Authors: Steve Bogira
Ora Lee Carter listens impassively in the gallery, her folded hands resting in her lap. At one point she leans over and says, “Sound to me like they all rehearsed it, and they rehearsed it good.”
The mother of one of the defense witnesses shows up in the gallery on the trial’s second morning. She’s heard of Locallo’s generosity with contact visits, and came hoping for a brief visit with her son, who’s been in a downstate prison for five years. Locallo later accommodates her. A young man appears in the gallery as well on the second day—a fellow Four Corner Hustler, Betts later says. Betts appreciates this show of support, the only one he gets.
During their cross-examinations of the defense witnesses, the prosecutors
point out that they all declined to offer any information to investigators right after the shanking; and that the assertions about Angelo Roberts are convenient ones, since Roberts himself is now dead.
Nicknamed “Baby Locust,” Roberts was a rising star in the Four Corner Hustlers. At the time of the barbershop shanking—March 1993—he was awaiting trial on two separate cases, one for murder and one for a weapons offense. He was acquitted of the murder and convicted of the gun charge, for which he was sentenced to five years. Seven months after he was released from prison,
police found his body in the trunk of a Chevy on the south side, riddled with bullet holes and stab wounds. He was twenty-four. His murder remains unsolved.
IN HIS CLOSING ARGUMENT
, public defender Eben focuses on the purported bedside identification of Betts by Bernard Carter. It wasn’t surprising that Carter picked Betts out of the photo array, he says, since Betts was the only inmate who’d been in the barbershop who was in the array. He says investigators didn’t show Carter a photo of Angelo Roberts or any of the other inmates in the shop because they “wanted to reach a certain end.” He wonders how Carter could have seen who shanked him anyway if, as Officer Jackson testified, he was attacked from behind. He wonders why investigators didn’t visit Carter again in the hospital after he was able to talk, to make sure nothing had been lost in translation in the nodding ID. “Why don’t they respect you enough to present you with a complete picture of what happened here?” Eben asks. He maintains that the defense witnesses were simply “coming forward at this time to do justice.”
In rebuttal, prosecutor Alesia stresses that Betts is on trial, not Officer Jackson, or Officer Debergh, or investigator Sullivan, or Angelo Roberts. Jackson, Debergh, and Sullivan had no reason to pin the crime on Betts, Alesia says. They simply did their jobs, and the reason the evidence pointed directly at Betts was because he was the offender. Betts “would want you to believe that anybody and everybody is responsible except him,” Alesia says. “Right now that spotlight’s shining down on that head of his and he’s sweating because this is the day he feared.”
Betts’s frustration has been mounting. He feels certain he’s going to get convicted. He thinks the jurors have paid much closer attention to the state’s attorneys. He’s noticed the younger women on the jury brightening whenever one of the two young prosecutors is speaking. He wrote numerous reminders to Eben on the lawyer’s yellow pads about points to stress in the closing argument, but in his view Eben ignored most of them. He wanted to testify, but Eben and Campanelli persuaded him not to, reminding him that the jury would learn about his criminal background if he did. (A defendant’s criminal
background is normally inadmissible. But it becomes admissible if he testifies, because the jury is allowed to take it into account in assessing his credibility.) At his first murder trial, too, his lawyers convinced him not to take the stand, and he’s always believed he’d have been acquitted if he’d only been able to tell the jury his side.
Now, as Alesia is winding up, saying the only sensible conclusion is that Betts was Carter’s assailant, Betts can restrain himself no longer.
“Why you ain’t bringing nobody on the witness stand to say that?” he blurts out from the defense table. “This the only person, this the only—Officer Jackson the only person you brought in here on the witness stand to say that.” Alesia allows Betts to have the floor, figuring the outburst is only showing the jury Betts’s volatility. Campanelli puts a hand on Betts’s shoulder, imploring him in a loud whisper to desist. But it’s as though Betts doesn’t notice her. “It’s seventeen people in the barbershop. Out of seventeen people, you can’t get nobody else to say that—”
Locallo instructs the startled jurors to retire to the jury room. Their eyes shift from Betts to the judge and back to Betts as they push themselves up from their chairs and begin edging out of the box.
“—out of seventeen people, you can’t get nobody to say that?”
“Disregard,” Locallo says.
As soon as the jurors are out of the courtroom, Locallo asks Betts to approach the bench.
The judge could banish Betts to the lockup for the last bit of the trial. But Betts’s absence at the defense table certainly might weigh against him in the jurors’ minds. A reviewing court could one day find such a remedy an overreaction, Locallo thinks, and the whole trial could go down the drain. Better to see if he can calm Betts down and have him remain.
“I understand your frustration,” he tells Betts. “But you have to let your lawyers do their job, and let me conduct a trial.” He warns Betts that if he interrupts again, he may have to be removed from the courtroom.
When the jury is back in the box, Alesia finishes up. “The inhumanity of prisons is not a result of the institution, of the system, of the officers, of others,” he says. “It’s a result of inmates, and in this case, Kevin Betts.” Then, as prosecutors here often do, Alesia paraphrases a maxim of British statesman Edmund Burke to end his argument: “All it takes for evil to thrive, Kevin Betts to thrive, is for good men and women to do nothing. He asks you to do that today. Do not do that. Do something. Find him guilty of first-degree murder.”
JURIES ARE GENERALLY
considered the biggest wild card of all at 26th Street. The lawyers’ influence over a jury’s makeup is limited. They
use their peremptory challenges (seven a side in most cases, fourteen in a capital case such as this one) to craft a panel to their liking. But with only superficial information about prospective jurors, the lawyers base their choices on stereotypes and gut reactions. “Juries are the one thing you can’t control,” Alesia says. “You control what witnesses you call and your trial strategy. But when the jurors start deliberating, it’s up to them.”
Which can be particularly disturbing for prosecutors. The state wins most trials, and so winning is an expectation. (Between 1996 and 2003 felony defendants in Cook County were
convicted of at least one charge in 74 percent of the jury trials that ended in a verdict.) It takes just one wayward juror to force a retrial, a result the prosecutor may view as an undeserved embarrassment. Thus prosecutors frequently grumble to one another about the wisdom of a process that consumes so much time and money, and in which the decision is then entrusted to a batch of $17.20 day laborers. Juries trouble Alesia more than anything else at 26th Street. “You just can’t trust ’em,” he says.
Like most jury rooms at 26th Street, the one in 302 is dreary. Ceiling tiles are missing and broken. The beige walls are grimy and bare. The view from the two narrow north windows is of a parking lot and a Popeyes. There’s a washroom on either end of the room, an empty water cooler in a corner, and foil ashtrays on the conference table. The plastic backs and cushions of most of the chairs are torn.
It’s nearly two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon when the jury gets the Betts case. John Hillebrand, a sixty-seven-year-old semiretired school administrator from the suburbs, is selected foreperson. The first vote he conducts is oral: three guilty, four not, five undecided.
There’s a consensus in the room that the investigation could have been more carefully conducted, Hillebrand and other jurors tell me later. In particular, it’s felt that someone should have revisited Carter after he was able to speak to verify his identification of Betts. But there’s also agreement that the defense witnesses can’t be trusted.
Dinner arrives at six: bland, soggy-crusted pizza in Styrofoam cartons. Hillebrand conducts a second poll, also oral. The undecided are asked to take a stand. Seven guilty, five not.
At nine
P.M
., with no word yet from the jury, prosecutor Alesia is growing anxious. He’s sitting in the deputies’ anteroom down the hall from the jury room. “You can never tell what twelve idiots are gonna do,” he says with a shake of his head.
At ten
P.M
. Locallo directs Deputy Laura Rhodes to sequester the jury for the evening. When Rhodes informs the jurors of the imminent bus trip to a
hotel, the news, as always, is greeted with protests. Rhodes volleys back with promises of a real dinner at the hotel and two drinks on the county.
Deputy Guerrero escorts Betts downstairs. Betts wonders which way the jury seems to be leaning. Guerrero says he has no idea. But Betts is heartened nonetheless by the realization that at least someone on the jury must be in his corner. When he tells his tiermates about the jury being sequestered, they congratulate him and give him thumbs-up. “It was like a sign of hope for the other guys,” Betts says. Inmates may clash from time to time, he says, “but nobody wants to see nobody else get found guilty.”
RHODES AND GUERRERO
look exhausted the next morning in 302. They’ve taken turns sitting in the hotel corridor overnight, safeguarding the jury according to regulations. Juries are sequestered only about once or twice a year per courtroom. Even though it’s taxing, Rhodes and Guerrero wish it happened more often. Rhodes enjoys chatting with the jurors. Guerrero likes the hotel’s cable TV and twice-baked potatoes. Both deputies appreciate the time and a half.
Locallo takes the bench shortly after ten and starts working through other cases on the day’s schedule. Meanwhile, deliberations resume in the jury room over coffee and doughnuts. Foreperson Hillebrand tallies a mid-morning vote, this time by paper ballot. Ten guilty, two not.
It’s obvious from the ensuing discussion who the holdouts are: a black woman—the lone black on the jury—and a white man. By lunchtime the black woman has joined the fold.
This leaves only Bill Massey, a sixty-three-year-old mailroom clerk, in the way of a guilty verdict. Some of Massey’s fellow jurors ask him impatiently how he can take the word of convicted killers over that of guards and an investigator. Massey responds that he doesn’t necessarily believe the defense witnesses, but that the issue is whether Betts has been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The missing shank, the shirt that never was inventoried, the dubious identification at the hospital, all bother him.
Massey is a movie buff, and his situation reminds him of one of his favorite films,
Twelve Angry Men
, the classic story of a jury anxious to convict in a murder case that’s stalled by one stubbornly ethical juror, played by Henry Fonda. Fonda ultimately persuades the other eleven to acquit. But Massey can tell there’ll be no persuading these eleven. Throughout the afternoon he feels the pressure on him mounting. A juror announces he has tickets to a play this evening, tickets that will go wasted if a verdict isn’t reached soon. Massey recalls the juror in
Twelve Angry Men
who wanted a verdict because he had tickets to a ball game. Another time Hillebrand
lays an arm on Massey’s back while making a point. Massey recoils, and Hillebrand pulls the arm away. A little later Hillebrand rests a hand on Massey’s arm. Massey curtly directs the foreperson to stop all this touching. Hillebrand testily promises never to touch Massey again. Later Hillebrand realizes he hasn’t put his arm similarly on any other juror and chastises himself for trying to be manipulative.
At four-thirty
P.M
. Rhodes delivers a note from the jury to Locallo, informing the judge the panel is stuck eleven to one, but without saying which way. Locallo reads the note to the lawyers.
Betts has spent a good deal of his time in jail and prison hunched over books in the law library. He knows he could direct his lawyers to ask Locallo to declare a mistrial, arguing that the jury is hopelessly deadlocked. But Eben counsels patience. The eleven votes could be for acquittal, he says. Betts agrees to wait, but he’s skeptical of Eben’s advice. With just one black on the jury, he doubts he’s got eleven jurors siding with him. He notes that the prosecutors are strongly in favor of the jury deliberating further. He suspects Eben would prefer a guilty verdict over having to retry the case.
After consulting with the lawyers, Locallo directs the jury to continue deliberating.
Dinner arrives in the jury room shortly thereafter. Pizza again. Most of the jurors leave the cartons unopened. The room is hot and stuffy. The smokers on the jury have agreed to confine their smoking to the washrooms, but this means the washrooms reek. Tempers are wearing thin. One juror reaches for a pizza carton, annoying the man next to him: “How can you
eat
that crap?” Occasionally Rhodes and Guerrero, waiting in the anteroom around the corner, hear raised voices through the jury room walls. “They’ve got the shank in there, you know,” Rhodes tells her partner. “Maybe that’s not a good idea.”
In the courtroom Locallo asks the lawyers how they’d like to proceed. Eben suggests the jurors be sent home for the night instead of to a hotel, with directions that they return in the morning to resume deliberations. Locallo likes the idea. Ostrowski wonders whether it’s legally permissible to allow a jury to separate once it’s begun deliberating. Locallo leaves the bench to consult the law books in his chambers.
Betts now feels certain the eleven-to-one vote is against him. He imagines how weary the lone dissenter must be getting. “People give in because it’s the easiest thing to do,” Betts tells me later. “You got a lotta people in jail right now because of that.” And so while the judge is gone, Betts tells Eben he wants him to make the motion for a mistrial.