Authors: Steve Bogira
THE JURY RETURNS
in midafternoon with a guilty verdict in the carjacking case. After Locallo meets with the jurors to thank them for their service, he mops up his calendar for the day. Probation liaison Schullo tells the judge she has one more case, and a few minutes after three, Bates is finally called to the bench. Schullo informs Locallo that Bates has indeed completed his community service, but that he’s in court because he’s been arrested again.
“What’s the charge?” Locallo asks.
“Delivery.”
“Miss Sheriff, take Mr. Bates into custody,” the judge tells Deputy Laura Rhodes. Bates is scheduled to appear before a branch court judge three weeks from now for a preliminary hearing in his new case. Locallo’s decision means he’ll be in the jail at least until then.
Bates shuffles off toward the lockup with Rhodes behind him. Should’ve gone ahead and left, he says to himself.
Deputy Guerrero pats down Bates at the sheriff’s station. Guerrero has little sympathy for drug offenders, even penny-ante ones. He subscribes to the domino theory regarding drug users. “You start with point-one gram, point-two grams, point-three grams—pretty soon you’re robbing people and raping old ladies.” Guerrero is also cranky today, the product of a late night barhopping with friends. He tosses Bates’s three remaining cigarettes and one stick of gum into a wastebasket. Then he finds the Snickers bar. “Can’t I just have the candy bar?” Bates pleads. But he knows what the answer will be and chastises himself for not eating it earlier. Guerrero mutters,
“Not my problem,” and flips the Snickers into the wastebasket, where it lands with a clunk.
IN THE DRUG WAR
of the 1950s and in the present one, the courthouse has played its standard enabling role. In both instances, court officials developed strategies to process the flood of drug defendants at an amphetamine pace, allowing the wars to march onward without pause or thought.
On April 2, 1951, Courtroom 506 at 26th Street became
the first court in the nation devoted solely to drug cases. Officials said the special court would help combat drug trafficking. The fifty defendants in court the first morning
weren’t traffickers, however—they were addicts arrested for possession. The judge locked them up for three months, six months, a year.
The court disposed of more than a hundred cases on some mornings, according to descriptions of it written by Indiana University sociologist Alfred Lindesmith, who visited it in the 1950s. It was easy to quickly convict the defendants because hardly any of them were represented by lawyers. Lawyers weren’t provided in those days for indigent misdemeanor defendants, and this was labeled a misdemeanor court—although the legislature gave it the special power to sentence defendants to as much as five years in prison. (The maximum term for a misdemeanor usually is a year.) Ninety percent of the defendants were black. Lindesmith visited some of the drug court clones that other cities opened in the 1950s, and as he reported in
The Nation
in 1957, he likewise found a “
long, shabby, pitiful parade of indigent drug users and petty offenders, mostly Negroes.”
In the late 1980s, with 26th Street’s trial judges swamped in drug cases, Presiding Judge Thomas Fitzgerald established a
drug night court program, shifting most of the building’s drug cases to five courtrooms that commenced business at four
P.M
., after daytime staff had left. The program was aimed at easing the workload of the trial judges so they could concentrate on more serious cases. Fitzgerald also reasoned that judges and lawyers who specialized in drug cases would learn routines for disposing of them more efficiently. He picked judges for the courtrooms not for their expertise in drug abuse but for their proficiency in hustling cases along; the judges came from hectic traffic and misdemeanor courtrooms and thus were adept at expediting a busy call. Fitzgerald hoped for a total of five thousand dispos from the five courts in their first full year, 1990. He got 9,700. So he added three more courtrooms to the program.
In 1992 Justice Department researchers, aware of the many other jurisdictions buried in drug cases, studied the Cook County operation. Prosecutors and PDs assigned to the drug courts told the study’s researchers they had little time to prepare cases or confer with witnesses or clients.
Some PDs said they felt pressured to advise their clients to decide in five minutes whether to plead guilty or not. Lawyers interviewed labeled the drug courts a “production line,” a “numbers game,” a “quick way to get rid of cases,” a “mill,” and “cattle-call justice.” Plea bargaining, of course, was rampant in the drug courts, jury trials almost nonexistent. Defendants benefited in the short run from the fire-sale offers they got from prosecutors or judges. But their plea deals often came back to haunt them. First-time offenders usually walked out of the courtroom with probation, but only four percent also got treatment. Many were soon rearrested and sent to prison. “They give them just enough rope to hang themselves,” a public defender told the researchers.
But “cattle-call justice” saved time and money. And so the Justice Department researchers deemed the drug night courts an “efficient and cost-effective approach available right now for replication in other jurisdictions.”
The way the Chicago newspapers raved about the night court program, one would have thought Judge Fitzgerald had developed a cure for drug abuse rather than for drug case overdose. Establishing the drug courts was “
one of the smartest recent moves” in the Cook County courts, the
Chicago Tribune
crowed in 1992. The
Tribune
allowed, however, that the drug courts had become the “equivalent of a pet bear cub that kept on eating.” Drug cases were coming into the courthouse more quickly than ever; the faster the bear cub ate, it seemed, the more food it had available to consume.
The drug courts are a prime example of how
crime magically swells to fill the criminal courts’ capacity to handle it. Before the night courts opened, police officers who found only a user amount of drugs on a person often let him go with a gruff warning, knowing that the preliminary hearing judges at 26th Street were tossing out petty cases because the trial court dockets were overwhelmed. The drug courts made this triage unnecessary: since there now were special courtrooms in which to process drug cases, the preliminary hearing judges didn’t have to reject the petty cases. Police officers, in turn, knowing the petty cases wouldn’t automatically be rejected,
began arresting more of the addicts they caught with a single rock or packet of heroin. Special teams of cops also swept increasingly through slums and housing projects in their wittily named drug “operations”—Hammer Down, Iron Wedge, Clean Sweep, Risky Business—dropping swarms of addicts and two-bit dealers into the night court jaws.
Soon the drug courts themselves were so distended that some of the new cases had to be assigned to the day court judges. Gradually more and more were so assigned. As of March 1998, more than a third of the 383 defendants on Locallo’s docket were charged with drug offenses.
The creation of the drug courts was “
like opening the gates to a dam wider during a flood,” the county’s chief public defender, Rita Fry, told a state task force in 1992. The jail population rose from 6,500 when the night courts opened to 8,600 three years later, Fry observed—a result of the decision to prosecute the “virtually inexhaustible supply” of drug users. Fry wondered whether the drug war here would be “fought with the same vigor if it were the sons of Wilmette, Winnetka, and Wheeling”—three white suburbs—being arrested and prosecuted.
In 1996, with Judge Fitzgerald’s support, the law-and-order-leaning Chicago Crime Commission proposed that lawmakers downgrade the possession of a gram or less of heroin or cocaine to a misdemeanor. The focus on small drug cases as felonies “
deludes the public into thinking that we are making progress in fighting crime,” the commission said. The following year a bill based on the proposal was introduced in the Illinois General Assembly. It
died in committee.
“
DONNA
?
DONNA
?
”
Public defender Kathryn Lisco is standing in the gallery aisle on an April morning, trying to rouse one of her clients, Donna Gilliam.
*
(Lisco recently replaced public defender Diana Bidawid in the courtroom, Bidawid having gone on maternity leave.) A skinny thirty-year-old African American in a sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, Gilliam is dozing on one of the benches, her head drooping above the open potato chip bag in her lap. She came alone to court, but the young man next to her, another defendant, now elbows her gently. Gilliam comes to, clutches the chip bag, and follows Lisco out into the hallway.
In January police say they saw Gilliam selling drugs on a ghetto street under the El tracks two miles northwest of the courthouse. They say she dropped five tinfoil packets to the ground as they approached, packets containing a total of 0.2 grams of heroin. She’s been free on an I-bond since.
Her drowsiness today is mainly due to the heroin she snorted before she left for court this morning, she’ll say later.
Now, in the hallway, public defender Lisco asks Gilliam if she’d like to opt for probation with treatment. “I know you got a drug problem,” Lisco says. Gilliam dips into the chip bag and nods.
Gilliam is back in the gallery, snoring softly, when Locallo starts going through the call a few minutes after ten. Clerk Duane Sundberg calls her
case at eleven-thirty. No response. Locallo’s eyes sweep the gallery. Sundberg repeats the name, more insistently. The young man next to Gilliam elbows her again. She blinks awake. “They calling you,” the young man says. Gilliam stands, the chip bag sliding to the floor. She grins sheepishly and steps through the glass doors and up to the bench.
Lisco tells the judge that Gilliam wants to be evaluated for treatment. Locallo consents to the evaluation, which will determine whether she’s a suitable candidate for treatment. The judge sets June 1 as the next court date.
Gilliam returns to the gallery beaming. She’s not particularly interested in treatment, she says later, but it sounds better to her than prison. After Lisco is finished with her morning cases, she escorts Gilliam to the first-floor office where Gilliam needs to make the appointment for her evaluation. Lisco wasn’t confident Gilliam would get there on her own.
DRUG TREATMENT
is
no panacea, especially for addicts from impoverished backgrounds, who often have a host of other troubles to overcome. Even if they can get probation and treatment instead of prison, and even if they successfully complete the program, they usually return to the same neighborhood and circumstances that led to the addiction in the first place.
Gilliam grew up in a west-side slum with two sisters and a brother. Her mother liked to drink, and Gilliam preferred it when she did because it made her less ornery, less inclined to whup Gilliam and her siblings. Their father had left when Gilliam was two, but she and her siblings sometimes stayed with him on weekends. He too was abusive. One day a gym teacher at school noticed bruises on Gilliam’s thighs and called the police. Gilliam wound up in foster care.
Gilliam quit school after eighth grade—because she was moving so often, she says, from foster home to group home to foster home. She got pregnant at fifteen. She says she started smoking cocaine when she was twenty-one after seeing her sister doing it. Smoking crack took away her feeling that she was worthless and unlikable. But that feeling quickly returned, and crack also made her jittery and paranoid. “It’s a useless thing,” she says. She craved it anyway. Like many crack addicts, she started snorting heroin to temper the jumpiness. She’s supported her addictions mainly by stealing and peddling drugs, she says. Her rap sheet also shows numerous arrests for prostitution. She’s worked a few legitimate jobs, but only briefly. Her lack of education has limited her to minimum-wage positions. And her frequent pregnancies have interfered with those jobs; at age thirty, she has seven children, who mainly stay with relatives.
• • •
GILLIAM DOESN
’
T EVEN MAKE IT
to her treatment evaluation in May. “I’m not gonna say I forgot—I want to keep it real,” she says later. “I knew that day that I had to go. But I said to myself, ‘I got to get this rock one more time. And toot this blow.’ ”
She also misses her June 1 court date. This one she really did forget about, she says later. “Drugs overruled my brain.”
On the morning of June 6 she gets busted again, for allegedly peddling drugs under the same El tracks she was allegedly peddling under in January. The police catch her with another five tinfoil packets, containing a total of 0.5 grams of heroin, they say. She has a few days of vomiting and diarrhea in the jail as the heroin in her system wears off.
The police picked her out of a crowd of people under the El tracks and said the heroin they found in a bush was hers—but it wasn’t this time, she maintains, and she didn’t happen to be dealing that morning. “But it’s always gonna be their word over mine because I’m an addict.”
So in July, on Lisco’s recommendation, she decides to cut her losses by pleading guilty to both charges. With two drug deliveries, probation is no longer an option. And since the second offense occurred while she was on bond for the first, her two sentences will have to run consecutively. Locallo gives her the
minimum possible sentence—a total of eight years. She’ll have to serve four. It’ll cost taxpayers about $80,000 to keep her slum safe from her for that time—or more than $11,000 per 0.1 gram of heroin she was charged with in the two cases combined.
ON SEPTEMBER
15, 1927, after Cook County Board president Anton Cermak spread the mortar for the cornerstone, he told reporters this new courthouse wouldn’t have been needed
but for Prohibition and all the murders, robberies, burglaries, and arsons stemming from it.
Temperance advocates had maintained that outlawing alcohol would greatly reduce crime. Many of those who have studied the Prohibition era believe it had
the opposite effect. After “intoxicating liquors” were banned in 1919, a black market blossomed to quench the public’s thirst. Organized gangsters shot and bombed competitors. Mobsters bribed cops, judges, and ward bosses to let their bootleg operations flourish. Alcohol continued to be used widely by the affluent as well as the poor, and so Prohibition soon lost its political support. It was repealed in 1933.