be held liable for constitutional torts resulting from the decisions of its legislative body or those supervisory officials whose acts are said to be those of the municipality. Liability can rest on an express policy or an established custom.
  29. ↑ Swartz, Tracy (July 5, 2019). "Former gang member wrongly convicted of Chicago double murder featured on 'Death Row Stories' TV show". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved August 3, 2020. Fields successfully sued the city, alleging that two Chicago police detectives falsified incriminating evidence and concealed favorable evidence.
  30. ↑ 2019 Season Four of Popular HLN Original Docu-Series “Death Row Stories”
  31. ↑ Meisner, Jason (October 4, 2016). "Inmate for 15 years freed after conviction tossed in Chicago killing". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved August 3, 2020. In August 2015, while McIntosh's petition for a new trial was under review by the state's attorney's office's Conviction Integrity Unit, Blagg was contacted by attorney Candace Gorman, who had found McIntosh's street file among hundreds of other old murder cases in filing cabinets at the detective headquarters at 51st Street and Wentworth Avenue. The Tribune first wrote about the cabinets' discovery in a front-page report in April 2014.
  32. ↑ Black, Curtis (February 15, 2018). "Chicago's pattern of withholding evidence in police misconduct cases keeps getting worse". Chicago Reporter. Retrieved August 2, 2020. And the month before that settlement, the city was assessed a $62,500 sanction for giving the "runaround" to an attorney for LaShawnda Young, whose 20-year-old son Divonte was shot and killed by police in 2012. Attorney H. Candace Gorman had uncovered evidence the city had denied existed, including video of a police interview in which Divonte's girlfriend was browbeaten and threatened and a follow-up interview with an eyewitness that cast doubt on the police version of events.
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