Authors: Steve Bogira
The thirty trial courtrooms at 26th Street “are like thirty different countries,” Locallo says. Sentencing standards can vary markedly from courtroom to courtroom. He’s given probation to defendants who likely would have gotten double-digit prison terms from other judges, he says.
None of the sculpted figures on the courthouse’s front wall is squeezing a rabbit’s foot or spinning a roulette wheel. But luck often seems the deciding factor here, and not only because of the Randomizer. A defendant’s fate may hinge on a judge’s mood, or who’s in the jury pool on a given morning, or whether a lawyer is in top form and nails a key cross-examination or is hungover and blows it.
• • •
BUT FOR THE WAY
a bullet was deflected in 1989, Deputy Gil Guerrero might have been one of those victims whose death is lamented in a murder trial here, he’s often thought. And yet if he hadn’t been shot at all, he’s also thought, he might have ended up like one of those gangbangers he ushers into the lockup every morning.
Guerrero, twenty-seven, grew up in McKinley Park, a predominantly white, working-class neighborhood not far from the courthouse. As a youngster, Guerrero, a Mexican American, had to steer clear of white gangs such as the Popes (Protect Our People, Eliminate Spics) and the Heads (Help Eliminate And Destroy Spics). Slurs and swastikas were sometimes spray-painted on the family’s garage door.
Guerrero never formally joined a gang, but he hung out with gangbangers in his high school years. One summer night after he graduated, he and friends were driving around when they encountered some rivals on a corner. Threats were shouted by both sides, hand signs were flashed, and then something shattered the side window behind Guerrero, who was riding in the front passenger seat. When the driver pulled over a few blocks down to check the damage to his car, Guerrero’s friends noticed the bullet hole in the back of the front seat, and the bloody hole in the back of Guerrero’s shirt.
He was treated at a hospital and released. But if the metal in the seat hadn’t redirected the bullet, he says, he could have been crippled or killed.
His distressed mother told him she had no interest in burying her son at an early age. She urged him to leave Chicago, suggesting he either move in with an uncle in Mexico or join the army. Guerrero pictured himself in a primitive shack with an outhouse behind it and opted to enlist.
He’d felt adrift since graduating high school. In basic training in Georgia, he was given challenges he felt were beyond him, like walking fifteen miles with a hefty rucksack on his back. “I’d think, ‘That’s impossible.’ And then I’d do it, and say, ‘Oh, I guess it’s not.’ ”
After two years in Germany and two in California, he left the army and returned to Chicago. An army buddy suggested he apply for a job with the sheriff’s department. Guerrero thought that might be a good fit. “You get your badge, you get your gun. I was used to wearing a uniform.” He worked a factory job for a year until he got the call from the sheriff’s department offering him a position. He began working in the courthouse in 1995, substituting for other courtroom deputies, until he got his first permanent assignment, in April 1997, to Courtroom 302.
Guerrero has dark bushy eyebrows and a broad expressive face. It’s often
expressing the aggravation he suffers in his job. Every morning he has to field the same questions from the lockup:
Is my lawyer here? Are my people out there?
“I don’t know who your lawyer is,” he’ll tell them. “I don’t know who your people are.”
Is the judge in a good mood?
“I don’t hang out with the man, I don’t know what kind of a mood he’s in.”
Defendants also ask him, during breaks in their trials, if he thinks they’re winning or losing. “They’re looking for reassurance,” he says. “But I’m not gonna tell nobody I think it’s gonna be not guilty, and it turns around and it’s guilty. But they don’t wanna hear ‘I don’t know.’ They’re like, ‘Well, you been here a long time.’ Yeah, well, what does that mean, though? What I say don’t mean nothing.”
Guerrero believes the prisoners are always watching him for signs of weakness. He isn’t really a tough guy, he says, but he feels compelled to act like one. Whenever he’s at all lenient with the prisoners, they take advantage. That’s been his experience with the one regular concession he makes—the smoking he allows in the lockups. The prisoners aren’t even supposed to have cigarettes, but they always do. Guerrero just asks them to restrict their smoking to the rear of the lockups, out of the eye of the security cameras, so his bosses won’t see it on their monitors downstairs. But someone frequently disappoints him by stepping into a camera’s view. The prisoners’ behavior in the lockups doesn’t worry him as much as their behavior in the courtroom, though. “Just don’t make me look bad when you go before the judge,” he often tells them.
Guerrero and his partner, Deputy Laura Rhodes, are usually in a cramped anteroom near the lockups when they’re not out in the courtroom. The audiovisual unit resting on a metal desk in the middle of the anteroom allows Guerrero and Rhodes to monitor the inaction in the lockups around the corner. (The prisoners spend most of the time dozing on the benches or staring into space.) The unit also has controls to the intercom that lets defendants in the lockups hear the court proceedings. The deputies leave the intercom on except in special circumstances. If a defendant is accused of sexually abusing a child, for instance, Locallo or the defendant’s lawyer may ask Guerrero or Rhodes to cut the feed to the lockups, to spare the defendant the beating he’d likely receive in the jail if word got out about the nature of his alleged crime.
Guerrero and Rhodes work well together despite contrasting personalities. Rhodes, twenty-nine—the taller of the two deputies by several inches—doesn’t subscribe to her partner’s “not my problem” maxim and doesn’t feel compelled to act tough in front of the prisoners. Female deputies can get away with treating prisoners with respect, she says. The
problem with male deputies doing so is not that prisoners take advantage, she says, but that other deputies are likely to brand them sissies.
The disdain that many deputies show prisoners is more than posturing, she says. It’s a genuine contempt, a belief that the prisoners are “monsters in brown suits, that they’re scum, they’re worthless.” She hears deputies brag about striking prisoners in the lockups or in the basement, and when they do, “nobody ever asks anything about how it happened or why it was necessary. They just say, ‘Oh, did you get him good?’ ”
She grew up in Marengo, a small semirural town northwest of Chicago. After graduating high school in 1986, she worked days as a salesclerk and studied photography in the evenings at Columbia College downtown. Sometimes she toured the Loop with her camera, asking “thuggish-looking types” if she could photograph them. She was fascinated by such characters, particularly by their faces. She felt she could see beyond the anger in their eyes to the child they’d been, “wanting to be like every other kid, to have a house and a mom and dad that’s living with them.” She thought about doing a photo book one day of jail inmates.
After she got a BA from Columbia in 1992, she taught a city college literacy class for adults. Her boyfriend, a jail guard, told her that the jail had openings for teachers. She first applied with the sheriff’s department in 1992, but by the time the department hired her in 1994, teachers in the jail weren’t needed; instead, she was given the task of taking the mug shots of the new prisoners. Soon she was transferred to the courthouse. She was assigned to 302 in 1997, a few months after Guerrero.
Rhodes and Guerrero spend much of their day ushering prisoners between the lockup and the courtroom. In the courtroom they stand behind the prisoner while the judge and the lawyers transact their business. It’s often boring, Guerrero says. He expected to see more trials. “Instead everybody just makes deals, like it’s a garage sale or something.”
“It’s all just a game, to everyone involved,” Rhodes says. “For the defendants, it’s ‘I can beat this case,’ or ‘I can get this deal.’ For the judges, it’s the big dispo race. I don’t think they really care whether the defendant is innocent or guilty—it’s how many defendants they can get to plead out. For the state’s attorneys, it’s ‘I can get this death sentence or this natural life sentence.’ For the private defense attorneys, it’s mainly about getting paid. You got some who truly care and a lot who think it’s just a case.” She thinks jurors are usually the only ones interested in what really happened. A few are in a hurry to go home, but most take their job seriously, she says. Rhodes has applied for work with the probation department for two years now but with no luck. She pictures herself prodding her probationers into
getting their GEDs and helping them find work. She could make a real difference as a probation officer, she says, which is more than she feels she can do as a deputy.
GUERRERO FACES
a challenge early one February morning, on the day jury-picking is set to begin in the murder trial of a defendant named Kevin Betts.
The incident occurs in the courthouse basement. The batch of prisoners bound for 302 this particular morning includes six convicts brought here from penitentiaries throughout Illinois to testify for Betts. Guerrero is patting down one of them when the man suddenly jerks an arm backward at him. No contact is made, but Guerrero sees it as a test of his authority—a test calling for a response. He slams the prisoner’s arm back against the wall and begins barking at him: “You got a fucking problem? You don’t like being searched? You think you’re special?” The prisoner scowls over his shoulder at Guerrero—a scowl Guerrero interprets as, Watch out—we’re all from the
state pen
. Guerrero scowls back.
The elevator ride up to 302 is tense, this prisoner and his cohorts eyeing Guerrero menacingly. Whenever Guerrero walks near the lockup this morning, he gets more glares from the Betts contingent, and when he is around the corner, he hears muttered threats about the ass-kicking they are planning for him. But Guerrero is proud he’s let them know he won’t be intimidated. “If I show them I’m scared, they’re gonna eat me up,” he says. It does unnerve him, though, when the prosecutors inform him later that all six of these inmates have been convicted of murder.
The Betts case concerns the stabbing of an inmate in a jail barbershop with a shank (a homemade knife). Like his witnesses, Betts already has one murder conviction. But so did the victim.
Prosecutors wish they were always fighting for angels—that every victim was a Lenard Clark or a Bennie Williams. But the victims are more likely to be an Insane Vice Lord shot by a Spanish Cobra, a pimp slashed by his hooker, or a cocaine dealer beaten by the customer who paid for a rock and got a piece of drywall. Bernard Carter, the victim in this case, was convicted in 1993 of killing a gas station clerk during a robbery. Since winning posthumous justice for a killer isn’t much of a motivator, prosecutors Mark Ostrowski and Joe Alesia instead are simply focusing on making Betts pay. “Just because he was in the jail,” Alesia says, “why should he get a free murder?”
It wasn’t a murder at first, because Carter didn’t die until almost two years after he was stabbed. He was working as a barber in the Division 1 barbershop the morning of the attack, in March 1993. He was still in the
jail because he was awaiting sentencing for the gas station murder. Someone plunged a shank into his neck, and he fell to the floor. The shank punctured his spinal cord, paralyzing him from the shoulders down. Betts had been the last inmate whose hair Carter had cut. According to police who visited Carter in the hospital the next day, he nodded at a photo of Betts when asked to identify his attacker. Betts was charged with attempted murder.
A month later Betts was convicted in the case that had brought him to the jail—the fatal shooting of one man and the wounding of another during an argument in a south-side home. In June 1993 Betts, then twenty-four, was sentenced to sixty-five years for those crimes.
And he still had the barbershop case looming over him, as well as another jail shanking he’d been charged with in August 1992. These two attempted murder cases each carried six to thirty years. Under Illinois law, moreover, sentences for crimes committed in custody are supposed to run consecutively to other sentences.
But then prosecutors made him an offer he couldn’t resist: two twenty-year terms that would run concurrent with each other
and
with his sixty-five-year sentence, in exchange for his guilty pleas to both shankings. Prosecutors would be getting two tough cases off the books. (Jail crimes are hard cases to prosecute because the key witnesses usually are inmates, who tend to be reluctant to testify and easy to discredit when they do.) Since the sentences for the shankings would be concurrent, they wouldn’t increase the time Betts owed beyond his sixty-five-year term. With day-for-day credit, he’d still be getting out at age fifty-eight. “I couldn’t beat that with a baseball bat,” Betts says. “I wouldn’t do an extra day.” He grabbed the deal in April 1994.
Meantime, though, Bernard Carter’s health continued to decline. He lay in a prison infirmary bed, a quadriplegic, his breathing assisted by one tube, his urine draining through another, his body shrinking and sprouting bedsores, until he died in December 1994. A coroner’s jury attributed his death to acute bronchial pneumonia, resulting from his quadriplegia, which in turn had been caused by the shanking. It ruled the death a homicide.
Case law is clear that a charge can be upgraded to murder if the victim’s death is directly attributable to the injuries allegedly caused by the defendant, even if the victim doesn’t die until years later—and even if the alleged offender has already pled guilty to a lesser charge. Betts had one murder conviction; a second would make him eligible for the death penalty. In June 1995 the state indicted Betts for Carter’s murder, and the Randomizer kicked his case to Locallo.
In his four years as a trial judge, Locallo has had about ten cases in which the state has sought the death penalty, but he’s yet to impose it. Ostrowski and Alesia find this ironic, given the praise the judge has received for the summaries of death penalty cases he publishes. If he really wants to be an expert on the death penalty, the prosecutors say, he ought to at least give it once.