Defending by Example

“Mr. Ammoura, is that you?”

It was summer 2011, and Ali Ammoura ’12 was a law student at Chicago-Kent College of Law when he heard a meek voice cut through the hustle and bustle of the lockup at the George N. Leighton Criminal Courthouse located near the corner of 26th Street and California Avenue in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood.

A former Chicago Public Schools teacher, Ammoura turned around and found himself face to face with one of his former students.

“It broke my heart,” Ammoura says. “The student was in my homeroom class. He sat next to my desk. He’s a good kid, and he’s there for armed robbery.”

When he started at Chicago-Kent, Ammoura hadn’t been sure of what sort of law he wanted to pursue.  

But when he saw the look of confusion and terror in his former student’s eyes, he knew he found his calling.

“I know that student personally. He’s not a statistic, he’s not a number,” says Ammoura. “He deserves an opportunity to be heard and to be represented. It was right then and there that I knew I could never stand on the opposite side, prosecuting him. Where I really wanted to be was sitting with people like him and holding space for them and giving them advocacy and representation.”

Fourteen years later, Ammoura is still representing indigent clients who are accused of crimes as a lawyer for the Office of the Cook County (Illinois) Public Defender.  

He was first assigned to the Family Defense division where he represented parents whose children had been taken away due to allegations of abuse or neglect. He then spent five years in Chicago’s south suburbs in Markham, Illinois, where he represented those accused of domestic violence, traffic violations, and juvenile delinquency.

In 2019 Ammoura was transferred to the county courthouse at 26th and California—where he remains to this day, representing adults accused of felonies.

“Someone asked me recently, ‘Good guys or bad guys. Who do you represent?’” Ammoura says. He says that he responded, “It’s not that black and white. I represent people who are accused of committing a crime, of doing something that society considers to be immoral or wrong. These are human beings. They’re not monsters.”

Ammoura’s job is to defend his clients’ best interests, no matter what mistakes they may have made in their lives.

In his eyes, the clients are all just humans in need.

“I get to be with people who are going through some pretty serious struggles, and maybe even the most challenging or one of the most challenging experiences and times in their lives,” he says. “Whether they committed this crime or not, my job is to help them through this situation, to be there with them.”

His colleague, office mate, and frequent trial partner, John Kwon, acknowledges that Ammoura’s ability to empathize with clients, and anyone else who walks into the office, sets him apart from his peers.

“Ali is very empathetic,” says Kwon. “He doesn’t judge, which sometimes, in our profession, it’s hard not to, but he doesn’t.”

Kwon says that a major part of the job at the public defender’s office is to mentor and train interns, something that he says that Ammoura is especially good at.

“He’s a very compassionate man,” says Kwon. “His greatest strength is he loves being a teacher and mentor. He really takes the interns under his wing. He loves keeping in touch with them even after their internship.”

Although he left public-school teaching, Ammoura’s dedication to juvenile justice, working to combat the school-to-prison pipeline, and helping to build up the next generation remain his top priorities.  

That is why he served as president of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference—a neighborhood group that prioritizes urban renewal, stabilization, an integrated community, and neighborhood safety—for three years. He also teaches juvenile justice as an adjunct faculty member at Chicago-Kent.

Despite his dedication through those roles and his mentorship, Ammoura says that he felt that he needed to do more to help support the next generation. Pulling from his experiences as a public defender, he decided to take an unconventional approach.

“In at least 90 to 95 percent of my cases, when my clients who are 17 and under show up to court, it’s with their mothers or with no one and not with any father or any man in their life,” he says. “We learn from those who raise us, and in the absence of anyone who raises us, who then shows us how to live? And for my clients, it was the streets that were showing them how to live.”

Ammoura knew that he couldn’t force fathers to show up for their children, but he wanted to understand why there were so many who wouldn’t.  

He looked inward, to his own understanding of masculinity, and decided to get involved in the Mankind Project, a nonprofit that offers peer-facilitated men’s groups and mentoring.

“It’s a men’s organization where the focus is helping men lead healthy, masculine lifestyles and helping men to heal and to give back to the world in positive ways by helping ourselves,” he says. “How many men out there just don’t love themselves? We have needs and yet society tells us to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders.  

“For me, it’s a noble cause, helping half the population to show up better in the world for themselves and their children.”  

As a public defender, Ammoura is often tasked with cleaning up the pieces of a broken world. He says that his clients are often themselves victims of discrimination and abuse, and incarceration often causes ripple effects through the families of offenders.  

But he believes that the solutions to those external problems may lie inside each of us, if we’re only brave enough to look.

“I want to show up as a father and as a positive role model for my children, and I want to support men who, they themselves are products of how they were raised, just like we all are,” he says, “so this work is really important to me.”