A former public defender testifies to the vivid human suffering at the heart of America’s criminal justice system.
 
As a public defender, Allen Goodman faced cross-examination from family and friends every day: How could he work to help criminals? How could he live with himself? Presumed guilty by association, Goodman quickly learned that people didn’t really want an answer; they wanted a justification, perhaps even an apology. Ever the idealist, Goodman answered anyway: Everyone deserves justice.

Everyone against Us is Goodman’s testimony of his life as a public defender. In it, he documents his efforts to defend clients, both guilty and innocent, against routine police abuse, prosecutorial misconduct, and unjust sentencing. To work in criminal justice, Goodman shows, is to confront and combat vivid human suffering, of both victims and perpetrators. From sex trafficking, murder, and abuse to false conviction, torture, and systemic racism, Goodman describes the daily experiences that both rattled his worldview and motivated him to work ever harder. Part memoir, part exposé, Everyone against Us is the moving story of an embattled civil servant who staves off the worst abuses of the criminal justice system, at great personal cost.

"“Goodman tells a very personal tale of nine years spent in the American criminal justice system, through travesties and victories, large and small. . . . From his first encounter with a client to the moments when some clients received their guilty verdict from a jury and were escorted from the courtroom in handcuffs, Goodman skillfully weaves a true tale of insightful advocacy and compelling conclusions. . . . He draws us in to the sights, sounds, and smells of the criminal legal system, forcing us to experience it with him because otherwise we might prefer to avoid it and thus avoid questioning its presumptions.”" - Los Angeles Review of Books

"“[An] important work of pulling the curtain back on the immense value of often-maligned public defenders.”" - Booklist