Authors: Steve Bogira
He left the state’s attorney’s office in 1983, reasoning that he’d improve his chances of getting to the bench by broadening his résumé and contacts. He did labor law for the Teamsters, then personal injury work. But he couldn’t get excited about slip-and-falls after prosecuting rapes and murders at 26th Street.
Cook County has two levels of judges: circuit judges, who are elected by the public, and associate judges, who are picked by the circuit judges to fill vacancies between elections. In 1986 court officials announced they’d be filling nine vacancies with associates. Locallo was among the 150 lawyers to apply. He’d been a lawyer less than nine years. But he had connections: the head of the committee selecting the eighteen finalists was a friend of Locallo’s father. Locallo was named a finalist.
After the finalists for associate judgeships are announced, political heavyweights contact the sitting circuit judges and let them know whom they’d like to be elected. Judge Cousins called a longtime friend on Locallo’s behalf—Mayor Harold Washington. Locallo’s name went on the list of candidates the mayor backed.
Locallo didn’t rest on his clout, however. He traversed the county, shaking hands with the circuit judges and soliciting their support. He personally contacted 175 of the 177 circuit judges—two were out of town. When the nine winners were announced, Locallo was among them. He was sworn in on June 13, 1986—a judge at thirty-three.
His first assignment was in the northwest suburbs, where he handled drunk-driving cases, misdemeanors, and an occasional felony preliminary hearing. It was hard for a judge to distinguish himself with such a docket, but Locallo managed to. He boned up on recent DUI case law to prepare himself for those cases, summarizing on paper the rulings he was reading. It occurred to him that his colleagues could benefit from these summaries, and he started photocopying and distributing them. He began to be thought of as a judge who went the extra mile.
After eighteen months he was on the verge of advancing to a felony courtroom in the suburbs. But then Locallo got into a dispute with an elderly colleague and, within earshot of numerous other judges, informed him he was “full of shit.”
Instead of being promoted to a felony courtroom, Locallo was transferred to the branch courts in Chicago—a demotion, in effect, since it relegated him to small matters still longer. “I did the right thing, but I paid the price,” he says. The episode taught him that “you have to show some finesse. You can’t go around telling judges they’re full of shit.”
For the next few years he sat in the dismal branches, conducting bond hearings and presiding over preliminary hearings in drug cases. Even in this lowly setting, he continued to make a name for himself. He began publishing and distributing summaries of Illinois Supreme Court decisions in death penalty cases. Periodically, after a preliminary hearing in a drug case, he’d give the lawyers a written ruling, replete with case citations. Even trial court judges at 26th Street rarely do that, and written opinions
in the branch courts were unheard of. During one preliminary hearing Locallo told the parties he couldn’t make an informed decision without visiting the scene of the crime; soon Locallo, the lawyers, the defendant, the court reporter, and the deputies were on their way. Nobody had ever heard of a branch court judge doing that, either.
In 1990 a candidate for president of the Cook County Board, R. Eugene Pincham, was blasted by his opponent for having been “
predisposed toward criminals” when he was on the appellate court. Locallo sent a letter to the
Chicago Tribune
backing Pincham. “
It is essential that our judiciary be free and courageous enough to take unpopular positions,” Locallo wrote. “We should all remember: ‘What is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right.’ ” The letter didn’t win Locallo any points with prosecutors.
In 1992 Locallo ran for circuit judge in a northwest-side subcircuit. Circuit judges earn slightly more than associate judges, their jobs are more secure, and they get better assignments. With the rave reviews of bar groups and the endorsements of both of Chicago’s major dailies, he won the Democratic primary, then
coasted to victory on November 3, 1992. This boosted his pay from $81,000 to $87,000. He worked as a “floater” at 26th Street, filling in for vacationing judges, until a permanent spot opened in a trial courtroom in December 1994. That was when he moved into Courtroom 302.
HUGE ART PHOTOS
of John F. Kennedy dominate Locallo’s windowless chambers. On election night in 1960 Locallo, then eight, stayed up after his bedtime cheering Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon. The Kennedy charm and eloquence awed him. He’d watch a Kennedy speech on TV, listen to the applause, and imagine himself president. When did that fantasy end? “I still want to be president,” Locallo says with a smile.
His desktop is usually suffocating under files, mail, faxes, transcripts, and legal newspapers. More newspapers are heaped in corners and piled on a couch and two chairs. Judges at 26th Street have no personal secretaries or law clerks. Locallo has slept on the couch on occasion after a late night’s work. There’s a shower upstairs in the chambers of one of the old courtrooms that he’ll use after such a night; his wife will bring him fresh clothes from home.
Long after other courtrooms have been vacuumed and dead-bolted, Locallo is often still on the bench or at his desk in his chambers. His off-bench judicial activities are extensive, including work for a state bar council and a judges’ group, the annual updating of his DUI and death penalty summaries, addresses to law groups, and occasional articles for legal journals.
Sam Adam, a defense lawyer who’s been trying cases in the courthouse since 1961, considers Locallo a “throwback to the old days at 26th Street, when judges took the intellectual side of their job more seriously.” Adam says that in years past, “You could go to a judge’s chambers at eight in the morning and find him reading recent decisions from the Supreme Court, or looking up some law. You almost never see that today. Locallo’s an exception.”
“He has a built-in sense of fairness,” says Charles Ingles, another veteran defense lawyer. In Ingles’s opinion, police officers lie routinely at 26th Street, and judges rarely call them on it. “But if Locallo thinks a case is bad, he’ll pitch it.”
Prosecutors are less fond of Locallo. “He’s thought of by prosecutors as somebody who wants to be on the appellate court and is gonna kowtow to the defense bar to get that to happen,” says one prosecutor who’s worked in Locallo’s courtroom. (Defense lawyers outnumber prosecutors in the bar groups that publish ratings of judicial candidates before elections, and it’s therefore believed they have more influence on a judge’s future.) “He knows the law better than most judges in the building, and he’ll give you a fair trial,” this prosecutor says. “But day to day, he gives real softball sentences.”
“Sometimes Dan Locallo does things to benefit Dan Locallo,” says Mark Ostrowski, the lead prosecutor in 302 as 1998 begins. “He’ll do things to make himself look good. I see him as a guy who can play it both ways, who will do what’s politically correct.” Locallo will sentence defendants stiffly in heater cases, with the press watching, Ostrowski says. But in the vast majority of lesser cases, he hands out conditional discharge, probation, and boot-camp terms much too easily, in Ostrowski’s opinion.
Locallo dislikes formality. He dreads the idea of appearing pretentious, especially to a jury. After a panel of prospective jurors has been seated in his courtroom, he’ll ask its members to “please put out of your mind anything you’ve seen about those goofy judges on TV.” He breaks up the tedium of jury-picking with frequent canned one-liners. To the man who mentions bowling as a hobby: “Oh, you got a lotta time to spare?” To the woman who works in a bakery: “I hear they make a lotta dough in that business.”
Locallo does indeed have his sights on the appellate court and, ultimately, the Illinois Supreme Court. In November 1997 he
appeared before a Democratic Party subcommittee in the Bismarck Hotel downtown, seeking slating for one of two appellate vacancies. He took it in stride when he wasn’t anointed. At forty-five, he was still relatively young, he told himself; his day would come. He needed to maintain his reputation with the bar
groups. And it wouldn’t hurt to get his name in the newspapers now and then. He’s never shrunk from publicity. When he was a prosecutor in Judge Cousins’s courtroom, he used to call reporters to try to interest them in the cases he was prosecuting. “I subscribe to the proposition that any publicity is good publicity,” he says.
The Bridgeport case—the racial-beating trial that he’ll preside over later this year—promises plenty of that.
ON A MARCH AFTERNOON
in 1997 two eighth-grade classmates decided to take advantage of the unseasonable warmth with a bike ride after school. The boys, Lenard Clark and Clevan Nicholson, both thirteen, lived in Stateway Gardens, a high-rise public housing project on Chicago’s south side. The tires of Lenard’s bike were low on air. The gas stations near Stateway charged a quarter for air, whereas the air was free at the gas stations in Bridgeport, the neighborhood to the west. So Lenard and Clevan pedaled west down 35th Street, across the bridge that spans the Dan Ryan Expressway, and into Bridgeport.
Bridgeport’s tidy redbrick bungalows are occupied mainly by whites, many of them city workers. The neighborhood was home to the first Mayor Daley—Chicago’s mayor from 1955 until his death in 1976—the two mayors before him, and the mayor after him. The present Mayor Daley, Richard J.’s son Richard M., lived in Bridgeport until 1993, when he moved to a neighborhood near the Loop. African Americans shop and work in Bridgeport, but most don’t linger after dark.
Lenard filled his tires at a gas station on Halsted Street, in the heart of Bridgeport, and then he and Clevan pedaled back east. They stopped at a playground and played football with three Mexican American boys. Then they resumed their homeward trip, accompanied by one of the Mexican American youths, eighteen-year-old William Jaramillo, who walked between Lenard and Clevan as they pedaled along. It had gotten dark. At the corner of 33rd and Shields—two blocks north of
Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox—a white youth confronted the three boys. As Clevan and Jaramillo would later tell it, the youth called Clevan a nigger and punched him in the head, knocking him off his bike, then punched Lenard in the head, knocking him off his bike, too. Lenard’s head snapped back into the aluminum-sided wall behind him—Jaramillo heard a
crunch
—and Lenard slid down the wall to the ground.
Lenard managed to push himself to his feet, and he took off, running and screaming, east on 33rd, his attacker in pursuit. (Clevan fled in a different direction; Jaramillo righted the bikes and wheeled them from the scene.) Lenard raced around a corner and into the street, but three white
youths caught up with him and he was knocked to the ground. His attackers then kicked him in the side and stomped his head into the pavement. They fled when a neighbor who was walking by warned them he was calling the police on his cell phone. The police officers who responded found Lenard facedown in the street and unconscious. An ambulance took him to Cook County Hospital.
Mayor Daley, no doubt recognizing the potential for racial unrest, was quick to condemn the beating and to assure the public that the police would soon be making arrests. Sure enough, in less than forty-eight hours three Bridgeport youths were charged with the attempted murder of Lenard, with the aggravated battery of both Lenard and Clevan, and with a hate crime. At their bond hearing, a prosecutor informed the judge that Lenard was in a coma. The judge fixed bond for high school seniors Frank Caruso, eighteen, and Victor Jasas, seventeen, at $100,000, and set a seven
P.M
. to seven
A.M
. curfew if they made bond. The third defendant, nineteen-year-old Michael Kwidzinski, had already graduated high school and sometimes worked nights, so the judge gave him no curfew but set his bond at $150,000. All three defendants posted the required 10 percent and were released shortly after the hearing.
Daley called the defendants a “
bunch of thugs” and decried their bonds as too low. In a letter published on the front page of the
Chicago Sun-Times
six days after the beating, he called on Chicagoans “
to join together to denounce this mindless act of violence and hatred.” He visited the comatose Lenard at the hospital, as did Reverend Jesse Jackson, Nation of Islam leader minister Louis Farrakhan, Catholic archbishop Francis George, and a stream of celebrities. Daley also hosted a VIP breakfast that
raised $100,000 for Lenard’s family.
For some African Americans in Chicago, the beating of Lenard was a painful reminder of the lynching forty-two years earlier of another south-side black youth, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. In August 1955, Till had taken a train to Mississippi to pick cotton with his cousins. While there he apparently made the mistake of whistling at or “talking fresh” to a white woman. His mutilated body came back north in a coffin. An all-white jury hurriedly acquitted the two men charged with his killing. Shielded from retrial by the constitutional protection against double jeopardy, the two men then confessed to the lynching in a story they sold to
Look
magazine.
“
We African-Americans will not tolerate another Emmett Till situation,” warned a letter published in the
Chicago Defender
, the city’s African American daily, after Lenard’s beating. “
No justice, no peace!” chanted the band of African Americans who marched into Bridgeport several times in the days after the attack.
Newspapers and magazines from coast to coast wagged a finger at Chicago’s “
race chasm” and “
ugly side.” “Will
a
savage crime help the city face its hate?”
Time
magazine asked.
In his weekly radio speech eight days after the beating, President Clinton deplored the “savage, senseless” assault and urged Americans to fight “the divide of race … America’s constant curse.” The president later
extended his best wishes to Lenard’s mother on the phone.