Authors: Steve Bogira
Harris, however, declines. He’s not going to cop to a crime he didn’t commit, he tells his lawyers. And if the jury does convict him, he says, at least he can appeal—whereas if he pleads, there’s no turning back.
Campanelli and Brown turn to Karen Harris for help. After convincing her that De’Angelo is being foolish, they arrange for her to talk to him in the conference room.
She returns to the gallery sniffly and wet-eyed after her meeting with De’Angelo. “I told him, ‘It look like you got to take this cop-out,’ ” she says to Lorraine Butts. “He say, ‘Mama, I didn’t do it.’ He say he wouldn’t get no appeal if he copped out, so he just gonna take the sixty.” She sobs, then inhales deeply and dries her eyes with the base of her hand.
In the early afternoon, Locallo sends the jury home, telling the panel that “certain matters” have to be resolved before the trial can proceed.
The judge and the lawyers reconvene in Locallo’s chambers. Locallo bumps his bid down to thirty-eight, but says that’s his final offer. Campanelli and Brown march to the lockup to tell Harris. Harris says he doesn’t know what to do. The PDs leave him alone to think it over. When they return twenty minutes later, Harris reluctantly says he’ll take the thirty-eight.
In the courtroom, Locallo quickly gets the plea on record. He defers formal sentencing until the following afternoon so Williams’s family can submit a “victim-impact” statement.
“
SIXTEEN YEARS,
” Karen Harris says to Butts in the gallery, after the plea has been recorded and De’Angelo has been ushered back to the lockup. That’s how many years De’Angelo will have left to serve, the PDs have explained to her. “That’s still a long time,” she tells Butts.
“Well, might be for the best,” Butts says.
Karen Harris brightens. “That’s what I thought. I said, ‘God did this for a reason.’ ”
“If he didn’t get locked up, he might be dead,” Butts says.
Karen Harris starts listing friends in her neighborhood whose children have been killed. “When my kids is out somewhere, and I hear bullet shots?” She rises from her bench, steps up to the Plexiglas, and peers through it. “I’m right away in the window, looking out in the street. I get my clothes on, go out there and find ’em.” She settles back down on the bench. “I’m glad my kids is locked up,” she says. “ ’Cause if they be out there in the street, that could be one of them gets killed.”
Maybe prison will even make a better man out of De’Angelo, she tells me. She’s been hoping lately that her second-oldest son might be straightened up by the no-nonsense boot camp he’s now in. “They teach you to be more mannerable, more respectful,” she says. “And if you ain’t, they spit in your face and everything.”
In his chambers, Locallo is personally calling the twelve jurors and two alternates, letting them know they won’t need to return, and why, telling them their checks (for three days’ work, at $17.20 a day) will be mailed to them, and thanking them for their service. Most judges would let a deputy handle this chore, but Locallo always goes out of his way to make jurors feel appreciated. He wants them to spread the word that jury service isn’t so bad after all. Jurors also represent a potential political benefit for a judge, he says. “That’s fourteen people that, assuming you don’t act like an asshole, are going to be your supporters” come retention time or when he runs for a higher judicial post.
The judge is almost giddy about the plea. Anything can happen when a case goes to the jury, he says. The jury might have decided that Harris’s confession was coerced from him, that Armstrong’s ID couldn’t be trusted because of her original mistake, and that Cruz’s testimony was suspect because it took so long for her to come forward. This was unlikely, but “you never know what those twelve great citizens are going to do,” the judge says. “They come back with a not guilty, and then the Williams family would have been further disappointed—they’ve lost their loved one, and the person who they believe committed the act walks out the door.”
So rather than trust what those twelve citizens might do, he brokered the plea. It was in the interests of the Harris family as well, he says; had the trial continued and had Harris been convicted, he could have gotten a sentence so long that his family “would never see him free again.” Locallo insists this wouldn’t have been a tax, much as it sounds like one. Had the trial proceeded, he would have learned more about the crime, he says, and maybe it would have seemed more heinous than he’d realized. This is the standard rationalization cited by judges for giving a longer term to a defendant after a trial.
The deal provided “closure” for everyone, Locallo says, himself included. “It’s one less day with the jury. We can move on to the next case.”
IN THE GALLERY
the following afternoon, while waiting for De’Angelo to be formally sentenced, Karen Harris has her hands twice as full. She has to mind not only Tiara but also De’Angelo’s toddler son, Tyreece. The twenty-three-month-old Tyreece is dressed in a striped shirt and blue corduroys. He’s wearing a bright red-and-blue backpack with
TIME FOR SCHOOL!
in big letters over a clock. De’Angelo was already in jail when Tyreece was born, so although they’ve seen each other through a Plexiglas window in a jail visiting area, he and his son have never touched. Karen Harris is hoping Locallo will allow that to happen today in a contact visit. She figures that De’Angelo and Tyreece may not have a similar chance until De’Angelo is back from downstate, when Tyreece is eighteen.
Karen Harris sometimes wonders whether she has other grandchildren through De’Angelo. (De’Angelo tells me later he’s also got a three-year-old daughter.)
The afternoon session in 302 hasn’t begun yet, but already Tyreece is trying his grandmother’s patience. “Grandma gonna whup you,” Karen Harris warns him as he crawls across a bench. Tyreece stops and studies her, then pushes himself into a sitting position. Tiara, who’s been standing at the Plexiglas, tapping on a ledge, decides to park herself on the bench as well.
“I’m just very relieved that it’s all out in the open,” Karen Harris tells me. She feels bad for Bennie Williams’s mother, she says, “because her son is no longer here and my son is.” Her voice drops. “I’m sorry that my son took her son’s life. I still would like to know what was the motive for him to do that.”
Gazing at Tyreece, she describes De’Angelo when he was small. He was a cheerful little boy who liked sports and music and got A’s in grammar school, she says. She brightens as she recalls how De’Angelo would don leather pants and a white glove and mimic Michael Jackson. (“That wasn’t even me,” De’Angelo says later. “That was my little brother.”)
Tyreece, who’s been chewing on his fingers and wriggling in his seat, suddenly collapses to the floor, sobbing. “Sit
down
,” Karen Harris commands, but he continues wailing. She raises a hand menacingly. Tyreece’s eyes follow the hand, but his crying persists. Harris angrily scoops him off the tile floor and lugs him out to the hallway.
A few minutes later she’s back on a bench in the courtroom, with Tyreece and Tiara glum and silent on either side of her, when Diane Smith and her family enter. After they’ve settled into a bench across the aisle, Karen Harris
takes a deep breath, pushes herself to her feet, and steps hesitantly over to the aisle. She catches Diane Smith’s attention, then quickly averts her eyes.
“I’m sorry about what my son did to your son,” Harris says softly.
Smith tilts her head subtly in Harris’s direction, nods, and says, “Thank you.”
The sentencing hearing begins with Ostrowski reading the victim-impact statement that Theodis Smith, Bennie Williams’s stepfather, wrote on behalf of the Smiths. It describes Williams as a “kind, compassionate” person who would run errands for seniors and sometimes bring homeless people home with him for a meal.
“The news of our son’s death was devastating,” Ostrowski reads. “We were thinking, ‘How could this happen?’ We were an average, law-abiding family.” The killing had harmed the family “mentally, emotionally, physically, and financially.” After Bennie was slain, Diane Smith began to frequently visit and call the school her eight-year-old son attended to check on his safety. She asked her husband to phone her several times a day to assure her he was all right. Bennie’s younger brother likewise was tormented with fears of another sudden loss. He couldn’t sleep, his grades declined. Now, almost three years after the murder, the brother has yet to utter Bennie’s name or visit his grave.
“Nineteen years seems a very cheap amount of time for our son’s life,” Ostrowski reads. The family blames not only Harris but also his parents “for their lack of guidance for their son.
“Our son will never have the opportunity to fulfill his dreams,” Ostrowski continues. “He will never be able to marry. He has a daughter who will never know her father.… However, we do know that a higher court will someday convene, and justice will truly be served when they judge De’Angelo Harris.”
Harris declines Locallo’s offer to say anything before he’s sentenced.
Locallo calls it “tragic” for “a man in college” to be gunned down when he wasn’t doing any wrong. Then he issues the thirty-eight-year term. He says he’ll give Harris a contact visit with his family before he’s returned to the jail.
Diane Smith appreciated Karen Harris’s apology. Though she wanted a longer sentence, that’s not what Smith is thinking about as De’Angelo Harris is led away. She’s not feeling anger so much as sorrow—not only for the loss of her son, but for the loss of Harris, too. Another life wasted, she says to herself.
HARRIS IS SOON SHIPPED
to the Illinois River Correctional Center, in the town of Canton, 155 miles southwest of Chicago. The prison, which
opened in 1989, is the
second-leading employer in Canton, a town of fifteen thousand.
Inside the prison the population is 64 percent black;
outside the prison the town is 98 percent white. The prison is
designed to house 1,211 inmates; Harris is one of 1,900.
After a year in Illinois River, Harris gives up on the prospect of ever receiving a visit from a friend or a relative. His friends are all locked up. As for his family, “If they don’t wanna think about me, they don’t need to think about me,” he says bitterly. “I don’t try to think about nobody. I blank all my problems out.”
The minimum $380,000 that taxpayers will spend to keep Harris locked up until 2014 is far more than ever was invested in him before, or that ever will be spent on either of his children, probably, unless they too end up in prison.
WHEN THE PUBLIC DEFENDERS
were lobbying Locallo for a shorter term for Harris during the plea negotiations in the judge’s chambers, they didn’t mention Harris’s poverty-stricken background. That fact is taken for granted about defendants here and thus is usually ignored.
Prosecutor Dalkin worked in juvenile court for two years before he was assigned to 26th Street. That stint exposed him to rampant neglect and physical abuse of children in poor neighborhoods. He doesn’t doubt that maltreated kids are more likely to themselves become violent. But Dalkin, the son of a real estate developer and the product of an affluent North Shore suburb, thinks such kids ought to overcome their disadvantages. “Maybe it’s closed-minded or unsympathetic, but I don’t feel sorry for people who can’t handle something like that, because I know there are people who can.”
Locallo, likewise, considers poverty no excuse for crime. “No way I’m gonna buy this, ‘I’m poor, therefore I had no choice,’ ” he says. His mentor, Judge William Cousins, “came out of poverty. He came out of some small town in Mississippi. His parents didn’t graduate from grammar school, but they showed him the right way.
My
dad was poor. My mom was poor. Why did they make that jump and get out of that situation? Because they
wanted
to.”
But what about kids who
don’t
have parents showing them the right way? “Yeah, some people have a bad start,” Locallo concedes. “If you don’t have parents who stress hard work, and getting an education, and being a productive citizen, it might be harder to go down the right road. But at some point—assuming there are no mental problems—you make a choice. You take the high road, or you take the low road.”
Campanelli has heard many judges and prosecutors at 26th Street recite
this view. “It just helps them do what they’re going to do,” she says. “They’re sending people to prison for years and years. They have to convince themselves that the person deserves it so they can sleep at night.”
Locallo is less critical of his uncle Victor, the one who spent his life working for the mob. He didn’t freely choose to take the low road, Locallo says; there were circumstances that compelled his illicit career. The judge explains that his dad’s and his uncle Victor’s parents divorced, after which their father didn’t contribute financially to the family. “My uncle Vic was the oldest child, and he got into bookmaking to support my dad, his brother, and their mother. Maybe it’s because I loved my uncle Vic, but I never looked down on him because of what he was involved in. You do what you have to do sometimes.”
FIVE
Luck
ON WEEKDAY MORNINGS
a clerk named Marcus Ferguson can be found in front of an old IBM computer in a dingy first-floor office. An assistant state’s attorney standing near him pulls a manila folder from a stack on a desk and calls out a case number and a court date. Ferguson’s meaty fingers then race over the keyboard, the two hefty gold rings on his right hand glinting. He’s proud of how quickly he can enter the data—in eight seconds or less. When he jabs the enter key with his middle finger, the name of a judge appears on his monitor. He announces the name to the state’s attorney, who prints it in black marker on the folder.
Thus are new cases parceled out to judges here by a computer program called the Randomizer. With that poke of Ferguson’s middle finger, the Randomizer blesses a defendant with a benevolent judge or consigns him to a banger; it sends him to a courtroom with reasonable prosecutors or cutthroats, with energetic PDs or mopes.