Authors: Steve Bogira
In his turns in night bond court, Kutrubis has noticed the prevalence of small drug cases, but it’s not something he dwells on. “I’m more concerned with getting people in and out as fast as I can,” he says. The prevalence of minorities among defendants isn’t something he thinks about either. “It really doesn’t faze me. It’s just a fact of life.”
Back in the lockups, the deputies have soon divided the prisoners into those being released—the usual one-third—and those bound for jail.
They cuff the jail group in pairs again and return the prisoners to the basement via the elevator. Then four of the deputies hustle the prisoners down the dank tunnel into the jail. Their workday almost over, the deputies
are as gleeful as their captives are gloomy. A black deputy sings cadence, his voice echoing merrily off the walls: “Left, left, left-right, left; left-right, left-right, left-right, left … Halt! That means stop, motherfuckers!”
He parks the prisoners in front of the doors to the Division 5 basement, where all new jail prisoners are processed. A colleague walks through the doors and hands the paperwork to a jail guard. A moment later the jail guard waves the troop in, directing them to a bench bolted to the floor. “All right, when I call your number, give me your name,” the guard says gruffly. Three hours of processing await the prisoners: fingerprinting, photographing, a terse consultation with a mental health aide, hurried examinations by a paramedic and a “dick doctor,” as he’s known here, more numbering and lettering on their arms, and finally a group strip-search.
While these prisoners await the start of their processing, the luckier defendants—those bonding out—are sitting in the jury box of a courtroom down the hall from Courtroom 100, eager for their release. It’s almost 11:20
P.M
. Sergeant Thomas hopes to be finished by 11:30. He’s on the witness stand, scratching away at the last of the paperwork. He’s been calling the prisoners over to him one by one. They sign their bond slips, he gives them a copy, and then he directs them to the gallery benches. After Chester G. signs his slip, he mistakenly heads back toward the jury box. “Hey,
brain-dead
,” Deputy O’Hara calls after him, pointing him toward the gallery benches.
“That’s no joke, he
is
brain-dead,” another deputy says.
“He’d have to be, to go into a police station and start swinging at cops,” says another.
Bullneck has been bickering with one of the prisoners in the jury box, a white woman in her thirties charged with drug possession. The arrest report says she left her kids at home, went to a drug spot, and bought a rock. Now she’s annoying Bullneck no end, daring to carp about how long it’s taking for her and the others to be released.
“Why are you whining?” Bullneck is asking her. “You’re getting on my nerves.”
“Well, we’re all
tired
, for Chrissakes,” the woman says. “I’ve never been through this before.
Jee
sus.”
Sergeant Thomas overhears and looks up from the bond slip he’s completing. “Ex
cuse
me—where did you see the sign that says that we have to care about you?”
The woman ignores Thomas, focusing on Bullneck. “I just wanna know why you’re picking on me.”
Bullneck’s eyes widen. “Because you’re a crazy-ass fucking hype who can’t take care of her own
kids. That’s
why.”
“We ain’t required to be concerned about your situation,” Thomas pipes in. “So if I’m not bleeding fucking tears for you,
fuck
that. Fuck
you
. Shut the
fuck
up and sit there until we fucking say you can go.”
“You got ten minutes till you can get outta here and suck your way to another rock,” Bullneck adds.
“I ain’t goin’ back there,” the woman says softly.
“Your life’s over anyway,” another deputy says. “You may not wanna hear that, but it’s true.”
WHETHER THEY
’
RE
bonding out or going to jail, these defendants are beginning a journey. They are setting off into America’s criminal justice system.
This is the story of that system, as shown through one year in one busy Chicago courtroom.
The men and women toiling in this courtroom work hard—but ultimately they are gears in a machine. More than a century ago, observers were already noting that criminal justice in America was a vast, expensive, relentless system. “
No man can examine the great penal system of this country without being astounded at its magnitude, its cost, and its unsatisfactory results,” John Altgeld said in 1890. Altgeld had been a Cook County judge, and he later was elected governor of Illinois. In an 1884 pamphlet,
Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims
, Altgeld condemned criminal justice in this nation, noting its end product: the
imprisonment of fifty thousand citizens. He called the criminal justice system
a “maelstrom which draws from the outside, and then keeps its victims moving in a circle until swallowed in the vortex.”
One might describe it similarly today. Except its yield—the number of people in prison—is now
nearly 1.5 million.
The system is run by people, but, as with many systems, it often seems the other way around. The courtroom staff works as it must, reflexively, not reflectively. The workers have no time to give much thought to any but the most extraordinary case, or to examine what they are doing.
What the system looks like depends, of course, on who’s doing the looking. So this story is told from myriad perspectives: those of the judge, the lawyers, the deputies, the jurors. And it is told also from the perspective of those snagged on the gears—the defendants.
From city to city, from courtroom to courtroom, one thing about most defendants varies little: their poverty. It has ever been thus. As historian Samuel Walker wrote in 1998 in his book
Popular Justice:
“
At every point in the history of criminal justice, the people arrested, prosecuted, and punished have been mainly the poor and the powerless.” One hundred fifty
years ago most defendants were European immigrants, Walker observed; today they are blacks and Hispanics.
This is largely the story of those defendants.
Recent reporting about criminal justice has focused heavily on two important issues: the death penalty, and the conviction of defendants later proven innocent. Death penalty cases are rare, however, and, even though DNA technology has proven that innocent defendants are convicted more often than once believed, such blatant miscarriages of justice are also unusual. This book intends to show more of what’s typical about a courtroom. It is about how justice miscarries every day, by doing precisely what we ask it to.
ONE
White Sales
LARRY BATES
pauses on the sidewalk long enough to fish his cigarettes out of a coat pocket and light one. Then he trudges on down California toward the courthouse.
The sidewalk is damp, the trees and rooftops dusted with yesterday’s snow. It’s not especially cold for a January morning, and so Bates has chosen to walk the two and a half miles from his west-side apartment to the courthouse and save the dollar-eighty bus fare. He doesn’t have a steady job at the moment.
He’d considered not going to court at all today. Go, and you might get locked up, he’d thought. But staying home wouldn’t mean staying free forever; they’ll put a warrant on your ass, he’d reminded himself, and when they catch up to you, they’ll lock you up for sure. Better to go, he’d decided, and just hope Locallo’s in a good mood.
Locallo being Daniel Locallo, the judge whose probation terms Bates hasn’t met—the reason for the letter summoning him to court this morning. In March 1997 Bates pled guilty to selling half a gram of heroin, and Locallo sentenced him to probation and twenty days’ community service. He picked litter off of vacant lots and railroad tracks several times since, as part of the sheriff’s orange-vest brigade. But he stopped showing up last fall, four days short of the twenty. He couldn’t explain why he’d been so foolish, though he knew deep down that the pipe had something to do with it.
He passes a winking
FLATS FIXED
sign under the El tracks near 21st Street. South of the El, the neighborhood becomes distinctly Hispanic—he passes
frutería y carnicería
markets, cafés offering tacos, tortas, and burritos.
I’m too old for this, Bates tells himself as he walks along, too old to be sweating jail all the time. Besides, this ain’t me, I’m a working man. He delivered papers in grade school, flipped burgers in high school, filled orders in a warehouse for years after that. But he also drank heavily and developed a cocaine addiction along the way. He was forty-two when he picked up his first criminal case, in 1996. The police caught him buying one rock on a street corner, for five dollars. The prosecutor offered him probation for his plea, and he grabbed it; who’d turn down “paper” when a trip downstate was an option? He stayed clean briefly after that. But he could hardly walk a block in his neighborhood without hearing the call of “rocks and blows”; soon he was backsliding, and busted, again.
The judge the second time had been Locallo. That was lucky for Bates, because unlike many judges at 26th Street, Locallo was willing to give paper on paper—that is, to give a two-time loser a second shot at probation. And so Bates copped out again. The twenty days of grunt work Locallo tacked on wasn’t any big thing—except for someone stuck on stupid, as Bates has chided himself since.
At 24th Street, California widens into a boulevard, with a parkway between the northbound and southbound lanes. Heavier traffic swishes by Bates. He passes the 1-800-NOTGLTY billboard at 25th Street and an
abogados’
office a few doors down. Two black men are beckoning cars into the lot next to the
abogados’
office—
COURT PARKING
$7,
ALL DAY—
while other workers in the lot wriggle the cars into bumper-to-bumper columns from the sidewalk back to the rat-baited alley.
Across 26th Street the sidewalk in front of the gray courthouse is thick with men and women in sports team jackets and hooded sweatshirts and coats, heading toward the plaza that leads to the entrance. Some of the women clutch babies or tow toddlers. A bus squeals to a stop and spits out a dozen more 26th Street customers. Others climb out of cars pulling up at the curb.
Bates mounts the steps to the plaza, and, off to one side, lights another smoke. It’s nine
A.M
., and court isn’t scheduled to start until nine-thirty. He leans on a railing and checks out the crowd converging on the plaza. On the east side of California, facing the courthouse, is the five-story parking garage for the courthouse employees, the cops here to testify, and the jurors. They’re rushing across California now, men and women clutching folded newspapers and briefcases, their ties and trench coats flapping in the wind. Most of those coming from the garage are white; most of those arriving on foot or by bus or getting dropped off are black or brown. It’s
more or less a racket, Bates thinks to himself, as he often has—all these people fattening up on us.
Bates takes a final drag, flicks the butt to the concrete, and makes for the entrance—the windowed lobby that connects the courthouse on the right with its younger and taller sibling on the left, the fifteen-story copper and glass administration building that houses the offices of the prosecutors, the public defenders, the clerks, the court reporters, and the probation officers.
Inside the revolving doors, the courthouse employees and police officers sweep past Bates, flashing their IDs at a deputy or tapping the badge attached to their belts and walking right in. Bates joins a long line at a metal detector. A scowling deputy warns those in line to remove belts and to empty pockets. The hyperactive metal detectors frequently chirp out accusations usually refuted by pat-downs.
The employees and the prospective jurors head toward the administration building elevators on the left. Bates turns to the right, along with the defendants, fellow probationers with court dates, and any of their relatives or friends who’ve come along. They stream through the lobby and into the courthouse.
Stapled to an immense bulletin board around a corner is today’s docket—printouts listing the eleven hundred felony cases scheduled for the building’s thirty trial courtrooms. It’s a sea of drug cases—possession, delivery, possession with intent to deliver—with islets of murder, criminal sexual assault, aggravated battery, and burglary. Defendants and their relatives and friends huddle around the bulletin board, scanning the alphabetical list. A few timidly ask strangers for help finding a name. Bates doesn’t need to look; he knows he’s headed for Courtroom 302.
Next to the bulletin board is the entrance to a stand-up coffee shop patronized mostly by the building’s visitors—the Gangbanger Café, as the courthouse employees call it. Customers lean on counters and fuel up on junk cuisine—doughnuts, chips, candy bars, juice, pop, coffee. Bates has breakfasted here on other court dates—a Snickers washed down with a Pepsi and chased with a smoke. But he’s squeezing his nickels this morning—he isn’t going to feed a vending machine or himself. He continues down the hall, heading straight to a stairwell, avoiding the crowd at the elevators. Bates has never liked bumping into acquaintances in the courthouse. (“What
you
here for, Larry?”) It’s embarrassing enough exchanging glances with people he doesn’t know, especially with the blacks who work here. He’s sure he sees disapproval in their eyes, a look intended to remind him that he’s shaming not only himself but his brothers and sisters. “Hey, I ain’t really about this,” he wants to tell them.
On the third floor he walks to the end of a hallway, then eases open the door to Courtroom 302 and peeks in. The courtroom is empty. The clock above the jury box says 9:10. Okay, he thinks, I got here in time, I ain’t gonna piss off the judge by being late—at least I did this right. He slips into a back bench. Just hope Locallo is in a good mood today.