Courtroom 302 (62 page)

When Bates completed his ninety days and was released early on a December morning, he felt more than ready to go. “Halle
lu
jah!” and “Praise the
Lord
!” he said upon leaving the center. He was brimming with pride and optimism as he rode a bus back toward the west side. “I felt like my being patient and persistent had paid off. I wanted to get back to living as a human being who’s about something, and who
has
something. I wanted to get back to being responsible.”

He found work as a machinist in a small factory. It paid minimum wage, “but you gotta crawl before you can walk,” he said then.

Two weeks after he left the rehab center he got married to Lillie Gross, the mother of two of his children. Gross, a hospital nutritionist and a longtime friend from church, had been visiting Bates in jail and in the rehab center. When he got out of the center “he seemed like the man I met twenty-some years ago,” Gross said. “I know he can relapse. But life is a chance. I’ll be there to support him even if he does fall back to his addiction.”

The wedding was on a Saturday evening in the Inspirational Deliverance Center, a west-side chapel. Bates wore a black tuxedo with a white boutonniere pinned to his lapel, and a white bow tie. About seventy-five people attended, the vast majority women and children. A friend of the couple sang “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You.” When the pastor told Bates, “You may salute your bride,” he gave Lillie a bashful peck. Then he and Lillie quickstepped out of the chapel under the arched hands of their bridesmaids and groomsmen and to the cheers of those in the pews.

When Bates would head home from work at the end of a day he’d almost always encounter some of his drugging friends. They made it clear he was more than welcome to join them again. “But I know what’s gonna happen to me if I get into that same type of lunacy. I’m gonna end up in prison,” Bates said in December 1998.

After several months at minimum wage, he began tiring of crawling, but with his felony record he couldn’t find anything better. He and Lillie quarreled occasionally. His friends’ overtures grew more enticing. By mid-1999 he was into that lunacy again, selling drugs to pay for drugs. By early 2001 he was back at 26th Street, charged with two new drug-dealing offenses. He pled guilty to both in February 2001 and headed to prison for the first time, at age forty-seven, with a seven-and-a-half-year sentence.

Bates applied for work-release when he got to within two years of his parole date. But he was informed that the nature of his conviction—drug-dealing within a thousand feet of a park or school—made him ineligible. It also disqualified him from serving his last year at home on electronic detention.

As he neared his release date, May 2004, he tried to prepare himself mentally for being free again. As a fifty-year-old with multiple felony drug convictions, finding work would be a challenge, he understood. “It ain’t gonna come as fast as I want, this I know. I’ll have to go through a lotta turndowns. Since I’ve been here I’ve seen some thirty guys leave and come back,” he said of his minimum-security prison in Taylorville.

Lillie picked him up on his release date and drove him back to Chicago. They’ve been living with her parents on the west side ever since.

As of late November 2004 Bates had stayed clear of further criminal problems. But his employment woes had persisted and that outlook remained gloomy. He’d worked sporadically—drywall and plumbing jobs, temporary service. He’s filled out many applications but his criminal record kept him from landing anything permanent. “It’s been a struggle but I haven’t given up,” he said that month.

It also was a battle to stay off cocaine. Down his block he could see young men making their sales. “It’s hard to resist, I ain’t gonna lie to you,” he said. “It’s a fight every day.” When he wasn’t working he kept himself busy—lifting weights, applying for jobs, visiting his children, and playing with his three grandchildren. He believed that if he walked down the street and bought a rock he’d be headed back to prison before long—and that the next sentence would probably be at least ten years. “Being a criminal and doing drugs ain’t nothing but a downward plunge all the way,” he said. “I just have to stay focused on what I have to do. I’m getting too old for this type of situation.”

DESPITE DROPS
in violent crime,
Cook County keeps sending more inmates to prison—19,299 in 2003, up from 15,529 in 1997. Much of that 24 percent increase was attributable to a
crackdown on parole violators. The
largest proportion of newly sentenced prisoners, however, continues to be drug offenders. The shipments of new prisoners from Cook County are
still 80 percent African American.

Both the jail and the courthouse at 26th Street are still swamped, mainly because of the drug cases. In 2002, with the jail population rising above eleven thousand, Cook County sheriff Michael Sheahan announced that he might have to house some
inmates in tents. That didn’t happen, but
fifteen hundred inmates slept on floors on some nights. The glut of prisoners has put pressure on courthouse staff to dispose of cases even faster.

Police wagons still drop off prisoners at the rear door of the courthouse every day, but the prisoners are no longer carted from the basement to a first-floor courtroom for their bond hearings. Instead, the defendants are ushered one by one in front of a camera in a cramped office in the basement. On a small TV monitor they see the image of the judge who will set their bond. The judge is at his bench in a courtroom on the floor above; as soon as he sees the defendant on his monitor, and sometimes before, he commences rushing through the bond hearing script. Spectators in the courtroom gallery see a tiny TV image of their relative or friend, and the defendants in the basement don’t see their loved ones at all. The defendants are
“not distracted by who’s in the courtroom, families present and so forth,” a bond court judge observed after the system was introduced in 1999. An official in the public defender’s office decried the “dehumanizing” system when it began. But a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office crowed about the time saved by the innovation.

IN MARCH
1999 Locallo was transferred to a civil courtroom downtown. This was a little more than a month after the first purported threat on his life, but he said the transfer had nothing to do with that. The chief judge of the circuit court, Donald O’Connell, had asked him to make the switch to the Law Division, which handles personal injury and medical malpractice suits seeking $50,000 and up. “I don’t get a rush out of those kind of cases. I like dealing with cases concerning personal liberty,” Locallo said shortly before he left 26th Street. “But you don’t turn the chief judge down.” He also figured he might be improving his chances of moving up to the appellate court by broadening his judicial résumé.

His office after the transfer was in the Richard J. Daley Center, in the North Loop, Courtroom 1912. Think of the year the
Titanic
sank, he’d tell jurors. He had indeed risen in the court system—sixteen floors. His chambers were larger, and he’d gone from no natural light to sometimes too much: the office overheated on summer mornings from all the sun he got through his floor-to-ceiling windows. On the rare occasions when he paused in his work, he could see the sailboats on Lake Michigan.

The defendants here weren’t dark-skinned men and women in tan uniforms, guarded by deputies; they were doctors, hospitals, corporations, and public agencies. As at 26th Street, the vast majority of civil cases were resolved without a trial. In a typical month, he’d settle fifteen to twenty-five cases in pretrial conferences and preside over just one or two trials. He enjoyed the give-and-take with the lawyers in the pretrial conferences and prided himself on his knack for generating settlements. The conferences were similar to plea bargaining, he found, except the haggling was over
large sums of money instead of years in prison. Disposition tally sheets were sent to judges monthly here instead of weekly, a reflection of the lesser importance of dispos as compared with 26th Street. He stayed among the dispo leaders nevertheless.

In April 2004 Locallo blundered, and he was subsequently exiled to a courthouse in suburban Rolling Meadows. It was an extracurricular mistake. A presiding judge in a different division had taken, Locallo thought, way too long to dispose of a case. Locallo concocted twenty facetious reasons the judge had held onto the case so long, photocopied the list, and distributed it to some judges and lawyers. When the object of his lampoon got wind of it she voiced her displeasure to the chief judge, and Locallo was soon on his way to the suburbs, where he was relegated to hearing minor civil suits.

Locallo told me late in 2004 that he expected the chief judge to transfer him back downtown before long. “This is like work-release,” he said. “The cases here are by no stretch complicated. There’s not enough work. It’s basically a waste of my talent. But that’s the price you pay for literary license.”

In November 2004 Locallo was retained again, along with the seventy other Cook County circuit judges on the retention ballot. The bar groups once again extolled him. “His fairness and integrity are unquestioned,” the Chicago Council of Lawyers said. The CCL called him “exceptionally skillful” at running a courtroom and “exceptionally hard-working,” and it expressed concern that “such a talented jurist is not assigned to a division where he would be able to preside over more complex matters.”

Locallo turned fifty-two in October 2004. He hasn’t run for the appellate court because there haven’t been vacancies recently, but he still plans to. “I’m shooting for 2006—there might be some openings then,” he told me late in 2004. “I still have the passion to get there but I will not consider myself a failure if I don’t.”

He missed his colleagues at 26th Street, but not much else about the place. He wanted to get back to doing the big lawsuits in the Daley Center; he’d found that assignment fulfilling and the environment pleasing. His work as a criminal court judge had been more important, though, he said: “Liberty is more precious than money. A lot of people can get by without much money, but it’s pretty tough to be in a cage.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SOURCES

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project began with an Alicia Patterson Fellowship I was awarded in 1993 to report on urban criminal courts and the poor. The fellowship allowed me to take a leave from my job as a feature writer for the
Chicago Reader
to concentrate on this subject. My thanks to the Patterson foundation and its director at the time, Margaret Engel.

It was my great fortune that a judge for the Patterson competition that year was Robert A. Caro, the incomparable biographer and journalist. Caro thought I should write a book on the criminal courts, and he expressed faith in my ability to write an exceptional one. The confidence he has shown in me has been unwavering, and I will always be indebted to him for it.

Caro did more than suggest I write this book, however. He also connected me with Katherine Hourigan, managing editor at Knopf, who has been instrumental in the publication of all four of his books. Bob raved to me about Kathy’s literary judgment and about the care she lavished on her projects. With her editing of this book I have seen firsthand what Bob described: despite her many other responsibilities, she has found time to shape the book with care and wisdom. She has also been my patient champion, relentless in her conviction, even as I flailed about for years before finding my focus, that I would ultimately succeed.

I appreciate the help of Kathy’s assistant, Eric Bliss, production editor Kathleen Fridella, designer Iris Weinstein, production manager Marci Lewis, publicist Elizabeth Cochrane, and the legal counsel of Jon Fine.

My agent, David Black, believes that journalism is worth little if it isn’t readable, and that it isn’t readable unless it tells a story. His reminders of that improved the book. Thanks also to Joy Tutela at his agency.

Two colleagues at the
Reader
, John Conroy and Tori Marlan, read the book as it was developing, chapter by chapter. Their advice was indispensable, not only because they are superb writers, but also because they know the landscape well, having repeatedly shone lights into the shadows of the Cook County criminal justice system. Their criticism was precise, challenging, and yet kind, and their generosity with their time touched me.

I benefited from the expertise of two veteran 26th Street lawyers: private attorney Dan Coyne and Jeffrey Howard of the public defender’s office, who helped me understand the workings of both the law and the courthouse. Vincent Boggan’s knowledge of the law and the courthouse was also invaluable, particularly because he has seen things from a different perspective. A friend of many years, Vincent is doing time in the Menard Correctional Center. My conversations with him over the years have helped me understand a defendant’s view of the criminal justice system.

The beat reporters in the courthouse in 1998—Terry Wilson of the
Chicago Tribune
, Lorraine Forte of the
Chicago Sun-Times
, and Karen Craven of the
City News Bureau
—shared their hard–earned insights and were delightful company throughout the year. Rob Warden’s reporting on criminal justice in Cook County in the 1980s provided helpful background—particularly his outstanding coverage of the George Jones “street files” case and of Greylord. John Conroy’s pioneering work on torture by Chicago detectives aided my understanding of Leroy Orange’s case. The reporting of the
Tribune’s
Maurice Possley and Steve Mills has also enlightened me.

THE LATE DR. DONALD RACKY
hooked me on journalism when I was a freshman at Chicago’s St. Rita High School and he was the inspirational advisor to the school newspaper. He cultivated in me a skepticism essential for any reporter, but particularly for a reporter who would one day write about the courts.