William goodman detroit

Main Photo Add photo. School period Add photo. Career Add photo. Achievements Add photo. Membership Add photo. Awards Add photo. Other Photos Add photo. Connections Add photo. Goodman Edit Profile educator urban planner William I. Goodman, American urban planner, educator. More photos. Add photo. While litigation and legal costs are certainly part of the effort to sustain and empower the movement as a whole, we want to be sure everyone is able to have as much information as possible before deciding to make their donation to a legal cause.

We have decided to temporarily disable the donation button on the General Fund in order to focus on raising money for litigation costs exclusively. Should the DWB organizing team determine more funds are needed for general expenses, we will turn the donate button back on.

Should our legal team determine more money is needed for litigation, we will raise the goal accordingly on this campaign. All funds raised on this campaign will be deposited into the Detroit Will Breathe organizational bank account, then transferred to our lawyers to pay expenses.

If anyone has any questions about the lawsuit, please feel free to reach out to DWB leadership or on social media. We look forward to giving donors and supporters updates whenever possible. Thank you so much for the support! Donate Share. Donations See top donations See top. Katherine Robinson. Goodman lost the case at lower levels, but the appeals process led to the U.

Supreme Court reversing the decision and releasing the defendants. The elder Goodman defended Black Panthers. He worked on school desegregation cases.

He represented a soldier in an all-black combat unit stationed in the Philippines who was accused of murdering another soldier.

When Morris Gleicher was indicted for allegedly conspiring to defraud the state of Michigan, the Goodmans defended him — successfully — in federal court in The feds maintained state employees had done the work. The government provided evidence for seven weeks, but the father-and-son Goodman team decided no defense was needed. It took the jury less than three hours to acquit Gleicher of all charges.

Now in private practice in Royal Oak, Lisa Gleicher worked for the Goodman firm after she graduated from law school in until Like all attorneys at the firm, she worked on pro bono cases, often in conjunction with the ACLU of Michigan.

Gleicher and Bill Goodman handled several cases aimed at maintaining and restoring women's access to health services including abortion during the s and s. They didn't win very many of them. Walter Bergman , a Michigan man, was critically injured in the assault and Goodman won him at least minimal monetary compensation after the jury agreed the feds had allowed the Klan attack to happen.

He's eloquent, inspiring and he always saw the big picture politically," Simon says. But Goodman also identifies a summer job as being almost as influential as his father's professional life. After his first year of law school at the University of Chicago, Goodman chose to intern at a small African-American law firm in Virginia where he helped draft pleadings and develop legal arguments in desegregation cases throughout the South.

After graduating, Goodman returned to Detroit and worked with his father. They spearheaded the defense of prisoners charged in the Attica Prison riots of Robert Sedler , a Wayne State University law professor, sometimes consulted or worked with the Goodman firm on constitutional cases during the s. The firm, he says, paid its bills with personal injury work, but "devoted a certain amount of its time to pro bono and civil rights litigation.

It was understood that every lawyer there was going to do some work on that," Sedler says. In , Sedler worked with Bill Goodman on the case that challenged the city of Dearborn's law prohibiting non-residents from using public parks.

Since then, Sedler has stayed in contact with Goodman, seeing him at events and applauding his work with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Goodman says it was "very hard" to leave Detroit in , but when the Center for Constitutional Rights needed a new legal director, he knew he had to apply. It's an organization that goes back to the '60s with the era's firebrand lawyer William Kunstler as one of its founders.

Its high-profile clients have included defense of the Chicago 7 , and it handled the case establishing, in , that electronic surveillance without a warrant is unconstitutional. His job included speaking engagements throughout the country and supervising the work of the center's 12 staff and three contract attorneys who were working primarily on racial profiling, police brutality and international human rights cases. It was crystal clear to me," Goodman says.

As Bush's "war on terror" began to attack domestic civil and constitutional rights, Goodman led the center into battle. For the last few years, the focus has been on detainees in U. A series of cases has been filed.