H. Candace Gorman

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

Education and personal life Gorman grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended the University of Wisconsin, where she majored in philosophy. 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.

After finishing law school, Gorman began a solo general law practice, and ten years later, she limited her practice to civil rights law. In 2008 and 2009, she spent time living in the Netherlands working as a visiting professional for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. According to The Wall Street Journal: The lawsuit against Donnelley, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago in November , 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."

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.

In 2012, Gorman told an interviewer that she was surprised by the Supreme Court's unanimous verdict after the "harsh" questions she got from Justice Antonin Scalia, 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. connected her to two clients: Abdel Hamid Ibn Abdussalem Ibn Mifta Al Ghazzawi and Abdal Ali Razak.

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, the right for a prisoner 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. Ron Suskind wrote about this in his 2008 book The Way of the World, detailing Gorman's first meeting with al-Ghazzawi and her goals for representing him.

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.

Her second client, Abdal Ali Razak, also known as Razak Ali or 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-Qaeda figure. 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. 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." 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."

Fields and Gorman filed the first lawsuit October 27, 2010. This ended in a mistrial due to misbehavior by a defendant, with the judge assessing defendants $70,000 to cover legal fees for Gorman.

It was in response to Gorman's appeals, filed after the second trial, that Judge Matthew 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.

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. 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." of hiding evidence from defense attorneys. which included their "alleging that two Chicago police detectives falsified incriminating evidence and concealed favorable evidence."

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.

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