Authors: Steve Bogira
“Then what did you do?” Dalkin asks.
“Look like he was grabbing my rifle, so I shot for his heart,” Demus says.
But the shot hit the butt of the rifle instead, shattering it, he says. “Everything fell out of his arm, then he ran.”
The intruder fled down the front steps and to the right, with Demus firing a third shot at him again from his porch, Demus continues. He believed he’d hit the man with this shot, because he went down on his front lawn, but the man quickly regained his feet and raced off, leaving his cap and one shoe behind. It looked to Demus as if he’d wounded him in the arm.
Demus stayed on the porch “sending the bullets out there”—four more shots at the fleeing man, then one at another man he spotted in the gangway next to his building, whom Demus assumed had been the other intruder.
Then Demus called the police. While he waited for them to arrive, he surveyed his house. His wife’s bedroom “was tore up like a tornado had been in it.” A back window was broken, as was the lock on the back door.
At the defense table, Conniff is studying a detectives’ supplemental report about the burglary. He’s found several discrepancies between the account the detectives say Demus gave them and the one Demus just gave on the stand. According to the report, Demus told detectives the intruder had moved to the front door and had turned toward Demus as he exited. Conniff figured Demus was now saying the man had backed toward the door because that would have given Demus a better chance to identify him. There also was nothing in the report about Demus firing a warning shot inside. And according to the report, Demus shot the intruder as the intruder exited the door, not after he reached the lawn. When Conniff highlights the discrepancies on cross, Demus insists he told the detectives the account he just testified to. But another contradiction develops on cross: Demus now says he actually missed Pouncy with his third shot and winged him with his fourth.
Demus reiterates his testimony regarding the direction the man took as he fled from the house, saying again that the man ran to the right. Locallo hands Demus a photo of his house and asks him to draw the path the offender took.
As Conniff presses Demus, Demus gets defensive, volunteering information
about heart pills he had to take, about the “state of shock” he was in, about how “it wasn’t no cool and calm at my age.”
“If you can, Mr. Demus, just concentrate on the question,” Locallo says impatiently, “and we can maybe finish this bench trial sometime today.”
The next witness, Chicago police officer Jesse Jeffries, says he was at St. Bernard’s Hospital on another matter during the afternoon in question when he heard a radio message asking police to be on the lookout for a young black man in a white T-shirt and black pants who’d just been shot in the arm. Then someone fitting that description walked into the hospital cradling his arm and wearing only one shoe—Pouncy.
Detective James Cavanaugh, who follows Jeffries to the stand, says that while Pouncy was administered to in the emergency room, he and his partner examined Pouncy’s bloody shirt and pants, which ER personnel had put in a plastic bag. They found two rings and a watch in a pants pocket, Detective Cavanaugh says, along with a photo of Pouncy. Other officers brought Demus to the hospital, and he picked Pouncy’s photo out of an array that Cavanaugh showed him. Demus also identified the rings and the watch found in Pouncy’s pants as his wife’s. An evidence technician later brought to the hospital the black sneaker with red laces that had been left near Demus’s house. It matched the one Pouncy had worn to the hospital, Cavanaugh says.
After the state rests, Conniff calls Catherine Crittenden to the stand. Crittenden, who tells Locallo she recently retired from thirty years’ work for the phone company, says Pouncy was working on her car on the afternoon in question. Her daughter, an acquaintance of Pouncy’s, had recommended him to her. The car was parked on the 6700 block of South Peoria. She was sitting in her car, with the hood up, when she heard what sounded like firecrackers. She got out of the car to see what was happening, and then she saw an old man with a gun chasing a young man south down Peoria. Pouncy was still at the front of her car, she says. Soon the old man returned, and then he approached Pouncy and began threatening him. “He started swearing, and he was asking Mr. Pouncy, ‘Is that your friend?’ ” Crittenden says. She told Pouncy he’d better go call the police. But as Pouncy tried to edge away down a gangway, the old man followed him, Crittenden says, and then she heard gunshots. Pouncy didn’t return.
Two other witnesses corroborate Crittenden’s account—a young woman who says she knows Pouncy from the neighborhood and happened to be in the vicinity, and Pouncy’s younger sister, who says she was sitting on the curb next to Crittenden’s car at the time of the incident.
Then Pouncy himself takes the stand. He’s short and slight with cherubic features. He’s been on home monitoring while his case has been pending,
and so he’s dressed in civilian clothes—white dress shirt and dark slacks. He never went into Demus’s home, never took any of his property, he says. He was just fixing a car next door, in front of a girlfriend’s house, when Demus approached him “saying things like, ‘Are those your friends?’ ” When Pouncy told him no, Demus “said something about, ‘You going to jail,’ ‘I’ll shoot you,’ ‘I’ll kill you,’ other words, you know, threatening words.” Then Pouncy made for the gangway, hoping to get into his girlfriend’s house through a rear door, but the door was locked. In the gangway he stumbled over a low gate, and his shoe stuck in the gate. Demus fired at him three times in the gangway, the last shot wounding him in the arm.
The rings and the watch found in his pants pocket at the hospital belong to a girlfriend of his, Pouncy says. “Me and my girlfriend got into an argument the day before that and she threw them at me.”
Conniff rests after Pouncy is through. Dalkin calls Officer James Yu in rebuttal. Yu says he participated in the investigation of the burglary, and he saw the sneaker on the lawn in front of Demus’s house.
Sitting at the defense table along with Conniff and Pouncy is Mia McPherson, a third-year law student clerking for the PD’s office. While she is perusing the photos taken outside Demus’s house by a police evidence technician, something catches her eye. The photo of the black sneaker with the red laces that Pouncy left at the scene is a close-up shot, so it’s not clear where exactly the shoe was, but directly behind the shoe there appears to be the bottom of a downspout. In a second photo, showing the front of Demus’s house from a distance, McPherson spies a downspout in the gangway north of the house—the gangway through which Pouncy says he fled from Demus. The angle and distance from which the second photo was taken make it unclear whether the sneaker was indeed at the bottom of that downspout. But McPherson thinks the two photos together suggest that the shoe probably was in the gangway, and not out front, when the police took the picture. That would match Pouncy’s account of what happened and not Demus’s. In excited whispers, McPherson shares her discovery with Conniff.
On cross, Conniff shows Officer Yu the photo of Demus’s house and asks if it shows a downspout in the gangway. Yu allows that it does. Then Conniff shows the officer the close-up of the sneaker.
“That is the shoe, is it not?” Conniff asks.
“Yes, sir,” Yu says.
“And that is a downspout, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
In his closing argument, Conniff stresses the differences between Demus’s
account on the stand and the one he gave detectives, concerning where Pouncy had been when Demus shot him. “
Falsus en partes, et falsus en omnia
, Judge,” Conniff says. (False in part, false in all.)
“Common spelling, Miss Reporter,” Locallo says. The court reporter flashes a grin at the judge as she taps away.
Conniff leans heavily on the credibility of Catherine Crittenden, stressing her three decades of work for one company. “Why is she going to come in here and lie for Mr. Pouncy?” the PD says. When Demus returned from chasing one young man down the block, as Crittenden and the other defense witnesses say he did, he likely was frustrated over not having caught the man, Conniff says. Then he saw Pouncy on the street near his house and assumed he’d been involved in the burglary. Demus “clearly indicated from the witness stand he’s not afraid to take shots at people,” Conniff says. “And I think that under this circumstance, he just didn’t hit the right guy, Judge.” Conniff adds that the state offered no evidence, just Demus’s word, that the rings and watch found in Pouncy’s pockets belonged to Demus’s wife. And he says Pouncy would have been a “very foolish man indeed” to burglarize the home next door to one he frequents.
Conniff believes there’s enough doubt to acquit Pouncy. But he senses that Locallo thinks otherwise. Something in the judge’s demeanor during the trial—Conniff can’t put his finger on it—has told the PD that Locallo doesn’t buy Pouncy’s story, or the testimony of his witnesses. Conniff would bet on his client going down.
Except for that sneaker. For how can the state, the judge, or anyone else explain how the shoe ended up in the gangway that Pouncy says he got chased through, instead of being out front, where Demus says Pouncy left it? So Conniff spends much of his argument focusing on the black sneaker with the red laces, and where the photo seems to show it to be.
Apparently with effect, because before Dalkin even begins his argument, Locallo asks him to explain how the shoe ended up in the gangway. Dalkin says it’s not clear from the photo that the shoe was in the gangway.
“If the shoe
is
in the gangway,” Locallo says, “then that certainly contradicts Mr. Demus’s testimony that he saw the defendant run down the stairs and make a right-hand turn.”
Locallo, whose own father is seventy-two years old and moonlighted as a security guard, tells the lawyers he found Demus to be a “sympathetic” witness and that he’s “not real crazy” about the defense witnesses. “However, seeing that shoe in the gangway—”
“But there’s no evidence that the shoe is in the gangway,” Dalkin reiterates.
Locallo asks Dalkin for the photo showing the sneaker, and he studies it
again. He tells Dalkin that there does indeed seem to be a downspout behind the shoe.
“That’s like reasonable doubt at this point, Judge,” Conniff says.
“Not necessarily, Mr. Conniff,” Locallo says. The judge says there’s only one way to resolve the uncertainty. “We’ll take a road trip.”
Dalkin offers to have an investigator snap some more photos of the area instead.
Conniff doesn’t think much of that proposal. “I think a road trip would be more appropriate than their investigator taking some more pictures. Or maybe
our
investigator should go and take some pictures.”
“We’re going to take a road trip tomorrow,” Locallo says. “Lunchtime.”
Dalkin says he already has plans to attend a party at lunchtime tomorrow for a prosecutor who’s being elevated to judge.
“We’ll go after the party,” Locallo tells Dalkin. “We’ll go in two cars. You take your car, I’ll take my car.”
“Do I have to ride with Mr. Dalkin?” Conniff asks.
PEOPLE HAVE BEEN
accusing Pouncy of taking things for much of his adult life.
In 1990, just two months after his seventeenth birthday, Pouncy and several others were seen hauling away the proceeds of a neighborhood burglary, according to police—a Nintendo system, a color TV, some coins and jewelry. The complaining witness didn’t show in court, and the case was dropped.
Two months later police caught Pouncy and another young man cruising in a 1981 Impala with a broken side window, no plates or sticker, a peeled steering column, and no keys in the ignition. According to police, Pouncy said he’d just bought the car from a man for $50, but a computer check showed it had been stolen earlier that day. Another dropped case.
Two days after that arrest Pouncy was arrested again, when two people who said they knew him told police they’d seen him leaving a house from which a VCR had been taken. Police say Pouncy claimed he’d only acted as a lookout for the real burglars. The burglary charge was eventually dismissed.
In 1992 a woman accused Pouncy of breaking into her back porch and pointing a gun at her through a kitchen window. Pouncy was charged with home invasion and attempted armed robbery. This case made it all the way to trial. Pouncy maintained he’d been watching videos at a girlfriend’s house at the time of the offenses. His girlfriend’s father testified on his behalf, recalling that Pouncy had been with the family watching
Home
Alone
. Pouncy was acquitted. He says his accuser was a former girlfriend who was mad at him.
While he was in jail awaiting trial on that case, police happened to run fingerprints they’d lifted from a can of spinach and a can opener from a burglarized south-side apartment—and the prints matched Pouncy’s. Three VCRs, a stereo, and two handguns had been swiped in that burglary. But a judge later threw out the case for reasons that are unclear from the court file.
Pouncy’s winning streak in court ended in 1994 when he pled guilty to two burglaries. He told the judge he was addicted to drugs and sought probation with treatment. The judge instead sentenced him to a state boot camp, in which he served five months. Pouncy says that the judge probably suspected he didn’t really have a drug problem and that the judge was right. Except for an occasional marijuana joint, he’s never used drugs, he says; he just claimed he did to try to get probation.
AT TWO-THIRTY
the following afternoon, a cool, overcast day, a white sheriff’s bus pulls up behind the courthouse, and the Locallo entourage boards.
The judge wasn’t serious about driving to the scene in private cars. This morning he asked the sheriff’s office for the bus and a driver, annoying the chief of security in the courthouse, Ed Hassel, who would have preferred a little more notice. But it’s par for the course for Locallo, according to Hassel, who says Locallo makes more special requests of the sheriff’s office than any judge at 26th Street, and often with little regard for the difficulties the requests might impose.