Authors: Steve Bogira
Locallo has made a half-dozen field trips in his twelve years as a judge thus far—more than any of his colleagues, he thinks. His first came during a 1989 preliminary hearing.
The defendant was charged with drug and weapon offenses. Police had entered his apartment with no search warrant and seized cocaine and shotguns. The issue was whether the officers had probable cause to believe the contraband was in the apartment. An officer testified he’d been able to see the guns and drugs from the entryway to the flat, but a defense photo suggested otherwise. After visiting the scene, Locallo suppressed the seized evidence and the state dropped the case.
During a bench trial in 1995 Locallo went to a nursing home to get the testimony of eighteen-year-old Jerome Triplett, who’d been rendered a quadriplegic after a shooting and beating by rival gang members. Triplett testified through a lip-reader since he couldn’t speak above a whisper. He sat in an adjustable hospital chair, his ventilator on one side of him and the lip-reader on the other. When Triplett’s whispers couldn’t be understood
by the lip-reader, Triplett pointed at letters on an alphabet board with a stick in his mouth. Triplett also used the stick to identify photos of the four defendants as his attackers. (The defendants had waived their right to be present for the hearing.) Locallo later found the defendants guilty and sentenced them to long terms.
When a key witness can’t make it to the courtroom, or when a trip to the crime scene may clarify an ambiguous exhibit, a field trip makes sense, Locallo says. He’s not sure why judges don’t make such trips more often. “To me, what’s the harm? It’s no big deal—you get on the bus and you go. It makes it interesting.”
The crew boarding the bus this afternoon consists of Conniff, Pouncy, prosecutors Dalkin and Mark Ostrowski, Deputies Guerrero and Rhodes, a court reporter, Locallo, and myself. It’s a midsize bus with a dozen two-person seats. The prosecutors take a seat at the front while Pouncy, the only black on board, heads straight for the rear. Conniff parks himself in the seat in front of his client, and Locallo settles in across the aisle from Conniff.
The bus crawls southward through midafternoon congestion on California. “You got a siren on this thing?” Locallo calls to the deputy who’s driving.
“Yes.
Why?
” The driver’s tone suggests he’s not using the siren, whether Locallo wants him to or not, and Locallo doesn’t push the subject.
Dalkin says something to Ostrowski about a recent vacation. Guerrero, overhearing, asks Dalkin whether he smoked dope on the trip. Guerrero’s antennae are always feeling for hypocrisy. He figures a lot of prosecutors must have gotten high in college, and he’d bet that some still do. He finds it funny how they always deny it.
“That what
you
like to do, Gil?” Locallo calls out to Guerrero.
“If I did, I’d probably be in front of you now, asking for a contact visit,” Guerrero says, and everyone laughs.
Everyone except Pouncy, that is, whose gaze is fixed out the emergency exit window next to him. He’s not sure how to act during this odd exercise, so he’s just trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. He still can’t believe this is happening. Last night he told some friends about the coming trip to the scene, but they just rolled their eyes. Even his girlfriend said, “Yeah,
right
.”
“Where we at—Sixty-first Street?” Locallo is saying. “Beautiful. Officer Battaglia, you’re making good time,” he shouts to the driver.
“I’m Silva,” the driver shouts back.
Earlier today, Locallo made his ruling in the bench trial of a defendant named Hector Padilla, who’d been accused of shooting a young man to death in a south-side Mexican neighborhood. Padilla’s mother, father, and sister had testified that Hector had been with them on the evening in question,
watching a video. But that hadn’t been enough to overcome the confession Padilla had given and the two eyewitnesses who’d fingered him. Locallo found him guilty, declaring, with unusual vehemence for him, that he believed the Padilla family had simply lied for him.
Now Ostrowski, who prosecuted the case, tells Locallo he thinks Padilla was expecting to be acquitted.
“Hector must have misread,” Locallo says.
“I was surprised you used the word
lie
on the record,” Ostrowski says. “You usually say something like
not credible
.”
“Wonder what video Hector was watching that night,” Locallo says. “Probably
The Usual Suspects
.” He looks across the aisle at Conniff. “You ever seen that movie?”
Conniff shakes his head.
“One of the absolute great movies,” the judge says.
Pouncy turns away from the window for the first time, looks at Locallo, and says excitedly, “I seen that!”
“Good movie, Terrence?” Locallo asks.
“
Yeah
. That Keyser—”
“Keyser Soze,” Locallo says. “There’s just so many twists to it.” He pauses, eyeing Pouncy in the backseat. “ ‘Terrence Pouncy, usual suspect,’ ” the judge says. He and Pouncy trade grins, and then Pouncy quickly and bashfully turns back to his window.
“A road trip would be beautiful for the Caruso trial,” Locallo muses to no one in particular. “Can you imagine that? Going into Bridgeport? Jurors would get a good look at the scene.…” His voice trails off wistfully.
The bus rumbles along on gritty south-side streets, past body shops, fast-food joints, taverns with Old Style signs. Pouncy feels confident, mostly, that this trip will clear him, but he also worries, as he passes familiar street corners, that this could be his last glimpse of these places for years. If the judge finds him guilty, it’ll be his third burglary conviction—which means a sentence between six and thirty years.
After twenty minutes, Officer Silva swings the bus onto the 6700 block of South Peoria. A hodgepodge of homes, brick and frame, are squeezed together behind tiny lawns. The bus groans to a stop in front of the Demus home, a weary frame two-story. An elderly man and woman standing on the sidewalk a few doors down look up at the bus and then at each other as the passengers spill out. Pouncy is glad to see no one he knows—he’s been concerned about the embarrassment.
Locallo and the lawyers survey the gangway on the north side of the house, the one Pouncy claims Demus chased him through. There they do indeed find the crucial downspout, attached to the building next door. It
appears to be a match with the downspout in the photo of the sneaker. It’s good news for Pouncy.
After just five minutes, the entourage reboards. The court reporter sets up her steno on a tripod in the aisle of the bus. For the record, Locallo says the principals have made a trip to the scene, and that the sneaker appears to have been in the gangway north of Demus’s house.
“All right. John, any questions?” Locallo asks Conniff. It’s not clear who Conniff would address them to, but the PD says he has none.
“Andy, any questions?” the judge asks Dalkin. Dalkin likewise has none.
“Gil, any questions?” Deputy Rhodes asks her partner softly.
Guerrero rubs his stomach. “Yeah. When can I get something to eat?”
On the return trip, Locallo begins telling Conniff about the annual touch football game the state’s attorneys and the PDs played when he was a prosecutor. His very first year he returned a kickoff for a touchdown, Locallo says, ending a two-year scoring drought for the prosecutors.
A judge spends his workday listening to the stories of others, and perhaps he yearns for times when the situation is reversed. Locallo can see he has an attentive audience in Conniff, whose eyes never wander from him, and Conniff soon pays the price, as Locallo relates in excruciating detail the key plays of several years of the football battles. “The next year the game was six to nothing in the snow.… The next year the PDs go ahead with two minutes left in the game.… Then we had time for one more play.…” The saga ends thrillingly, with wide receiver Locallo serving as a decoy, the PDs triple-teaming him, and another prosecutor grabbing a deflected pass for a last-second touchdown and a come-from-behind victory for the state. Locallo gazes blissfully out his window after finishing the chronicle. Conniff steals a look at his watch.
Conniff mentions that he’s hoping to get to his daughter’s high school softball game later this afternoon. Locallo grabs the ball and heads downfield, launching into several minutes of his daughter’s exploits in cross-country races and his son’s feats on basketball courts.
When Dalkin says something to Ostrowski about a case on the courtroom’s call involving the northwest-side Edens Motel, it prompts Locallo to tell another story, relating to that motel.
He was sleeping over at a friend’s house one night when he was ten. In the middle of the night “we got the bright idea to go out for some Cokes”—and the two boys sneaked out of the house and over to the motel, knowing it had a pop machine. As luck would have it, police were monitoring the area because of some car break-ins in the motel lot earlier that evening. Locallo and his friend neared the motel just as a string of squad cars and a paddy wagon rolled by. The boys darted across a busy street and into a
forest preserve. “Then we heard ‘Halt!’ And then
boom
!” Locallo says; one officer had fired a warning shot. “We hit the dirt. They walked us back to the squad cars at gunpoint.”
Locallo informed the officers his father was Sergeant August Locallo. “They said, ‘Well, you’d better call him.’ It was three o’clock in the morning. I said, ‘I think he’s asleep.’ They said, ‘Call him.’ ” Fortunately for Locallo, his father’s wrath was exhausted mostly on the officer who fired the shot, and at the drawing of weapons to round up two youngsters. But “needless to say it was a while before I went on any more sleepovers,” Locallo tells his audience.
Soon after the group returns to 302, Locallo calls Pouncy to the bench. The judge says for the record that the police photo of the sneaker, along with the visit to the crime scene, suggests a version of events “diametrically opposed to the testimony of Mr. Demus, and under the circumstances creates doubt in this court’s mind regarding the whole set of facts.… Therefore, the court having said that, the defendant is not guilty.”
“Thank you, Mr. Locallo,” Pouncy says meekly. He confers briefly with Conniff, then takes a seat in the empty gallery. He’ll have to wait while Conniff prepares a court order for Locallo to sign explaining to the home-monitoring officials why Pouncy wasn’t home today. Pouncy’s acquittal ought to make that point moot, but Pouncy can imagine some sheriff mistakenly hauling him back down to 26th Street for violating his bond.
Once Pouncy is in the gallery, Dalkin approaches the bench, shaking his head. He asks Locallo if the microphone is off, and the judge leans forward and cuts the sound to the gallery.
“It just strikes me as odd,” Dalkin says, “that when a person gets found not guilty of a residential burglary, that he shows no emotion.”
Conniff, who’s writing the court order for Pouncy at the defense table, springs to his feet. “You know why that is, don’t you?” Conniff asks Dalkin.
“Yeah, I know why, because he’s guilty,” Dalkin says.
Conniff glares at the prosecutor. “Your office has that rare myopia, that even when the evidence doesn’t support the charge, you still believe the guy’s guilty.”
Ostrowski comes to Dalkin’s aid, reminding Conniff of the difference between not guilty and innocent. “We just didn’t have the evidence,” Ostrowski says.
“I think you had a witness who took the stand and lied,” Conniff replies. “I’d worry more about that part than about, ‘Well, he [Pouncy] must have been guilty of
some
thing.’ ”
“We can continue this philosophical discussion another time, John,” Locallo says. “You’re gonna be late for your game.”
“I feel very strongly about this,” Conniff says.
Locallo, passing through the gallery on his way out of the courtroom, admonishes Pouncy to “stay out of trouble. You go down on another burglary, you’re looking at six to thirty. Get a degree. Get a job. Be productive.” Pouncy nods.
“You wouldn’t think a judge would come to your neighborhood like that,” Pouncy says after Locallo leaves. “I appreciate that. Like they say, he’s a law judge. That’s why he found me not guilty, because he went by the law. I have did some bad things, and at some point you got to be punished. But not for a crime you ain’t did.” He says he does indeed plan to return to school and to find work, but that he first needs surgery on his arm. He’s had little feeling in the first three fingers of his right hand and trouble moving the arm since he was shot by Demus, he says.
Conniff is still steaming about Dalkin’s reaction when the PD gives Pouncy his court order in the gallery a few minutes later. “These people on the other side—they read everything as evidence of guilt,” he tells his client. He cautions Pouncy to watch his step back in his neighborhood, warning him that the police will be “looking to put a case on you. Whenever you win one, you better stay out of sight for a long time.”
Pouncy thanks Conniff, then pays him the highest compliment a PD can get. “Hey, you good,” he says. “Why ain’t you become a real lawyer?”
Considering Conniff’s philosophy about a lawyer remaining detached, he got surprisingly worked up about this case. He also showed a concern for Pouncy—but not one that would last. “I subscribe to the bathtub theory of litigation,” Conniff says a few weeks later when he’s asked something about the Pouncy trial. “You have to bathe in the waters of the case. But after it’s over, you pull the plug and let out the water. Mr. Pouncy is now down the drain.”
ON A MONDAY MORNING
in late April, Locallo and his staff take a different kind of road trip from 302.
Jury selection is set to begin this day for Frank Caruso and Victor Jasas in the Bridgeport case. (The third defendant, Michael Kwidzinski, has asked for a bench trial.) To accommodate the anticipated throng of media and spectators, Locallo has been granted use of one of the building’s older, spacious courtrooms, number 600. He takes the bench at 9:40 and runs through a few miscellaneous matters on his call. The oak pews in the gallery are beginning to fill with reporters and spectators even though the main attraction isn’t scheduled to begin until 10:30. The judge is sporting a fresh haircut. So is Deputy Guerrero. So is clerk Duane Sundberg.