Authors: Steve Bogira
“Oh, now your
chest
hurts,” the paramedic says, looking up at the deputies.
“She’s playing it off,” Bullneck says.
“There’s a sub joint on Sacramento where you can get her a rock and a sub,” Deputy O’Hara says.
“You do know an ambulance ride is not a get-out-of-jail-free card?” Sergeant Thomas says.
Then Bullneck hears a comment from one of the other women in the lockup, a leather-faced African American. Whatever she’s said has clearly annoyed him. He darts over to her, grabs her arms, spins her around, and butts her head into the wall. She groans, and her fellow prisoners murmur a meek protest. Over his shoulder Bullneck shoots back: “That’s all right. Those of you who’re going to jail? You’re not eating. Those of you who got someone coming to bond you out? We’ll kick ’em outta the building.”
“I don’t feel good,” Diaz moans softly, folding over to the floor. The taller paramedic props her back up against the wall. Diaz moans again, clutching her stomach.
“Watch she don’t puke on you,” a deputy advises the paramedics.
“Does she need to go to the hospital?” Thomas asks.
The taller paramedic shrugs, then shakes his head.
“All right, she’s dope-sick,” Thomas renders his verdict. “She goes to court, she goes to jail.”
“
THEY ACT LIKE
slave masters,” one of tonight’s prisoners, Terrance Evans, says later of the deputies. But at least they don’t play favorites,
Evans says. “You could be black or white, crippled or mental—they still treat you like a dog.”
The prisoners are too dangerous to be treated any other way, the deputies insist. “We get people who cut people, who shoot people—we get the
worst
,” says Deputy Fred Holcomb. “Things you read about in the paper, see on TV—it all comes here.”
But nobody here this evening is accused of cutting or shooting anyone. Defendants charged with murder or rape usually have their bonds set in an afternoon “violence court.” Of the forty-three prisoners with felony charges tonight, thirty-seven are accused of drug crimes. Most are charged with buying, holding, or trying to sell a tiny white rock of cocaine, or a thumbnail-sized foil packet of brown powder heroin—not a kilo, not an ounce, but in most cases a gram or less.
Four of the accused felons are charged with burglaries, one with a firearms offense. That leaves one prisoner charged with a violent felony—the bandaged and bruised Chester G., accused of that aggravated battery in the police station.
Most of tonight’s allegedly violent offenders—the nine men here for domestic battery—are sitting in the misdemeanor lockup, it being a graver offense in Illinois to possess a minute amount of cocaine or heroin than to beat a wife, a girlfriend, or a sister.
Among the other misdemeanor defendants, Linda L. is accused of pocketing two bottles of E & J Brandy, Tyrone S., two remote controls, Duane P., a bottle of Downy fabric softener. The oldest of tonight’s prisoners, Carlos O., fifty-nine, purportedly tried to liberate two cases of Miller High Life from a grocery store. Stefahn J. got caught peddling watches on a train. The misdemeanor defendants will have their bonds set here, but their cases will be handled in branch courtrooms elsewhere in the county.
In an office around the corner from the bullpens, Ralph Ferro and three other clerks hunch over old desks, recording information from the arrest reports onto forms.
Ferro lifts an arrest report from the pile in front of him. The cop responsible for this particular bust estimated the street value of the drugs involved at $18.75. Ferro wonders aloud about the final tab for catching, prosecuting, and perhaps punishing the defendant for his $18.75 felony.
A heavy-set man who peers at the paperwork through thick plastic glasses, Ferro, at thirty-eight, has already worked bond court for two decades. At eighteen, he had the kind of credentials that merits a clerical post at 26th Street: a bigwig uncle in the front office. The evening work complements his day job as a bricklayer, providing him comp days, sick
days, and health insurance. A sense of satisfaction from his labor isn’t among the benefits. “We probably don’t accomplish nothing here,” he says. “It’s just jobs for people. We’re just pushing papers around.”
COURTROOM 100
has bare beige walls and a grimy tile floor. A U.S. flag stands behind the judge’s bench. The bench, and the pews in the gallery, are a dark oak. The backs of the pews are engraved with such sentiments as “Fuck All Police” and “Fuck All Police 1000 Times.” By eight-fifteen, most of the pews are filled with relatives and friends of the prisoners, some with money in their pockets, others merely with I-bond hopes in their hearts. They wait quietly in the pews. Deputies appear at the front of the courtroom periodically, gabbing and laughing.
At 8:40
P.M
. the Honorable Lambros Kutrubis takes the bench. He’s got short black hair, thick eyebrows, and a studious face. A judge for eight years now, Kutrubis, fifty-four, is assigned to the division that hears pretrial matters. He gets night bond court duty one month a year. His job here is “to keep things moving as fast as I can,” he says.
The deputies like Kutrubis. He’s got all the attributes of an exceptional bond court judge, they say—meaning
he’s fast and doesn’t dispense too many I-bonds, or set too many low bonds. It takes only a few minutes to escort prisoners to the jail, whereas completing the paperwork required for prisoners who bond out can keep the deputies from getting off early.
Kutrubis typically deals with the male defendants first, working his way through the warrants and misdemeanors to the felonies, then finishing with the females. The twelve defendants with warrants earned them by missing court dates. Kutrubis declares “warrant to stand” when each of these defendants is marched before him; they’ll spend the night in jail, then be taken tomorrow morning to the courtroom from which the warrant was issued.
With the other defendants, Kutrubis has two matters to resolve. The first is the Gerstein hearing. No one can be detained for long after arrest without a determination that there’s probable cause to believe he’s committed the crime he’s charged with. The stakes are too high to relegate the decision to jail a person to the officer who makes the arrest or the prosecutor who files the charge, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1975 in
Gerstein v. Pugh
. “The detached judgment of a neutral magistrate” is required, the high court said.
At 26th Street, though, as in many criminal courthouses, nothing is heard in a Gerstein hearing; the judge skims the arrest report and almost instantly seconds the officer’s decision. Kutrubis throws out far fewer than one case in a hundred, he says. Usually the defendant has barely reached
the bench before Kutrubis has made his detached judgment that there is “probable cause to detain.”
The second matter is the bond. Illinois law directs the judge to consider a host of factors before setting bond: the nature and circumstances of the offense charged, the weight of the evidence against the defendant, the likelihood of conviction, the sentence applicable upon conviction, whether there’s motivation or ability to flee, the defendant’s family ties in the community and how long he’s lived there, his employment, financial resources, character, mental condition, and past conduct, whether he’s given consent to periodic drug testing, his criminal history, his record of appearances or failures to appear at previous court proceedings, whether he tried to flee from police before his arrest, whether he refused to identify himself or to be fingerprinted, any uses of aliases or false dates of birth.
The bond decision is of course a critical one for the defendant, often determining whether he’ll be sleeping in the jail or at home for the weeks or months until his case is resolved. A defendant can ask his trial judge to lower his bond when his case makes it to a trial court, but judges don’t often do so.
At 26th Street the lawyers and the judge polish off bond hearings almost as rapidly as the judge does the Gersteins. The assistant state’s attorney takes fifteen seconds or so to inform the judge of any blemishes in the defendant’s background—convictions, failures to appear in court. The PD then takes his quarter-minute to summarize the defendant’s pluses—a job, a family, a stable address. The lawyers speak at an auctioneer’s pace, knowing that any dallying will subject them to the grumbles and eye-rolls of the deputies. And usually without pause, the judge announces the defendant’s bond. As Kutrubis puts it: “Once you get the man’s criminal background and his bond forfeitures, and you hear any mitigation, I mean, what else is there to know?” For the felony defendants, the bond hearing serves a second purpose, whether intended or not: it prepares them for what they’ll likely experience in a trial court upstairs. The time devoted to considering whether they actually did what they’re accused of and, if so, what should be done about it will be dwarfed in most instances by the time spent on procedural matters, such as determining what sentence might induce their guilty plea.
The bond is an amount and a letter—five thousand–D or five thousand–I, for instance. D, for “deposit,” means the defendant has to post 10 percent of the amount to stay out of jail; I, for “individual recognizance,” means the defendant will be out the door as soon as the paperwork’s done. (
The amount of the I-bond is the money the defendant will owe if he doesn’t show for court, although the county rarely tries to collect.) A defendant
with no felony convictions charged with possessing a small amount of drugs will get an I-bond from Kutrubis; a convicted felon with a history of bond forfeitures will get a D-bond. For defendants with D-bonds, freedom boils down to money: the haves can post and leave; the have-nots will be making that long walk through the tunnel. A study of the Cook County Jail and the courthouse published in 1922 denounced this blatant economic discrimination, noting that it relegated to jail mostly the “
poor and friendless.” That hasn’t changed.
Bond court is
slickly choreographed. The deputies line up the defendants in the hallway between the lockups and the courtroom in the order in which they’re going to be called, positioning the first defendant just inside the courtroom. A clerk calls a name; as the first defendant approaches the bench, the deputies replace him with the next defendant from the hallway. At the bench Kutrubis chirps, “Probable cause to detain, background?” The lawyers rush through their spiels; Kutrubis declares the bond; a deputy slips a folded copy of the charge into the behind-the-back hands of the defendant and nudges him back toward the door to the hallway. There’s a rustle of paper, the snap of staplers. The whole transaction usually takes about a minute. The clerk calls another name.
A private attorney steps forward when the bandaged Chester G. is called to the bench. The attorney softly informs Kutrubis of his client’s mental health problems and his immaculate record. He promises that Chester will take his medicine if he’s released. Chester gets an I-bond.
A month from now a prosecutor will dangle in front of Chester misdemeanor battery and one-year conditional discharge (nonreporting probation).
Chester’s lawyer will tell me he thinks the police likely overreacted to whatever Chester did in the station, but that the deal will allow Chester to get the case behind him “without a drawn-out battle that we have no guarantee of winning.” The officers involved will endorse the deal—Chester’s admission of guilt relieves them of the threat of a lawsuit or brutality complaint.
Walter Williams, the one-legged asthmatic, is the on-deck defendant at nine
P.M
. A deputy to one side of the judge’s bench surveys him from the waist down as Williams awaits his turn at the front of the courtroom. “You try and run, I’m gonna take that other one,” he says, laughing. Williams looks away.
“Walter Williams.”
Williams crutches his way over to the bench. “Probable cause to detain, background?” Kutrubis says. The state’s attorney informs the judge of the car theft case Williams had pending before yesterday’s arrest. DeBartolo tells the judge Williams is a high school graduate and the father of three, and
that he’s on disability. Seventy-five-hundred–D, Kutrubis decides. Williams’s head drops. Seven hundred fifty to walk; 750 more than he has. There’ll be no blow tonight—just cramps, diarrhea, and wheezing in a county cell.
Four days from now Williams will collapse in a jail dorm—and there, exactly one week after his thirty-fourth birthday, he’ll die.
A medical examiner will attribute the death to “massive gastric dilatation” (stomach swelling) and bronchial asthma, with narcotics withdrawal a significant contributor. Inmates in Williams’s dorm will tell the medical examiner that on the day he died Williams complained of stomach pain, vomited all day, and asked for medical attention—but that the sergeant on duty told them Williams was merely dope-sick and if they kept banging on the door to get the officers’ attention, the officers would tear the dorm up. The Cook County medical examiner will close his investigation into Williams’s death with no finding of negligence by the Cook County Jail. Ten days after Williams’s death, he’ll be indicted posthumously for stealing the van—news of his passing not having caught up with the state, which will seek and get the indictment from the grand jury. At a court date two weeks later a prosecutor will inform the judge of Williams’s demise. “Death suggested, cause abated,” the judge will declare for the record, before he moves on to the next case.
At nine-thirty, Cecilia Diaz wobbles into the courtroom, blinking against the glare. Kutrubis gives her an I-bond on the attempted possession charge. Her outstanding warrant will keep her in jail for now anyway, Kutrubis notes.
A week from today a judge will toss out the older drug case that was the basis of the warrant. Diaz will be released from jail on the I-bond Kutrubis issued tonight on her latest case. Five weeks later she’ll fail to show in court for that case, earning her a fresh warrant.
Kutrubis sets bond for the final defendant at 9:52
P.M
. Subtracting the ten-minute recess he’d taken between the misdemeanor and felony cases, he’s disposed of the seventy-seven defendants in sixty-two minutes on the bench.