Authors: Steve Bogira
“I understand clearly what the charges were, you know what I’m saying, all of that—but I wasn’t the person.”
“Well, the law does recognize that an individual can plead guilty if he wishes to,” Locallo says. Locallo knows that the
U.S. Supreme Court has even condoned the taking of guilty pleas, under certain circumstances, from defendants who insist they’re innocent.
Critics of this holding say it makes it easier for courts to convict the truly innocent.
But Supreme Court justices have been more concerned with the backlog in the criminal courts, and the need to keep the line moving.
“The law also recognizes if you want a trial, you can get a trial,” Locallo goes on. “Do you want a trial?”
“No, I’m gonna take this because I’m not gonna win,” Cameron says. “Ain’t no way I’m gonna win. I can’t beat this system, your honor.”
“You have to answer his questions,” Bidawid says.
Locallo asks him once more if he still wants to plead.
“Yeah, I still wish to do that.”
Locallo finds his plea to be “knowing and voluntary.”
Bidawid has Cameron sign a waiver of his right to a presentence investigation. The PSI, prepared by a probation officer, is designed to acquaint a judge more thoroughly with the defendant’s background—his upbringing, family, education, work history—so the sentencing decision will be an informed one. All that information is moot, though, in a 402, since the sentence has already been agreed upon.
IN THE PREDAWN HOURS
a week later, Cameron is loaded onto a bus with barred windows that takes him down Interstate 55 to Joliet, where he’s processed into the state’s prison system. Two weeks later another bus takes him farther southwest, not to the Graham Correctional Center—the one with the drug treatment program Locallo mentioned—but to the Illinois River Correctional Center in the town of Canton. “These people trick you,” Cameron says, of ending up in Illinois River instead of Graham.
Cameron says he spoke up during the plea conference because “I wanted someone to understand where I was coming from. We all got a story to tell. And some people had a rough life and some people didn’t. I think they should find out why people do the things they do. And see who the person really is. And see what you could do to make him
not
do the things they do, instead of always just locking ’em up.”
TWO
A Growth Industry
THE COURTHOUSE
has survived seven decades of hard wear and neglect largely because of the foresight of its designers. “
Lamentable but true, most civic and public buildings do not receive the best of care either from the occupants or from the caretakers,” Ralph Hammet, the building’s chief designer, wrote in an architectural magazine shortly after the building opened in 1929. “Special concern was taken to select good wearing materials, and floors, walls and trimmings that would not require expensive janitorial service.”
Expensive janitorial service isn’t provided, as visitors to the building’s public washrooms quickly learn. In the rusted and filthy sinks the water runs nonstop or not at all. Toilet stalls lack doors, and some lack toilets as well. Paper towel dispensers and toilet paper holders commonly dispense and hold nothing. The mirrors are cracked in the few washrooms that still have them. Floors are sticky, ceilings drip, and the insulation is frayed on the overhead pipes. The norm is expressed by the sign that appears one day on a wall in a first-floor washroom:
HAND BLOWER IS WORKING
.
The building’s water fountains function only as oversize ashtrays. Ceiling tiles are missing in some corridors, revealing the pipes above.
But the halls are mopped and the courtrooms vacuumed frequently. Except for the washrooms, the building isn’t particularly decrepit. More noticeable is the unwelcoming tenor of the hallways. There are no benches or chairs. Security cameras peep down from the ceilings. The walls are bare, save for the fire extinguishers and the many prohibition signs—forbidding smoking, hat-wearing, “unapproved group congregating,” and the “causing of a disturbance or nuisance.”
QUIET—
NO SMOKING, EATING, CHILDREN, TALKING
plaques hang next to the doors of most courtrooms. The view out the east windows is of the parking garage across California Boulevard; the west windows stare into the brick face of Division 1, the jail’s oldest building.
People congregate in the hallways despite the posted ban. Family members with worried faces talk in low voices, and defense lawyers inform clients of the prosecutor’s latest offer. A wet-eyed, middle-aged black woman may step into a hallway from a courtroom at any moment. Cops waiting to testify lean against walls, trading jokes. The officers in their navy sweaters and powder-blue shirts and the small clusters of dark-skinned youths in sports team jackets pretend to ignore one another. But perhaps they’re conversing on the washroom walls, where scrawled greetings such as
FUCK THE POLICE
adjoin salutations such as
ALL GANGBANGERS SUCK THEIR DEAD DADDIES DICK
.
From the outside the courthouse looks misplaced in this humble neighborhood. With its broad columns and Greco-Roman flourishes, the building resembles a museum—but no tour buses, and few cabs, ever venture to this location, six miles southwest of downtown. The eight allegorical figures in tunics and togas adorning the courthouse’s seventh story now seem a wasted effort. Each centered above one of the eight columns that stretch from floors three through six, they stare straight ahead, like police-lineup subjects ordered to face forward. They were carved by German-born sculptor Peter Toneman. In December 1997 Chicago artist Lynn Toneman, the wife of Peter Toneman’s great-grandson, had jury duty at 26th Street and saw the sculptures for the first time. She found them “impressive and intriguing” but was more struck by the “depressing chemistry” inside the courthouse, the “heartbreaking sight of these people in the hallways—people in trouble and their mothers and siblings.” Toneman and her fellow jurors voted to convict, after which she left the building “hoping I’d never have to return.”
On the boulevard in front of the courthouse, workers begin constructing
a decorative fountain in early 1998, one of three being added to the city’s boulevards with federal funds. The fountain will “blend Beaux Arts and Prairie Style,” a city press release says. It will have handmade ceramic tile accents, and lights in the pool and bowl will illuminate the cascading water at night. Benches, shade trees, and flowering shrubs will surround the fountain. A defense lawyer visiting Courtroom 302 one afternoon suggests it be christened the Bond Pond, in honor of the relatives of defendants he expects will loot it of its coins on their way to bond court. Andrew Dalkin, one of the prosecutors in 302, thinks the $280,000 to be spent on the fountain
is money down the drain. “They’re trying to add beauty to a place that’s beyond beautification,” Dalkin says.
COOK COUNTY
was founded in 1831, after soldiers had pushed most of the local Indians westward. That same year state legislators, recognizing the need for an organized system of law if justice were to prevail in the land taken from the Potawatomi, established the Circuit Court of Cook County.
Hearings and trials at first were conducted in taverns, stores, and churches. But the growth of the county seat, Chicago—from 350 residents in 1833, when it was incorporated as a town, to 3,300 two years later—led to the building of
the county’s first courthouse in 1835, on Chicago’s public square, at Clark and Randolph. Civil cases predominated initially. As Chicago’s population swelled, however, so did crime. The original courthouse was torn down and a larger one built on the public square in 1853.
The Chicago Fire destroyed that courthouse in 1871. In 1873 the county for the first time opened a courthouse exclusively for criminal cases, just north of downtown at Dearborn and Hubbard. Officials predicted it would suffice for fifty years. But the city’s population continued to increase, as did crime, and in twenty years that courthouse came down and a larger one went up on the spot.
“No other city of its size on earth goes often deeper or more wisely into its pockets to down crime,” the
Chicago Herald
boasted on the eve of the opening of the latest courthouse in 1893. “This big clearinghouse for crime will prove a mighty impregnable thing for evildoers to run against.” Evildoers continued to run against it, though, and soon that courthouse, too, was awash in cases, the jail overflowing with defendants. County officials responded in their usual way, asking taxpayers for yet another bigger courthouse and jail. But this time taxpayers balked, rejecting four bond appeals from 1915 through 1921.
In 1922 the county hired criminologist George
Kirchwey to study its dilemma. Kirchwey—former dean of the Columbia University Law School and former warden of New York’s Sing Sing prison—recommended that the county quit trying to build its way out of its crime problem and instead focus on stemming the tide of defendants. This would entail examining what led people to commit crime, and what could be done to change that, Kirchwey said—a tall order, he allowed, but in his mind the only real long-term solution. County officials weren’t interested in such a fanciful idea, but Kirchwey’s report helped them nonetheless, because he acknowledged that the present courthouse and jail were in such bad shape that new ones had to be built. The officials rallied civic leaders and the city’s newspapers
behind that recommendation, and
taxpayers finally approved a bond appeal in 1925.
Kirchwey’s larger point, about the need to study the causes of crime, was soon forgotten. The county’s power brokers had little incentive to do anything that might reduce the number of defendants; by the 1920s ward bosses were already
hopelessly hooked on courthouse and jail patronage. Judges, prosecutors, bailiffs, clerks, probation officers, and jail guards owed their jobs to the ward bosses—and showed their thanks by knocking on doors on election day.
In anticipation of the expected approval of the 1925 bond appeal, a committee was formed in 1924 to recommend a site for the new courthouse and jail.
The first sites considered were all downtown, out of regard for the convenience of those who would use the courthouse. But then a committee member proposed a large parcel of land at 26th and California. The land was vacant, except for the city’s House of Corrections, a jail for ordinance violators who couldn’t afford to pay their fines. Because the land was owned by the city, it could be obtained cheaply through a city-county swap. Committee members allowed that the location was far less accessible than the downtown sites being considered, but argued that accessibility had its drawbacks. A downtown jail hurt a city’s spirit, committee members maintained, as well as the values of nearby businesses.
And so the committee settled on 26th and California. Politics may have also influenced the decision. Most of the committee members owed their allegiance to county board president Anton Cermak, in whose ward the chosen site happened to be. So what if for decades judges, lawyers, jurors, witnesses, and relatives and friends of defendants would have to struggle to reach the remote location; the important thing was that members of Cermak’s ward organization, to whom the county board president could dole out courthouse and jail jobs, would have a pleasantly short commute. And if a host of lawyers did indeed establish offices up 26th Street and down California, it wouldn’t hurt
Cermak’s real estate holdings in the area.
THE COURTHOUSE OPENED
on April Fools’ Day, 1929. Chicago was battered with its worst spring storm in years that day, fierce winds and sleet damaging lakefront property and forcing the closing of the Outer Drive (now known as Lake Shore Drive).
The courthouse’s facade impressed reporters. They were charmed as well by the look of the building’s fourteen courtrooms, with their marble walls, oak benches trimmed with bronze rosettes, and brass light fixtures. But those who worked in the courthouse reached a quick negative verdict on the building. “Chicago’s worst April Fools’ joke,” one judge called it.
From their towering thronelike perches, judges could barely hear the proceedings below—especially with a fan whirring in the wall behind them. When they turned off the fans, the judges heard lawyers and witnesses distinctly—the lawyers and witnesses in the courtroom above, whose voices would drift in through the vents. Then there were the freight trains that regularly roared by on the tracks along 26th Street. A bailiff told a reporter that the courthouse’s designers must have “meant to keep the judges fair and impartial by preventing them from hearing.” One judge had so much trouble following testimony in the kidnapping trial he was presiding over that he angrily recessed it and resumed it in a courtroom downtown.
The acoustics weren’t the only target of criticism. Deputies who escorted prisoners between the jail and the courthouse via a tunnel griped about the icy rain dripping from the tunnel’s ceiling. The courthouse’s elevators quit at week’s end, trapping sixty people between floors for forty minutes, and the heat soon failed. Adding insult to injury, there was an appalling dearth of spittoons. The
object of the courthouse staffers’ wrath, county board president Cermak, was vacationing in Florida.
Workers fixed the elevators and improved the acoustics, and the county board appropriated money to rectify the heat problem. A custodian gathered up the old courthouse’s spittoons and installed them in the new building. Judges with courtrooms on the 26th Street side of the building dealt with the noise from the freight trains by keeping their windows closed, although this made their courtrooms broil in the summer. (The county board wouldn’t fund
air-conditioning for the building until 1973.)
But the main trouble with the courthouse—its location—wasn’t so easily corrected. Only a handful of lawyers ever set up shop nearby, and the courthouse failed to attract restaurants or other businesses to the area.
Young lawyers torn between practicing civil or criminal law tended to opt for the convenience of the downtown civil courts, diminishing the pool of private defense attorneys and increasing the load on public defenders.