Courtroom 302 (15 page)

Harris raced back across Western, discarding the gun as he ran, and into the 340 South Western high-rise, according to the confession. When he heard sirens, he left the building and watched the paramedics “pull the person he shot out of the car on Western,” Butera reads.

“De’Angelo Harris states that he has been treated well by the police,” Butera goes on. “De’Angelo Harris states that he was given two baloney sandwiches to eat and an Orange Crush to drink.… De’Angelo Harris states that he is giving this statement because it’s the truth and he wanted to get it off of his conscience.”

De’Angelo’s mother, Karen Harris, is as still as a stone in the gallery. It’s the first time she’s heard exactly what De’Angelo allegedly told authorities about the shooting. She doubts he gave the confession without any pressure from detectives. But an awareness is surfacing: De’Angelo did it.

There’s no answer in the confession, however, to her chief remaining question:
Why?

That’s also what Bennie Williams’s mother, Diane Smith, is pondering across the aisle.

Smith had come to the trial “wanting to hate” De’Angelo Harris, she says later. But hate isn’t exactly what she’s feeling now. For one thing, her son Bennie was such a compassionate person that she doubts he’d have been bent on vengeance. Smith has also noticed Karen Harris’s stern manner toward the little girl in the barrettes. To Smith’s surprise, she’s feeling a stirring of sympathy for De’Angelo. But she still wishes she knew what prompted him to shoot her son.

On cross, public defender Cynthia Brown asks Butera if she asked Harris why he’d done the shooting. Butera doesn’t recall doing so.

“You never asked him why he did this?”

“I don’t remember specifically asking that question or not asking that question,” Butera says.

Prosecutor Ostrowski and his partner on this case, Andrew Dalkin, would have preferred a clear motive in the confession—such confessions are more persuasive to a jury. But a motive isn’t essential. The prosecutors don’t have to show why Harris pulled the trigger; they only have to show that he did (and that it wasn’t in self-defense). Ostrowski says later that he has no idea why Harris didn’t acknowledge in his confession that he’d seen the
T
on Williams’s cap, as Ostrowski believes he did. Dalkin guesses that Harris felt the crime would sound less heinous if he didn’t admit that he believed he was shooting a rival gangbanger.

Neither prosecutor has given much thought to why Harris would respond to a rock-throwing incident with lethal violence. Their job is to convict defendants, not to try to understand them. In his opening statement, Ostrowski has called the trial “a case about senseless violence”—and that’s how he sees it. “I’m not sure that we can ever figure out why these people do the things they do,” he says. Dalkin likewise shrugs and says, “Some people are just violent.”

•  •  •

DE
’
ANGELO HARRIS WAS BORN
into a world of bad facts. His mother, Karen, was fourteen when she got pregnant with him in 1977. She raised him and her three subsequent children in the west-side Garfield Park neighborhood—then and now an area of abandoned factories, collapsing frame homes, burned-out apartment buildings, and empty lots sparkling with broken glass. She relied on welfare. When her kids were young, she got arrested for allegedly: striking a woman in the chest and head during an argument; threatening to hit her mother with a portable TV; menacing two people with a stick and threatening to kill them; and promising to tear down her apartment building and kill its owners. All the cases were dismissed. De’Angelo says his mother would sometimes punish him by hitting him in the head or punching him in the chest—“wasn’t nothing way unexpected.”

The first time De’Angelo caught his mother sucking on a crack pipe was when she was pregnant with Tiara, he says. De’Angelo was only eleven, but he knew that a pregnant woman, especially, shouldn’t be doing that, and he made his mother promise to quit. He thinks she did for a time. But when Tiara was two, Karen Harris’s own mother lodged a child-neglect charge against her, alleging that Karen had been leaving Tiara with her for days on end without providing any food or money, while Karen went out and spent her aid check on cocaine. Karen pled guilty to the neglect charge and was sentenced to one year of court supervision.

At an early age De’Angelo began running away. He’d often stay with a friend of his mother’s. Karen Harris says she didn’t mind him staying with this woman because “I knew he was safe with her.” The woman, Lorraine Butts, has been arrested for allegedly: striking a woman with a baseball bat; punching and biting other women; smashing a windshield with a bat; and keeping a loaded, unregistered semiautomatic in her apartment. All the cases were dismissed.

Butts lived in a Rockwell Gardens high-rise. Rockwell Gardens was one of the score of vertical slums that Chicago erected in the 1950s and 1960s, when city officials dealt with housing shortages for the poor by
planting high-rises in ghettoes rather than forcing white Chicagoans to live with blacks nearby. The concentration of poverty made the projects dreadful places to raise children and incubators for the state’s penitentiaries. For decades, young black males would graduate from teeming projects to teeming prisons, pausing at 26th Street to pick up their diplomas.

De’Angelo joined the Gangster Disciples before he was a teen. “I can’t even explain why,” he says. “I was twelve then.” Soon he had a steady job—peddling
marijuana in a Rockwell breezeway every weekday after school, from five in the evening to midnight. He enjoyed an earning power he couldn’t imagine equaling in any legitimate job as an adult. He wore gold chains, Pelle Pelle sweaters, Guess jeans, and Nikes or Air Jordans. Lorraine Butts gave him the benefit of her advice, he says. “She was like, ‘Don’t get caught.’ ” (Butts says she suspected De’Angelo was dealing and did indeed give him that advice.)

In 1990, at his paternal grandfather’s funeral, De’Angelo, then twelve, saw his father for the first time in nine years. “Everything gonna be all right, Dad,” De’Angelo consoled his father. “Don’t call me ‘Dad,’ ” his father responded.

When De’Angelo was living in Butts’s Rockwell Gardens apartment, he developed a bond with her boyfriend, a man named Anthony Perkins who was sixteen years older than he was. “I’m talking about like father and son,” De’Angelo says. Perkins has been arrested repeatedly; by 2000 he would have three felony drug convictions. De’Angelo says Perkins helped his marijuana business in Rockwell by referring customers to him in exchange for samples. It was Perkins who told police that he believed De’Angelo had shot Williams.

In the two years and eight months that De’Angelo was in jail awaiting trial, his mother rarely visited him. It hurt too much to see him locked up, she says. But she had her own legal worries as well. In 1995, two months before De’Angelo was charged with shooting Williams, Karen Harris had picked up her first felony charge, for allegedly selling two rocks of cocaine to an undercover officer. She soon pled guilty for probation, a hundred hours of community service, and $200 in fines. Sixteen months later a probation officer told a judge that Harris hadn’t completed a single hour of community service or paid a dollar of her fines. Harris pled guilty to violating her probation and was sentenced to two months in jail.

ON THE EVENING
of the Harris trial’s first day, after the proceedings have been recessed, an investigator for the state’s attorney’s office gets a call from a woman who says she witnessed the Williams shooting.

The investigator talked with this woman, Evelyn Cruz, the day before the trial. Cruz said then that on the night of the shooting, she’d gotten off a Western Avenue bus, in front of Rockwell Gardens, and had walked to her building in the project. While waiting for the elevator, she’d heard gunfire.

Now she tells the investigator she actually saw the shooting—and Harris doing it. She knew Harris from the project—they’d lived in the same
building for a time—and so she was sure it was him. She says she was afraid to tell the whole truth before, but she’s reconsidered.

The prosecutors had Harris himself to thank for this witness. Harris had given Cruz’s name to his lawyers before the trial as a possible alibi witness. The PDs had sent an investigator to talk with her, but she’d told him what she later told the state’s investigator—that she’d only heard the shooting and hadn’t seen Harris until afterward. The PDs decided they probably wouldn’t call her as a witness, but they included her name on the list of potential witnesses they gave the state.

Prosecutors Ostrowski and Dalkin can hardly believe their ears the following morning when their investigator tells them about the call from Cruz. It’s like one of those far-fetched scenarios that happen weekly in courtroom dramas on TV. It looks like a great fact for the state and an awful one for Harris. But there is a problem for the prosecutors: they rested their case the day before.

With the jury waiting in the jury room, Ostrowski and Dalkin ask Locallo to allow them to reopen so they can put Cruz on the stand. Campanelli and Brown strenuously object. Cruz’s testimony would be suspect, Campanelli contends—she’s given conflicting statements about what she actually witnessed, and it’s taken her more than two and a half years to incriminate Harris. “All right, she has some baggage,” Locallo concedes. But it should be up to the jury, he says, to evaluate her credibility. Locallo retires to his chambers and calls his boss, Presiding Judge Thomas Fitzgerald, to get his opinion. Then, back in the courtroom, he says that since a trial’s mission is to seek the truth, he’ll allow the state to reopen. He tells Campanelli and Brown they can interview Cruz before she takes the stand. She’s waiting in the prosecutor’s office.

After Campanelli’s talk with Cruz convinces her she’d be a devastating witness against Harris, the PDs see the writing on the wall. This extra ace for the state makes it foolish for Harris to stay in the game, they decide. It’s time for him to cut his losses if he can by pleading.

But Ostrowski isn’t eager to bargain now that he holds all the cards. So the PDs decide to haggle directly with Locallo.

Harris can’t expect a huge discount for folding in the middle of his trial. Including the day spent picking the jury, he’s already eaten up two court days. But his plea right now would save the full day the remainder of the trial would likely consume. That ought to be worth
some
thing, the PDs figure.

After broaching the plea possibility with Locallo, all the lawyers meet in his chambers. Harris is present, too. Brown reminds Locallo that Harris was barely seventeen at the time of the shooting. He’d done well in school
before he’d given in to neighborhood pressures and joined a gang, she says. He’d been abandoned by his father. But he has a supportive family, Brown says, including his mother and a woman he regards as his stepmother (Butts), both of whom are in court today.

Locallo always factors the victim’s background into his sentencing calculation. Had Bennie Williams indeed been a gangbanger, Locallo would have offered Harris a shorter term. “When a victim is productive and going to school and has potential, that’s a greater loss to society than if he’s some goof who’s involved in gangs,” the judge says later. Williams “was a solid kid, a college kid—there was no reason for that student to be killed.”

Campanelli thinks it’s wrong for a judge to decide “that one victim’s life is worth more than another” when he’s contemplating a sentence. Ostrowski likewise thinks judges shouldn’t consider the victim’s background—for a different reason. Most victims of violent crimes tried at 26th Street aren’t college students from the suburbs; they tend to be from the same slum as the defendant, with their own gang affiliations and criminal records. So judges who weigh the victim’s background in the manner Locallo does are apt to sentence most defendants more lightly.

In a murder case, Locallo also factors in the interest shown by the surviving family. If they come to court regularly—as Williams’s survivors have—he’s likely to give the defendant a longer term. “Sometimes you take into consideration who weeps for the deceased,” he says. Campanelli thinks this, too, is improper. “But judges are human, and it’s hard not to be influenced” by the survivors in the gallery, she says.

The sentencing range is twenty to sixty years. (None of the aggravating circumstances exist that would allow an even stiffer penalty.)

Locallo offers Harris forty years for his plea today.

Ostrowski would like to push Locallo for a longer term—in part because of all the time his office has expended on Harris, what with the three hearings his pretrial motions necessitated and these two days of a jury trial. “He put us through a lot,” the prosecutor says later. But since Locallo just sided with the state on a key issue—the motion to reopen—Ostrowski thinks he owes it to Locallo not to quibble with him about his plea proposal.

Ostrowski’s partner, Dalkin, is ambivalent about the prospects of the trial ending early. It makes sense to him to secure the conviction. But a guilty plea would leave him feeling deprived. After six months as a third-chair prosecutor, this is his first murder-jury. When he was in law school, imagining himself as a lawyer, he saw himself trying cases in front of a jury—not standing in front of the bench day after day, pushing through plea deals in car thefts and two-bit drug cases. He stayed up late last night
crafting his closing argument, and he was looking forward to delivering it today. Now it appears that that was a wasted effort. Dalkin also worries that if the trial is truncated with a plea, it may not count as one of the six jury trials he needs to advance to second chair.

In a small conference room off the courtroom, Campanelli and Brown urge Harris to take Locallo’s offer. They remind him that with the day-for-day good-conduct credit he’d really need to do only twenty years. The PDs also remind Harris that he’s already served almost three years in the jail, so he’d only be locked up another seventeen. Insist on the trial continuing, and he could end up with a sixty-year sentence, they warn him. “This offer is guaranteed,” Campanelli tells Harris. “But nothing is guaranteed after trial.”