Courtroom 302 (7 page)

No future heaters on this morning’s radio, though. Certainly nothing rivaling the Bridgeport case. Three white teens from the south-side Bridgeport neighborhood were charged last year with attempted murder, having allegedly beaten a thirteen-year-old black boy nearly to death for bicycling through their neighborhood. One of the defendants, Frank Caruso Jr., is the son of a reputed mobster. Locallo can’t imagine a hotter heater: President Clinton decried the attack in his weekly radio address, and Mayor Daley demanded the culprits be brought to justice. Reporters surely will flock to the trial. And Locallo is still pinching himself: the Randomizer—the computer program that parcels out 26th Street’s cases among its thirty trial court judges—kicked the case into his courtroom. The upcoming trial alone is reason to look forward to this year—and not just because of the certain publicity. No, the Bridgeport case is more than a heater; in Locallo’s mind, it is a pivotal case, a chance to show African Americans that the system isn’t really stacked against them.

He’s always known he’d do something momentous. When he was three, his mother sewed him a
Superman cape, and he wore it constantly. A flight from a bedroom dresser one afternoon that resulted in stitches under his chin didn’t shake his faith in his endowments.

At age ten, he saw
To Kill a Mockingbird
in a Little Rock, Arkansas, theater. Little Rock was his mother’s hometown, and his family was visiting relatives. He watched the handsome country lawyer, Atticus Finch, argue passionately on behalf of Tom Robinson, the black man wrongly accused of rape. He listened intently as Finch told the white jury and the packed
courtroom how the courts were “the great levelers,” how in the courts “all men are created equal.” No matter that Finch and Robinson lost; Finch had done the honorable thing, and the ten-year-old boy could picture himself in that dashing three-piece suit, arguing bravely in that crowded courtroom.

He got his chance in 1978, though as a prosecutor instead of as a defense lawyer. It took him less than nine years to win appointment to the bench, at age thirty-three. The
bar associations have praised his intelligence, diligence, fairness, and integrity as a judge.

When he reaches Jackson Boulevard this morning, he turns east. The road curves through Columbus Park and then straightens, slicing through a neighborhood markedly different from his own. Small frame houses with sagging porches are mixed in with boarded-up buildings and weedy vacant lots. A sign in one of the vacant lots promises “$10 for Good Used Radiators.” Discount food and liquor stores advertise the Lotto in their front windows. This is the Austin neighborhood, part of the city’s sprawling, poor, black west side—a fertile pasture for defendants. He finds the shift in landscape unremarkable; he’s driven this route or similar ones to the courthouse for years. He follows the sweep of the boulevards—Jackson to Independence to Douglas. He happens to cross the route Larry Bates hiked earlier this morning.

He’d never have recognized Bates on the street, though. Hundreds of defendants pass through his courtroom each year; he couldn’t remember each one. The heater defendants, for sure, but they’re few and far between. The vast majority of 26th Street cases don’t attract the eye of an alderman, let alone the mayor or the president. Car thefts. Possession cases involving sneeze-and-it’s-gone amounts of cocaine or heroin. No reporters watch these; often the defendant’s relatives don’t even show.

The judges in TV dramas and movies are always presiding over heart-stopping jury trials, with riveting testimony and passionate arguments—action punctuated by a banging gavel and calls for order by the judge. About the only use a gavel gets at 26th Street is holding down papers in chambers. As for jury trials, judges here might do
one a month. Locallo and his colleagues spend most of their days prodding defendants toward the finish line—toward pleas of guilty that spare the county the burden of trials. A judge could tire of this mundane work, could wonder what he was accomplishing as he hurried defendants out the back door while ever more streamed in the front. And many judges did tire of it, requesting transfers to the civil courts downtown. But eleven years on the bench, most of them at 26th Street, have yet to sour Locallo; he still awakens eager to get to the courthouse, even on mornings like this, with no trial scheduled. He prides himself on his management skills, especially in how nimbly he sheds the
fat from his docket, how quickly he disposes of the “bullshit cases,” as he calls them, saving the court’s time for the cases that merit it. The Bridgeport case, for instance.

Douglas Boulevard bends into Sacramento Boulevard, Sacramento into California. He cruises by the 1-800-NOTGLTY billboard and the parking lot beyond it. Just past 26th and California, he swings onto the courthouse grounds at the “Shipping/Receiving” sign, waving to the deputy in the small brick outpost nearby. He parks his Lumina in the lot for judges behind the courthouse and enters a rear door.

His first stop today, as usual, is the office of the presiding judge at 26th Street, Thomas Fitzgerald. A half-dozen judges are drinking coffee and chatting in the first-floor suite already. Fitzgerald has let his judges know they can drop by any morning before they head upstairs. Locallo looks forward to these few minutes of fraternizing before taking the bench. He tends to gab about his golf game or his kids’ athletic achievements. Sometimes he’ll solicit a veteran judge’s advice on a thorny issue developing in a case in his courtroom. In recent years, judges more often have sought
his
counsel, aware of his grasp of case law. This morning, after coffee and twenty minutes of small talk, Locallo leaves Fitzgerald’s office and walks down a corridor toward the judges’ elevator. It’s nine forty-five, time to get the call going.

BATES IS HEMMED IN
on the back pew between a skinny young man in a Dallas Cowboys jacket and an older woman in a Fila coat when Locallo materializes at the front of the courtroom, in the doorway to the left of the judicial bench, at 9:50. He’s still zipping on the black robe over his white shirt and tie as he heads to the bench.

When the judge appears in some courtrooms at 26th Street, the clerk or a deputy commands everyone to rise, declaring that the Circuit Court of Cook County is now in session, the Honorable So-and-So presiding, and informing the spectators that talking and newspaper reading are forbidden. Locallo finds such pomp embarrassing and the prohibitions silly, especially in a courtroom with a sealed-off gallery. Court starts without ceremony once he settles into his high-backed leather swivel chair, and he or his clerk calls the first case.

Locallo has brown eyes and a fair complexion that pinks up in the golf season. Well-developed jaw muscles broaden his face below the ears. His hair is wavy black and full but graying on the sides. He keeps it medium length and feathered back on top, but short on the sides and in back. He stays closely shaven. He often wears a bemused expression, as if he knows the joke but is above laughing at it.

He played baseball and football in high school and still has an athlete’s cocky carriage—shoulders back, chest out. But he’s forty-five now, and he doesn’t burn many calories swiveling and rocking behind the bench. As with many judges, the robe hides an expanding belly.

His long, curved bench is cluttered with law books, file folders in precarious heaps, and transcripts in black binders. More files and binders litter the floor beneath the bench. A desk calendar from Notre Dame High School, the judge’s alma mater, occupies the eye of the turmoil, the area on the bench he leans over from his leather chair. In the calendar’s squares Locallo records, in black ink, the dates of upcoming trials and hearings on motions and, in red, the dates of his son’s and daughter’s cross-country meets, volleyball matches, baseball and basketball games. Trials and hearings frequently extend into early evenings, so whenever possible he schedules them for dates other than the ones containing red ink. His clerk, Duane Sundberg, is lining up files at the end of the bench to the judge’s right; today’s court reporter, Paul Marzano, sits poised before his steno at the bench’s other end, adjacent to the witness stand.

Twenty-sixth Street’s original courtrooms, spacious and trimmed in oak, are on floors four through seven. These cramped courtrooms on the second and third floors were added a half century later. Prosecutors and defense lawyers may have polar views about their cases, but in 302 they make their pitches from tables a yard apart. A drab gray carpet covers the floor, and a chintzy fabric is peeling from the walls. The lack of any windows in the courtroom proper accentuates the claustrophobic feel. In the old courtrooms upstairs, with their rows of tall windows, the sun occasionally registers its own opinion at a trial’s pivotal moment, casting a lawyer in brightness or a defendant in shadows during closing argument. The immutable fluorescent lights in 302 free the proceedings of such bias and drama. The majestic courtrooms upstairs were built when jury trials were more common. For taking a plea, a broom closet will do.

The courtroom’s only windows are in the gallery, three narrow ones on the right. On sunny mornings the reflection on the Plexiglas makes it hard to see into the courtroom from the gallery. The courtroom proceedings are transmitted to the spectators via ceiling speakers. From time to time during a typical day, a lawyer will have a bit of news to share privately with the judge—an update on a prosecutor’s recovery from gallbladder surgery or on a defense attorney’s case before a disciplinary committee. Locallo will lean forward confidentially and flip a switch on the underside of the bench; the spectators in the gallery will hear only their own breathing. Locallo is better than many judges at remembering to turn the sound back on after
the social sidebar, but he too forgets sometimes. When he does, the spectators usually sit in meek silence at first; then glance quizzically at one another; then start analyzing their predicament. (“He need to cut that mike back on.”) Before one of them risks an act so bold as tapping on the Plexiglas or gesturing to a deputy or clerk, a courthouse regular is likely to happen into the gallery from the hallway, grasp the problem, and come to the rescue, approaching the glass doors with a hand cupped behind an ear, and Locallo will lean forward and restore the audio.

A “Do
Not
Use This Door!” warning is taped on the left side of the glass double door to the courtroom proper. Lawyers often ignore it, barreling mindlessly through the door, which then screeches in protest. The door sticks open as the attorney hurries on into the courtroom. The job of shoving the door closed, with another irritating screech, belongs to a person of lesser rank, usually one of the deputies. When Deputy Guerrero does it, he’s likely to be muttering something about law school graduates not being able to read a damn sign. The door has been out of whack for as long as anyone can remember. When the sign becomes too tattered, the deputies replace it with a fresh one.

THE MAIN JOB
in the courthouse has always been sorting. The judges and lawyers sift through the raw material dropped off by police and determine who gets to walk out of the courthouse and who must leave on a bus with barred windows.
About three-quarters of the defendants are convicted. Of these, just over half are sentenced to prison, with most of the remainder getting probation. Clerks write the shipping orders for the prison-bound, judges sign them, and jail guards fill them.

Twenty defendants are scheduled to appear before the bench on this Thursday in mid-January. Their cases are various distances from completion. Lawyers will update Locallo on a case’s status, and in most instances, after a couple of minutes, he’ll give the defendant another court date. But with luck at least a few cases will cross the finish line today.

Prosecutor Joe Alesia tenders “discovery” to defense attorneys in one of the day’s first cases, in which two young men are charged with relieving two other young men of their Air Jordans at gunpoint. As usual, this “discovery” consists mostly of police reports regarding the alleged robbery. Before the next court date, the defense lawyers will study the reports for inconsistencies and omissions. A glaring error can cause a lawyer to advise his client to gamble on a trial; a minor flaw can at least be brought up in plea discussions when trying to extract a markdown from the state. Even an airtight police report helps the defense lawyer: he can use it to persuade
his client to wave the white flag and grab the state’s best offer. Locallo continues the robbery case to February.

Clerk Sundberg calls Leslie McGee. A seventeen-year-old female from the lockup is ushered before the bench. She blows a kiss to a relative in the gallery on her way. McGee is charged with shooting a cabbie to death. Her public defender tells Locallo she’s involved in “negotiations” with the state. Locallo continues the case for a month.

Soon the judge starts running through the VOPs—the violation of probation cases. Larry Bates is the first probationer summoned before the judge. His stomach flutters when Sundberg calls his name, but he rises quickly in his pew and strides purposefully to the bench. In front of the bench, he parks himself next to a tall, olive-skinned woman with long dark hair, assuming she’s the PD who’s representing him today. Actually the woman, Rhonda Schullo, is a liaison for the probation department.

Schullo informs the judge of Bates’s failure to complete his community service. Locallo glances down at Bates.

“Do you wanna be able to leave this courtroom?” Locallo’s voice is a strong, sure tenor, with the authentic twang and
dis-an-dat
s of a white Chicago product. He slightly slurs his
s
’s.

“Yes, sir,” Bates says. He tries to catch Locallo’s eyes, but they’ve already shifted back to the paperwork in front of him on the bench.

“Do you wanna be able to be on the street?”

“Yes, sir.”

Locallo gives him another court date—March 25—and a warning that he complete the last four days of community service by then. If his docket were less bloated, the judge wouldn’t grant Bates two months to finish up four days’ work. Bates glides out of the courtroom to the hallway. Smoking isn’t allowed in the corridors, but many people do, and Bates is craving a cigarette. The urge to leave the building, however, is stronger right now. He hustles down the stairs, past the docket board, the Gangbanger Café, and the sour deputies at the metal detectors, and out the revolving door. He lights his cigarette on the plaza, promising himself he’ll take care of that community service really soon.