Authors: Steve Bogira
“You’re gonna have a long road to get over the hill” regarding the torture claims, Locallo tells Geraghty.
• • •
IN EARLY AUGUST
Geraghty continues his push to get over that hill with a bulky filing. A cover memo addresses Locallo’s earlier insinuation that Orange was merely trying to exploit the revelations about Area 2. Orange was not just “jumping on some bandwagon,” Geraghty says in the memo. “Years before the evidence about the pattern and practice of torture by Area 2 police officers emerged, Orange was telling everyone he could about the horrors he had been through.”
The balance of the filing consists of affidavits and other documents backing up that contention.
There’s an affidavit from Jeffrey Howard, the public defender who represented Orange and his half brother, Leonard Kidd, at their bond hearing at 26th Street on January 14, 1984, a few hours after Orange and Kidd were transported to the courthouse from Area 2 after giving their confessions. Howard didn’t speak with Orange or Kidd until they were brought into the courtroom that day, he says in his affidavit. But “when Leonard Kidd and Leroy Orange were brought out of the lockup, one of them complained to me that the police used a ‘black box’ to electroshock him,” Howard says. He couldn’t remember whether it was Orange or Kidd.
The “black box” allegation sounded ludicrous to Howard at the time, and so he didn’t tell the judge at the bond hearing about it, the PD says in his affidavit, reasoning that such an outlandish claim could later be used by the state to impugn the credibility of the defendant who made it.
The transcript of the bond hearing is included in the filing. Like most such hearings, it was abrupt. Orange and Kidd were brought simultaneously before Judge Matthew Moran, who dealt first with Kidd. Noting the four counts of murder, Moran declined to set a bond. Howard noted for the record that Kidd had limped into the courtroom, and he asked Kidd which leg was injured. “I am hurting between my leg where they jumped on me and made me tell that I had said I done something I did not do,” Kidd said, over the objection of the prosecutor. Judge Moran said Kidd’s statement would “be made a matter of record.”
After Moran likewise declined to set a bond for Orange, Orange said, apparently to Howard, “Talk about my injuries.”
“You have injuries?” Howard responded. “Hold it, your honor. He says that he also is injured as well.”
“I got pin marks on my butt,” Orange said. “Only bruise I got to show. Other things happened. That is all that is visible right now.”
“The record will show your statements,” Judge Moran said.
Among other documents in Geraghty’s filing:
• A February 9, 1984,
Chicago Tribune
article, in which attorney Earl Washington, then representing both Orange and Kidd, charged that both of his clients had been electrically shocked at Area 2 with
“a mysterious ‘black box,’ ” as the article put it.
• Records of visits by Orange to the Cook County Jail hospital in 1984, in which he repeatedly complained of rectal bleeding and weakness of his rectal muscles. A notation from a February 16, 1984, hospital visit said Orange attributed the bleeding “to electric prong being placed in rectum which he alleges police did upon his arrest 1/12/84.”
• Affidavits from several people who said Orange had recounted the torture to them while he was in the jail in 1984. Alfred Girtley, who was in the cell next to Orange’s from January through November of that year, said Orange began talking to him about his arrest a week or so after Orange was jailed. Orange told him the police “used a cattle-prod to shock him to get him to sign the confession,” according to Girtley. Orange’s ex-wife, Mildred Dixon, said Orange told her “the police had a black box and that they shocked him with it.” Patricia Moore, a former girlfriend, said Orange told her “that the police put an electrical device inside of him that gave him an electric shock.” Wanda Walton, a friend, said Orange told her the police had put “some sort of cattle prod up his anus,” and that they’d also put a plastic bag over his head. Marie Jamison, another friend, recalled Orange talking about a black box that “had something electrical in it which gave him a shock.”
In the filing, Geraghty also addresses Locallo’s assertion that injuries to the testicles “don’t just disappear.”
Orange had alleged that a detective had squeezed his testicles shortly before he agreed to confess. His confession was taken beginning at 3:56
A.M
. on January 13, 1984. He was examined by Dr. Sharish Parikh at the jail on the afternoon of January 14, not long after his bond hearing. Parikh testified at Orange’s trial that he examined Orange’s scrotum and testicles after Orange told him his testicles had been squeezed by police. Parikh said he didn’t find any bruises, marks, or swelling, and that when he palpated the testicles, Orange reported no pain.
But Dr. Anthony Schaeffer, chairman of the department of urology at Northwestern Medical School, maintains in one of Geraghty’s affidavits that it was “entirely possible for a patient to sustain a very painful squeeze” of the testicles and “have no signs of trauma, including palpable tenderness, 36 hours later.”
And there’s an affidavit from Dr. Robert Kirschner. As a Cook County
medical examiner for seventeen years, Kirschner had testified in court here more than five hundred times, the vast majority of them as a state’s witness testifying about a murder victim’s cause of death. But he’d also investigated torture internationally. He’d served as a forensic consultant to the United Nations Truth Commission in El Salvador, to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and to the Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala. He’d investigated many allegations of police abuse in Chicago, finding in “numerous instances” no evidence supporting the claims, his affidavit says.
Kirschner had interviewed Orange in the courthouse in early August. He’d reviewed Orange’s trial testimony, his confession, the police records pertaining to his arrest and interrogation, and the relevant medical records. The methods of torture described by Orange—the bagging, the electroshock, the squeezing of the testicles—were “used on persons in custody in many countries” because the methods “usually leave no marks,” Kirschner observes in his affidavit. The rectal bleeding Orange complained about in the jail could have been caused by the insertion of a foreign object into the rectum, the medical examiner says.
Orange’s description of his near-suffocation with a plastic bag was “consistent with that of someone who has actually experienced this event,” Kirschner says, as was Orange’s account of his physical reaction to being electroshocked. Orange had extended his hand and fingers when describing the shock administered to the back of his forearm, and he’d flexed his hand and fingers when describing the shock to the front of the forearm. This was exactly the kind of “involuntary neuromuscular response” such shocks caused, according to Kirschner. Orange had also said he clenched his teeth so hard while being shocked that his upper front teeth had cracked. Kirschner had examined Orange’s teeth and found them to indeed be cracked. In Orange’s previous accounts of the injuries he suffered from his treatment at Area 2, he’d said nothing about cracked teeth. But it was common for torture victims “to be uncertain of some details of their torture, or to recall other injuries at a later date,” Kirschner says.
In sum, Kirschner says in his affidavit, Orange’s description of his physical reaction to being shocked made it “virtually certain that Mr. Orange was subjected to electric shock torture.”
ON A MORNING
in late August, Locallo hears arguments on Orange’s petition for a hearing regarding his torture claims.
Geraghty contends that the affidavits and other documents he’s submitted show that Orange made his allegations promptly and repeatedly. Kirschner’s affidavit attests to the validity of the allegations, Geraghty adds.
Locallo soon starts finding fault with Geraghty’s position. Regarding Orange’s complaint of rectal bleeding, the judge points out that Geraghty has neglected to mention Orange’s history of hemorrhoids. (Orange had been treated for hemorrhoids in 1978.)
“Well, he did have a history of hemorrhoids,” Geraghty says. “But he didn’t complain about hemorrhoids. He complained about something being shoved up his butt.”
Locallo asks Geraghty what physical evidence he has corroborating Orange’s claims. Geraghty says the corroboration isn’t physical—it’s in the multitude of evidence of similar torture at Area 2 in the early 1980s. Evidence of injuries to Orange might have been found if he’d been more carefully examined after his bond hearing, Geraghty says. But the complaint Orange voiced to his public defender, about being shocked with a black box, had seemed too outlandish to be believed. “We just did not know what was going on at Area 2 back then,” Geraghty says.
Geraghty, who’s well aware that Locallo has recently presided over Dino Titone’s retrial, now draws a parallel between Orange’s quest for a hearing and the appeal that won Titone the retrial. It was hard to believe Titone’s account of the attempted fix of Judge Maloney, Geraghty says—until evidence surfaced of other fixes involving Maloney. Just as Titone made his allegation before Maloney’s corruption was widely known, Orange made his torture claims before Area 2 became notorious. But Orange’s case is even stronger than Titone’s was, Geraghty says, because Orange voiced his complaint almost immediately, whereas Titone had waited years.
Prosecutor David O’Connor responds that Orange’s allegations have grown “more grandiose, more ludicrous” over time, as witness his latest claim that the electroshock caused his teeth to crack. O’Connor says that torture allegations have been made against Area 2 detectives for years now, and people in the “criminal element” talk to each other, and thus defendants “know that these are the type of allegations that should be made” to try to get new trials.
Geraghty shoots back that Orange was hardly a member of a “criminal element”—he had only one conviction before this case, for criminal damage to property, sixteen years before he was arrested for the murders, and he’d been steadily employed for years.
Locallo interjects, “Your client did also admit to taking cocaine. So there’s a worker, Leroy Orange—there’s also a Leroy Orange who takes cocaine.… So Mr. O’Connor’s argument is not beyond the realm of possibility.”
The judge says he’ll rule in late September on the request for a hearing.
FIFTEEN
What Really Happened
“
DO
NOT
BE FOOLED
by her appearance today,” prosecutor Michael Nolan is warning the jury in 302 as he points at defendant Leslie McGee.
McGee watches Nolan studiously as he continues with his opening statement. There’s a pen in her hand, a legal pad on the table in front of her. Her pigtails frame a bright-eyed, cherubic face. Winnie the Pooh, hunched above one breast pocket of her jumper, is gazing at the clutch of balloons above the other breast pocket. McGee also has on a white blouse, crew socks stretched halfway up her calves, and green tennis shoes. She’s an average-sized eighteen-year-old. She was sixteen when she shot the cabbie in the head with the .357.
Nolan reads the jury the climactic passage of McGee’s confession: “I said, ‘God bless you,’ and a couple other words that I don’t remember. Then I gave him a peck on the cheek and I shot him.” “Where did you shoot him?” “Somewhere in his head.” “And how did you know that you shot him?” “Because he gasped and his eyes opened wide.”
With those “chilling” words, Nolan says, McGee told police how she murdered thirty-six-year-old Jean François, a Haitian immigrant with three children, on the first day of March 1997.
Nolan has been looking forward to this trial. He’s had his fill of gangbanger cases “where so-and-so shoots so-and-so because he had his hat cocked the wrong way.” He’ll take a “weird little murder” like this one any day, he’s said. When he read the case file, what stood out to him was the blessing and kiss McGee gave François, according to her confession, before she killed him. Nolan didn’t know what to make of it, but he found it intriguing.
The courthouse reporters are elsewhere this fall morning, this “weird little murder” not weird enough. It’s another black-on-black case. The gallery benches are draped with the usual smattering of yawning, heavy-lidded minorities, anxious for a break in the trial so they can get their continuances and leave. The sole spectator with a personal interest in the trial has only a peripheral connection—she’s the sister-in-law of the common-law wife of the deceased cabbie. McGee’s father can’t watch the trial because he’s listed as a potential defense witness, but McGee’s mother, who lives in Chicago, isn’t here either. McGee hasn’t heard from her since she was arrested for this murder a year and a half ago.
Pacing in front of the jury, Nolan now relates the circumstances preceding the shooting. François was in his cab when he spotted McGee near an El station on the south side. He offered her a ride even though she told him she had no money. McGee got into the front seat. François couldn’t have known about the .357 she had in the back of her pants, under her coat. She’d stolen the gun from her father’s house, intending to shoot her boyfriend, who’d recently broken up with her. When François reached 51st and Aberdeen—two blocks from where McGee said she wanted to be driven—he “did something that was wrong, but that should not have cost him his life,” Nolan says. He pulled the cab over, suggesting that McGee pay him for the ride in another way. “He was suggesting that he would like to have some kind of sexual relations with the defendant.” When McGee said she wasn’t interested in paying that way, François “at that point touched her left breast over her shirt.” When McGee again rebuffed him, François “slapped her and said, ‘Get out of the cab, bitch.’ ” That’s when McGee instead delivered her fatal mixed message to François.
Nolan paints such a vivid picture, it’s as if he’d been in the cab’s backseat. But there were only two people in the cab, as far as anyone knows, and one of them is dead. So Nolan’s source for these details is the confession of the young woman he’s already cautioned the jury to distrust. Nolan isn’t at all sure the shooting unfolded this way—in fact, he doubts it did. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know what was true in her statement and what wasn’t,” he says later. He could have told the jury what he really thought: that McGee definitely shot François but exactly how, or why, he wasn’t sure. There’s no percentage in betraying such doubts to a jury, however. “Why should twelve people who don’t know you be willing to convict someone and send her to prison if you seem unsure of what she did? You’re selling your case. I mean, that’s just being a lawyer.”