Courtroom 302 (27 page)

At 4:50 he calls for the Betts jury again, and testimony resumes before an empty gallery.

PUBLIC DEFENDER EBEN
’
S
closing argument for Betts the following day is laden with baseball metaphors—fitting, perhaps, after the murderers’ row of witnesses who went to bat for his client.

Prosecutors get to speak first and last in closing argument, although they’re allotted about the same amount of total time as the defense. During the state’s first summation, by Mark Ostrowski, Eben noticed the rapt attention paid by the middle-aged black juror in the first row, Rufus McGee. Every time Ostrowski made a point, McGee had smiled and nodded. So now Eben tries hard to catch McGee’s eye, but McGee looks everywhere else.

Prosecutor Alesia jabs his finger at Betts and glowers at him during the
state’s rebuttal argument but fails to goad Betts into an outburst like the one he made in the first trial.

The jury gets the case at 2:50
P.M
. The prosecutors and PDs return to their offices in the administration building. Locallo heads downstairs for a hot dog from the Gangbanger Café. The court reporter stays in the courtroom, tapping away at a transcript on her laptop.

At 3:10 angry voices rise from the jury room. The court reporter cocks her head, fingers suspended above her keyboard. Then she swivels out of her chair and tiptoes into the hallway outside the jury room, where she nearly collides with Deputy Rhodes, who has tiptoed there faster. They trade silent grins. A man is doing most of the yelling: “They put it on a dead man! It don’t take no Charlie Chan to figure this one out!”

The door at the rear of the courtroom suddenly swings open, and Locallo strides into the gallery. “Uh-oh, judge is back,” the court reporter alerts Rhodes in a whisper. The two women don’t want Locallo to catch them eavesdropping on the jury, and so they duck into the sheriff’s station. Locallo, jamming home the last of his hot dog, heads to his chambers.

Eben returns to 302 a few minutes later, and Rhodes and the court reporter fill him in on the Charlie Chan remark. Eben guesses the source was Rufus McGee.

“Maybe they’ll make him foreman,” Rhodes suggests with a smile.

There’s a relaxed air in the courtroom now, typical after a jury trial, like the relief at home once company has left. The company in 302 hasn’t quite departed, but it’s safely lodged in the jury room; no need now for solemn airs. Locallo takes the bench to mop up his call, then notices a fly buzzing over the well of the courtroom. He descends from the bench, armed with a folded
Sun-Times
and a purposeful look, a black-robed little-game hunter. In the middle of the courtroom he eyes his prey near the ceiling, swats vainly once with the tabloid, shrugs, and returns to the bench.

The deputies line up the prisoners in the deputies’ hallway, and Locallo commences holding brief status hearings and doling out continuances. Public defender John Conniff represents the defendants, and prosecutor Mark Ertler has the honors for the state. Ertler has just this week been rotated into 302; he’s replacing Alesia, who’s moving on to another courtroom. One of the defendants, Todd Hayden, a tall, bearded African American charged with attempted murder and armed violence, breaks the routine. Hayden doesn’t want a PD or a private lawyer; he wants to represent himself.

On the rare occasions when defendants at 26th Street tell the judge they’d like to go
pro se
(speak on their own behalf), the judges try to talk them out of it. Few defendants have the legal knowledge and experience
necessary to mount an adequate defense, and
case law directs judges to inform defendants of the disadvantages of self-representation. Moreover, pro se defendants usually insist on jury trials, which they make unbearably long with their ignorance of trial procedures. Pro se defendants are always a nuisance to the court, but they’re not always foolish. In 1994 a pro se defendant named Gregory Hudson won acquittal from a jury in a double-murder trial. Defense lawyers dubbed his victory the “
Miracle at 26th Street,” and the losing prosecutors were the butt of jokes from colleagues for weeks. (But the miracle had an expiration date.
A year later Hudson was back at the courthouse, charged with armed violence; he represented himself again, was convicted, and got an extended sentence of fifty years.)

“I’m gonna remind you of a saying,” Locallo tells Hayden. “ ‘A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.’ The law allows you to represent yourself, but I don’t recommend it. But that will be your choice.”

Hayden tells Locallo he’s taken criminal justice classes at a city college. “I’ve studied law all my life—civil, criminal, domestic,” he says.

When Locallo asks Ertler for Hayden’s background, the prosecutor lists convictions going back more than twenty years, for car theft, burglary, robbery.

“Let the record reflect that I’m demanding trial,” Hayden says.

“We may be picking the jury tomorrow,” Locallo bluffs.

But Hayden isn’t deterred. “I’m demanding trial. If you say it’s tomorrow, it’s tomorrow.”

“Well, I’m not saying it’ll be tomorrow,” Locallo retreats, “but get your witnesses ready, and we’ll see what the situation is.”

The judge continues the case for only one day. He hopes Hayden will come to his senses overnight and agree to accept a PD. In the meantime just one day will be lost toward the speedy-trial deadline.

After Deputy Guerrero ushers Hayden back to the lockup, normalcy returns; one by-agreement continuance after another. At 3:36 there are shouts from the jury room again.

And five minutes after this latest hubbub, the jury buzzes. It’s had the case less than an hour. Rhodes returns from the jury room a moment later and informs Locallo that there is indeed a verdict.

“All right, call the other attorneys, please,” the judge says.

Fifteen minutes later the principals are at their respective tables in the courtroom. There are no loved ones in the gallery rooting for Betts, nor any survivors of Bernard Carter’s praying for a conviction. (Carter’s grandmother, Ora Lee Carter, left after testifying on Friday, saying she didn’t see the need to sit through the trial again.) A PD from another courtroom on the floor is here out of curiosity. He’s predicting a not guilty; fast verdicts
are usually acquittals, he says. Next to him Kenneth Madoch, the court reporter for most of the trial but not today, forecasts a guilty verdict but acknowledges that this may be wishful thinking. “I always predict guilty. You ever hear of anyone appealing his case after he gets acquitted?” Appeals mean transcript orders for the court reporter at
a dollar-eighty a page.

The jurors file into the jury box. Locallo asks the foreperson to rise and hand the verdict to Rhodes. At the defense table, Eben’s head drops subtly; the foreperson
is
Rufus McGee. Betts, too, is disappointed. McGee’s body language throughout the trial convinced Betts that McGee “wanted to find me guilty
bad
,” Betts says later. Rhodes walks the verdict over to Locallo. The judge reads it to himself and then hands it to clerk Sundberg to read to the court.

Not
guilty. Betts beams and claps twice, then hugs his lawyers while Alesia and Ostrowski silently gather their files at the state’s table.

“
I DIDN
’
T EVEN WANT
to be on this jury,” foreperson Rufus McGee says later. “I would’ve rather worked.”

McGee, forty-four, a resident of a south suburb and a mail carrier for nineteen years, says he was stunned to learn, when deliberations began, that not everyone was convinced of Betts’s guilt. In fact, the first vote had been nine to three for acquittal, with McGee and two white men comprising the minority, and all six women voting not guilty. “I thought it was gonna be the blacks against the whites,” McGee says. “But most of the whites were saying not guilty! I was the only black guy who said ‘Fuck him.’ I wanted to hang his ass. I don’t care nothin’ for no gangbangers.”

He says he didn’t fight harder for his view, even though his instincts said Betts was guilty, because he found the evidence lacking. There were conflicts in the testimony of the officer in the barbershop and the officer down the hall, he says. But McGee allows that practical considerations also persuaded him to give in quickly. “They got us cramped up in this little room, and I was ready to get the hell outta there, man. But I still held out—for about twenty minutes. Then I thought, let’s get this over with. I was tired of being in that room with them ladies. Them broads let him off. I don’t even think they should let any ladies on the jury, period. They’re too sentimental. And they use the washroom too much. How many times you gotta piss in an hour?”

McGee had followed the Bridgeport case in the newspapers and knew it was assigned to Locallo. The killing of Mike Cutler had occurred on the first day of the Betts trial, and McGee had read the stories about it with interest. “Those white guys are gonna walk now, man,” he says of the
Bridgeport defendants. “They probably paid some stupid black guys to do it. Of course it was a hit. It don’t take Charlie Chan to figure that out.”

“
MAN I
’
M TELLING YOU
, ain’t no feeling like that,” Betts says later about what it was like for him to hear the clerk read “Not guilty.” “Only way you could feel like that is if you hit the Lotto for about a hundred million dollars.”

Betts says that he and the victim, Bernard Carter, were affiliated with different factions of the Vice Lords, factions that were in conflict at the time of the shanking. While Carter was giving Betts the haircut, he whispered something to Betts concerning the gang dispute. Betts wouldn’t say what he whispered, just that it angered him. “So then I stood up and punched him,” Betts says. “But I didn’t stab him. When I punched him, he fell back, and a bunch of guys grabbed him, and he fell down. And I ran out of the barbershop.” He says he’s not sure who actually shanked Carter, but that Carter “got what he had coming.”

Betts’s witnesses had said nothing about Betts punching Carter; they’d testified that Betts had simply walked out of the shop after his haircut. So if Betts is telling the truth, then all of his witnesses lied.

Betts soon is returned to a prison in Joliet to continue serving the sixty-five-year term he got in 1993 for a different murder. He hopes this victory in Locallo’s courtroom can be used to get his time reduced in the other case. The judge who gave him sixty-five years had taken into account the shanking of Carter that Betts then stood accused of. Judges can consider other pending criminal charges, not just convictions, in determining a sentence. But now that he’s been acquitted of the shanking, Betts plans to petition for resentencing in that case. His ultimate hope is to win a new trial and an acquittal of that murder as well. It might seem a pipe dream, but not to someone who’s beaten a case he’d once pled guilty to. What’s to say he can’t win the Lotto again?

THE FOLLOWING DAY
, with Betts finally out of the way, there’s some real movement on Locallo’s docket. The judge had twenty-eight defendants on his calendar, but now he’s got time to hold plea conferences and rack up dispos. He tempts one defendant after another—conditional discharge, probation, boot camp or, at most, a brief prison stay—and one after another pleads. An accused pickpocket grabs an offer of three and a half years, total, for guilty pleas in his three cases. That’s three dispos. The pro se defendant, Todd Hayden, also brightens Locallo’s day. He tells the judge he might still want to represent himself, but he agrees to allow Lisco
to represent him for now. Locallo continues the case for a month “by agreement” between Lisco and the state.

Locallo chalks up an exceptional fourteen dispos on the day. All of these are by plea except for one case, and the judge disposes of that one expeditiously, too—with a stipulated bench trial.

“Stip benches,” as they’re called at 26th Street, are Cliff’s Notes versions of real trials. They’re usually conducted when the state won’t reduce a charge that the judge thinks should be reduced. The two sides go through the motions of a trial as rapidly as possible, substituting for actual testimony the capsule stipulations of what they believe witnesses would say. Also known as “slow pleas” and “try-downs,” stip benches are popular in courthouses throughout the country because of the time they save. The judge informs the defendant of the result ahead of time. “Verdict and sentence first—trial afterward,” the Queen of Hearts might say.

The defendant in today’s stip bench is charged with possession of 1,277 grams of cannabis with intent to deliver. Locallo asks the state to reduce the charge to simple possession so he can give the defendant probation, but the prosecutors won’t. The “trial” takes three minutes. Locallo finds the defendant guilty of the lesser charge, as he promised he would. The defendant gets his probation, the state gets its conviction, the public defender momentarily has one fewer client, and Locallo has another dispo.

^*
“Linda” requested that I not use her real name, nor those of her friends.

NINE

Perseveration

LOCALLO USUALLY BRIGHTENS
when he talks about his days as a prosecutor. But not when you bring up his most significant case—the prosecution of George Jones.

Locallo was the lead state’s attorney when the nineteen-year-old was tried for murder, rape, attempted murder, home invasion, and burglary in 1982. Before Locallo finished putting on the state’s evidence, Jones was cleared of all charges.

The case led to two federal lawsuits.
One forced changes in the procedures of detectives and prosecutors.
The other resulted in an $801,000 award to Jones—damages assessed against the city and seven Chicago police employees for false arrest, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

“
A frightening abuse of power by members of the Chicago police force” was at work in the Jones criminal case, a federal appeals court panel said in 1988. Detectives “were determined to put away George Jones regardless of the evidence.”