Courtroom 302 (14 page)

But there was something about Locallo that the Carusos likely didn’t know—something that might have given
them
pause.

Despite the negative comments about blacks he’d heard when he was small, Locallo seemed to have developed an affinity for African Americans. When he was a teen, what had most impressed him about JFK had been his fight for civil rights for blacks. The judge that Locallo most revered, William Cousins, is African American. Roosevelt Thomas, the defense lawyer he’d had the run-in with that had convinced him not to be such a strident prosecutor, is African American. R. Eugene Pincham, the former appellate justice whom Locallo had supported when he was being disparaged, is African American.

Then there’s the striking impact that
To Kill a Mockingbird
has had on Locallo.

He’s hardly the only lawyer of his generation for whom that movie, or book, was an early inspiration. Locallo, however, has watched the film repeatedly. And one particular scene still brings on tears. Once when we were in a crowded downtown restaurant, he got choked up just
talking
about the scene. “It’s where Gregory Peck [playing lawyer Atticus Finch] is walking out of the courtroom,” Locallo said, his voice beginning to crack and soften. “The blacks stand up.” Here Locallo’s eyes flooded and his face reddened. A hand flew to his brow to shield his eyes. His head
shook. A half-minute passed before he regained his composure. I asked him why that particular scene affected him so deeply. “I just thought that was
so great
—here’s the community standing up out of great respect for someone who fought for them. That’s the thing you have to do—stand by what you believe in. And that’s the only way you’ll
get
respect, is if you
don’t
compromise your beliefs. It was sad that the judge in
To Kill a Mockingbird
couldn’t see the injustices there. Atticus Finch saw the injustices.”

FOUR

Good Facts, Bad Facts

THE THREE REPORTERS
assigned full-time to the building descend on 302 whenever the Bridgeport case is on the schedule for a pretrial matter, large or small. Often a handful of other reporters show up as well. Ever accommodating to the media, Locallo usually beckons the reporters to sit in the jury box instead of the gallery, so they can more easily follow the proceedings.

The three beat reporters have to be highly selective about what they cover, given the more than one thousand cases on the courthouse’s menu every day. A crime needs a special twist to win their attention—a mother suffocating her children, a teen beating his father to death, a congressman having sex with a minor. Almost any killing of or by a police officer makes the cut.

But the trial of one young black male for slaying another rarely does. So the reporters are elsewhere on the morning late in January when the De’Angelo Harris jury trial begins.

The case concerns a shooting in front of Rockwell Gardens, a public housing project on Chicago’s west side, on a May evening in 1995. Harris, then seventeen, allegedly fired three times into the parked car of twenty-year-old Bennie Williams. Williams was hit twice in the back, the lethal bullet piercing his aorta and his main pulmonary artery.

Harris was a member of the Gangster Disciples. The prosecutors believe he assumed that Williams was a member of the rival Traveling Vice Lords because he was wearing a Texas Rangers baseball cap, with a
T
on it. But Williams wasn’t a gang member and didn’t even live in the neighborhood. He was a University of Arkansas student home for the summer,
who’d driven to the west side from his parents’ suburban Oak Park home to visit his baby daughter. Williams’s mother says her son liked the cap with the
T
because his middle name was Terrell.

Harris is represented by Amy Campanelli, the senior public defender assigned to 302, and Cynthia Brown, a member of the PD’s Homicide Task Force, an elite unit whose members represent only homicide defendants.

Every case has its “good facts and bad facts,” Campanelli says. The lawyer’s job is to highlight the good facts and play down the bad ones. A bad fact for Harris is the eyewitness who says he did the shooting; a worse fact is that Harris confessed to it. A good fact for Harris is that the eyewitness initially identified a different young man as the shooter. Another good fact is Harris’s youth when he confessed. Campanelli and Brown will try to convince the jury that veteran homicide detectives coerced their naïve young client into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit.

Locallo is anxious to dispose of the case because it’s one of the oldest on his call. Every Thursday a legal newspaper, the
Chicago Daily Law Bulletin
, lists each criminal court judge’s “priority cases”—his or her five oldest. It’s a public prod from the chief judge to dispose of those cases. Locallo has two cases from 1996 and three from 1995, one of them being
Harris
. It’s not Locallo’s fault that the case has been around so long. Public defender Brown has made pretrial motions contending there hadn’t been probable cause for Harris’s arrest and challenging the admissibility of his confession and of testimony regarding the lineup ID made by the eyewitness. These motions have required three separate hearings, all of which Harris lost. The case has also been delayed twice by the rotation of prosecutors from 302 to other courtrooms.

Illinois’s speedy trial act gives the state 120 days to bring defendants to trial—160 days for defendants on bond. But cases often take far longer. No days are tolled against the time limit while pretrial motions initiated by the defendant are pending. And the clock runs only if the defendant formally demands trial instead of agreeing with the state on continuances, which is what defense lawyers usually do. Harris’s final pretrial motion was disposed of three months ago, but Campanelli and Brown still haven’t demanded trial on their client’s behalf. When the evidence is strong against a defendant, his lawyers are happy to let the case age, since it sometimes weakens as it does—the state’s witnesses disappear, or get cold feet, or get arrested themselves, hurting their credibility. If the defendant is in jail, prosecutors often don’t feel much urgency about getting to trial either.

Defense lawyers who demand trial risk alienating the prosecutors, who couldn’t possibly adhere to the time limits if every defendant in their courtroom demanded trial. Prosecutors sometimes consider trial demands
to be inconsiderate if not a personal affront, Locallo says, and so work extra hard to convict defendants who demand trial. “You know the old adage, ‘Don’t wake up a sleeping tiger,’ ” Locallo says.

Of course, the defense lawyers themselves, the PDs especially, have their own caseload problems, and that’s often the real reason they agree to continuances—though they’re likely to tell their clients it’s purely for tactical purposes that they’re not pushing the case to trial.

PROSECUTOR MARK OSTROWSKI
begins the state’s case with his “life-and-death” witness, Bennie Williams’s mother, Diane Smith. In a murder case, the life-and-death witness establishes that the victim did indeed die. The defense would gladly stipulate to this fact; but in a jury trial, prosecutors favor presenting it through the anguished testimony of one of the bereaved. Like many prosecutors, Ostrowski says that in murder cases, he hopes to ease the pain of the victim’s survivors by bringing them a conviction. But from a strategic point of view, the more the life-and-death witness suffers in front of the jury, the better.

Diane Smith is dressed sedately in a navy pin-striped pantsuit and a dark broad-brimmed hat. Though she attended all the pretrial hearings, she hasn’t grown any more comfortable with the courthouse; the visits still make her queasy, she says later, reminding her of Bennie’s death. The prospect of testifying has been worrying her, and the tension is written across her face as she takes the stand.

She tells the jury she last saw her son alive on the morning of May 25, 1995—and that the next time she saw him, it was at the medical examiner’s office. Several jurors lean forward, brows knitted.

“What was his condition when you saw him at the medical examiner’s office?” Ostrowski asks.

“He was
dead
!” Smith wails. She cradles her face with her hands and sobs. Ostrowski cocks his head sympathetically and offers her his handkerchief.

After Smith is excused, she joins her husband and several other family members in the front row of the gallery. Smith is hoping Harris gets convicted and sentenced to the maximum sixty years. She also hopes to learn from the trial why Harris shot her son.

Across the aisle from Smith and her family sits a stout woman with red streaks in her black hair—the defendant’s mother, Karen Harris. Next to her is her bright-eyed seven-year-old daughter, Tiara. Tiara’s hair is festooned with orange and white barrettes. Her sneakers swing freely above the tile floor. Through the tinted glass she can see her brother’s back. He’s in a suit, sitting at a table with two white women. Two white men are at
another table. The lady police officer sitting just inside the glass doors is also white. So is the man in the black robe behind the big desk. So are all the people in the two rows of chairs at the side of the courtroom, except for one black lady.

Tiara has three older brothers. De’Angelo, now nineteen, has been in the jail here for two years and eight months. Tiara’s seventeen-year-old brother is in a boot camp because of a drug conviction, and her sixteen-year-old brother is in a juvenile home because of a gun case.

The eyewitness to the shooting, Mary Armstrong, testifies next. The grandmother of Bennie Williams’s baby daughter, Armstrong was standing just outside the passenger door of his car when he was shot. She tells the jury that Williams had gotten into the car and was leaning over to open the passenger door for her when a young man approached the rear of the car, pulled a gun from his pants, crouched slightly, and fired through the back window.

Armstrong fled to a security shack in a nearby parking lot. She heard two more shots as she ran. A guard in the shack called 911. Williams was slumped backward in the car, unconscious, when police arrived.

Armstrong acknowledges on direct examination that she originally “picked out the wrong gentleman” from a lineup as the shooter. But then she identified Harris in a second lineup, and now she’s positive he was the shooter. On cross-examination, Campanelli asks her if she hadn’t also been positive after the first lineup that the young black male she’d picked had been the shooter. “At that time, I was,” Armstrong concedes.

DETECTIVES
’
SUSPICIONS
after the shooting had quickly settled on a twenty-year-old named Dante Johnson. He fit the rough description Armstrong gave (male black, six feet, 180 pounds), and one witness said he’d been in the center of an argument between the Gangster Disciples and the Traveling Vice Lords an hour before the shooting. Johnson admitted being in the argument but said he’d left the scene soon afterward, going to his girlfriend’s on the south side. After Armstrong picked him out of a lineup, however, he was charged with murder and jailed with a $1 million bond.

Four days later a man named Anthony Perkins told police they had the wrong man in the Williams slaying. Perkins said the real culprit was his stepson, De’Angelo Harris.

Ten days after that detectives showed Armstrong an array of photos that included one of Harris but none of Dante Johnson. According to a police report, as soon as she saw Harris’s photo she realized she’d erred in identifying Johnson. Police arrested Harris and put him in a lineup. Johnson and Harris were both six foot one, but Harris was three years younger,
twenty-five pounds lighter, and much fairer-skinned than Johnson. Armstrong picked Harris. Harris signed his confession not long after the lineup. It was a full week after Armstrong told police she had been wrong about Dante Johnson before prosecutors dropped the charges against him. In all, he spent three weeks in jail for the Williams murder.

AFTER THE LUNCH BREAK
Susan Butera, the assistant state’s attorney who wrote up Harris’s confession at the police station, reads it to the jury.

“De’Angelo Harris states that he is a member of the Gangster Disciples and has been a member for the past four years,” Butera begins. “De’Angelo Harris states that the Traveling Vice Lords is a rival gang of the Gangster Disciples, and these two gangs were at war on May 25, 1995.”

In the gallery, the boredom is wearing on seven-year-old Tiara. She stretches out across one of the benches and closes her eyes—but they soon pop open. She whispers something to her mother; but her mother is trying to hear De’Angelo’s confession. “Shut
up
,” Karen Harris says sternly. “Sit up.” Tiara grudgingly pushes herself upright. She peers through the glass a moment; then sighs, lets her head drop backward to the top of the back of the bench, and studies the ceiling. Soon she winces and rubs her neck, then tries cushioning her head with her hands. The fidgeting is annoying her mother. “I’m gonna take you in the back and whup your butt, you understand me?”

“De’Angelo Harris states that … on May 25, 1995, some members of the Traveling Vice Lords were throwing rocks” at a Gangster Disciple’s car, assistant state’s attorney Butera continues. This led to an argument with the TVLs. According to the confession, Harris heard gunfire as he and his fellow GDs were heading back to Rockwell Gardens after the argument. In the high-rise at 340 South Western, he armed himself with an automatic gun that the gang kept in a “spot.” He left the building about an hour later with the gun tucked in his pants. On Western Avenue he came upon a parked car with someone in the driver’s seat. He didn’t see who the person was, according to the confession, because he approached the car from the rear.

“De’Angelo Harris states he saw the person in the car lean over toward the passenger side of the car,” Butera reads. “De’Angelo Harris states when he saw this person lean over, De’Angelo pulled out the loaded gun from his pants, pointed it towards the person that he saw in the car, and pulled the trigger. De’Angelo Harris states he heard the gun go pow, pow, pow.”