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.
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.
Gorman's husband Chris Ross is a demographer. They have three children.
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. According to The Wall Street Journal: 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."
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.
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. Gorman appealed that decision to the US Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in her favor in May, 2004.
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, 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."
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. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which provides pro bono lawyers for the Guantanamo detainees connected her to two clients: Abdel Hamid Ibn Abdussalem Ibn Mifta Al Ghazzawi and Abdal Ali Razak.