For the Want of Justice

“I never see it that I’m the one defending the bad guys,” says Heather Widell ’12. “I’m defending people, and I’m defending the [United States] Constitution.”

Widell has run her own firm, the Law Offices of Heather A. Widell, for the last 10 years. The firm focuses on criminal defense.

Widell considers the decade that she’s spent as her own boss to largely be a success, but the road to get there was not straight forward. The lifelong athlete graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in sports management marketing.

“I thought I could be an agent, because I was not going to be in the WNBA or on any national soccer teams,” she says, laughing.

She then enrolled at Chicago-Kent College of Law because going to law school would allow her to draft her own contracts, but after a year focusing her studies on contracts, she was so miserable that she was on the verge of leaving the program—until she signed up for Teaching Professor David A. Erickson’s Adjudicative Procedure Process course.

Erickson, who is the director of Chicago-Kent’s Trial Advocacy Program, immediately recognized Widell’s talent for public speaking and recruited her to the trial advocacy team.

“My second year, I felt like I had a family and a lot of that was because of trial team,” she says. “My first team went to nationals, and I hadn’t even taken Evidence yet. It was wild.”

When she graduated, Widell took a job at what was then known as Smith Amundsen doing insurance defense litigation.  

She quickly realized that it was not a good fit.

“I have a gift to be able to give a voice to the voiceless and help people,” she says. “I felt that my skill set was not being utilized properly defending insurance companies.”

Without having another job lined up, she left Smith Amundsen and spent a few months job searching before a bit of good luck came her way.  

At a public event, her father met John Fitzgerald Lyke Jr., currently a Circuit Court of Cook County judge but who was, at that time, a defense attorney leading his own firm.

Widell showed up to her interview to learn she already had the job.

“I saw your name in the trophy case. I read up on you. You’re hired,” Widell remembers Lyke saying, adding: “Within a couple of weeks, he had me doing my first murder trial. It was trial by fire. I got thrown right in, and I loved it.”

She continues, “I quickly found that it was something that I, again, could use my superpower of giving a voice to the voiceless, trying to fight for justice where I can, to fix in any way systemic injustices, a broken system, and actually help people.”

She had been working at Lyke’s firm for a little more than a year when he was appointed to the bench, and Widell had the opportunity to buy the firm. She was still in her twenties.

“It was lost on me a little bit how big that was until I started seeing reactions on people’s faces,” says Widell. “I was kind of still a kid. I’m in control of all these people’s lives and freedom. This is scary.”

In the beginning, Widell was joined by Nicholas Economakos ’12, a friend from the Trial Advocacy Program.  

The two practiced together for four years before he decided to focus on civil work, at which time he joined Bellows Law Group as principal litigation and negotiation counsel.

“We were inseparable from moment one, winning our first tournament together and planning to have a criminal defense firm together someday. That dream eventually became a reality,” he says. “We both grew as attorneys so much, being thrust into the middle of a hectic trial schedule, with everything from drug cases to murders.

“Heather is the most incredible human being I’ve ever met,” he continues. “There is not a more naturally talented lawyer I’ve ever seen in a courtroom. She has incredible instincts. She is sassy, likable, assertive, and brilliant. She is a cross-examination artist, that is truly a joy to watch.”

While Widell usually keeps a low profile, she was thrust into the spotlight when she represented Jussie Smollett, an actor accused of orchestrating a faux hate crime against himself. She represented Smollett during the appeals process, which Widell’s team eventually won.

“The state had a deal with him to dismiss his case if he did community service and surrendered his bond, which he did,” says Widell. “There was no jurisdiction, no precedent for them to just bring back a case that had been duly dismissed.”

The case garnered so much media attention that Widell got a new look into the way the justice system works.

“That was probably the most dramatic case that I’ve done,” she says. “I’ve done a bunch of murder trials, but that one, even though it was a class four felony for filing a false police report, turned out to be the biggest insight into how everything works in the system from start to finish. He was already tried and convicted in the court of public opinion way before we even stepped foot in the courtroom. It was one of the saddest realizations, that a lot of times in our system, you are not innocent until proven guilty.”

But most of Widell’s clients aren’t celebrities—they’re people being prosecuted by a system that is much more powerful than them.

“I try not to think about whether they actually did it or not, but there have been a few that I knew they really didn’t do this,” she says. “Those have been the scariest moments to think that someone who is innocent could be facing however many years, decades of their lives.”

She was recently arguing for the release of one of her clients and got upset about the way the prosector asked for a longer sentence, in what Widell thought to be a flippant matter.

“Has anybody in this room spent even a day in Cook County jail?” she demanded passionately. “He’s spent already nine years of his life, almost more than a third of his life, in Cook County custody for something he did not do. This is not justice.”

Those last four words brought tears to her eyes.

“I appreciated not that I was crying in court, but that I could still, after 10 years, be moved to tears for the want of justice,” she says.

Her client is still in jail, and Widell is still fighting for him.

“Every day, I can help a little bit to repair some of the systemic injustices so that we can be on a more equal footing,” she says, “instead of having the giants [against] the little guys who don’t stand a chance a lot of the time.”