Authors: Steve Bogira
The guards are members of SORT, the sheriff’s Special Operations Response Team. Caruso has the special detail because he’s in protective custody in the jail due to the nature of his case. That status also keeps him out of the regular courtroom lockup. “Why don’t they just put him in with the niggers?” a deputy from another courtroom asked Guerrero facetiously after the SORT guards parked Caruso in the jury room earlier this morning.
Caruso is before Locallo only briefly. The lawyers and the judge quickly hash out a procedural matter relating to his sentencing two days from now. Soon the guards usher him back to the jury room. Locallo has granted Caruso a contact visit with his father and sister before he’s returned to the jail. Deputy Rhodes beckons Caruso Senior and his daughter out of the gallery for the visit.
The Carusos don’t have the jury room to themselves for the visit, and not just because of Caruso’s SORT guards. This also happens to be sentencing day for Dino Titone. Titone’s status as a prison inmate with a potential death sentence qualifies him for special handling, too: he’s handcuffed to a chair in the room, and his own pair of SORT guards are sitting nearby, thumbing through newspapers.
The double murder Titone was convicted of had originated in Bridgeport.
The two victims were abducted on a December night in 1982 from a house at 3002 South Emerald, just nine blocks from the Carusos’ home. Now, on a fall morning sixteen years later, Titone and Caruso have ended up together in a jury room at 26th Street, although not to deliberate someone else’s fate.
Titone takes the opportunity to give Caruso some advice: he tells him to be grateful he’ll be getting another chance in the world. Titone won’t be getting such a chance, barring a successful appeal and a victory in a third trial, since the only alternatives in Illinois for a multiple murder are lethal injection or natural life—the choice Locallo will make this afternoon. Titone advises Caruso to learn what he can from his time in prison. He also promises the elder Caruso that he’ll put in a word for Frank Junior regarding his safety in prison. Titone has influence with some prison gang leaders, he tells me later, having gotten to know them during his six years on death row and eight years in maximum security.
Locallo also has his usual batch of minor cases to deal with today, starring the blacks and Hispanics crammed into the lockup and those defendants on bond who are waiting in the gallery. One of the prisoners in the lockup is George McNeal, a gaunt fifty-one-year-old African American who was arrested three weeks ago after an encounter with an undercover “drunk” at an El station. A twenty, a five, and two ones were sticking out of the cop’s breast pocket. McNeal allegedly snatched the money while offering to sell the officer a rabbit McNeal happened to have in a cage. Backup officers moved in and handcuffed McNeal. The officers also charged him with a weapons violation after they found a butcher knife in his backpack. The arrest report is more thorough than arrest reports are in some violent crimes, including even a description of the rabbit (two pounds, six inches, black).
McNeal has been in jail for three weeks since he was charged with swiping the $27; Caruso spent no time in jail while charged with stomping a thirteen-year-old nearly to death. Caruso’s family could put up $10,000 for his bond; McNeal didn’t have the $500 for his. At
$51 a day in room and board, McNeal’s jail stay for the $27 theft has thus far cost taxpayers more than a thousand dollars.
When McNeal is in front of the bench, his public defender, Bob Galhotra, gives his side of the story to Locallo. McNeal had just finished his second day on a demolition crew and he had yet to get paid. He was hungry. Someone gave him the rabbit. Perhaps the rabbit was going to be his dinner, Galhotra says; maybe that was what he was going to do with the butcher knife. Then McNeal happened on the fake drunk. The two men were negotiating a price for the rabbit and the cage, and McNeal plucked
the $27 before the deal was finalized. “It was just a poor decision, Judge,” Galhotra maintains.
“Some people might say it was a hare-raising decision,” Locallo says. The judge grins, the lawyers chuckle, McNeal stares straight ahead.
Locallo dangles probation, with fifty hours of community service, for a plea to theft—an offer that would spring McNeal from jail today. “I’ll take that,” McNeal says eagerly.
LOCALLO GRANTS
Titone his own contact visit in the jury room during lunch, with his father, sister, brother, and a friend. They came to court against Titone’s wishes. He didn’t want them to hear all the bad things the prosecutors were sure to say about him as they lobbied for his execution.
Titone professes a lack of concern about today’s hearing. He hopes Locallo takes him off death row because it’ll soothe his parents; but it’s not such a big deal to him because, he says, he isn’t afraid of being executed. In fact, there’s nothing he can think of that he fears. “My father told me when I was young that I was blessed for I never had no fear,” he says. “But as I see it now, this was a curse.” Without fear, a person “enters into bad challenges,” as Titone puts it.
The hearing begins with prosecutor James McKay putting a records custodian on the stand to testify about some of the thirty-eight disciplinary infractions—or in prison parlance, “tickets”—Titone has accumulated in his fifteen-plus years in prison. Titone’s two SORT guards struggle to stay awake in their chairs behind him. Titone smiles from time to time as the records custodian details his tickets. When he first entered prison, he fought often with other inmates “to get my respect and space,” but he rarely has to anymore. He’s gotten along fine with most guards, he says, but if one is being unfair, “I’m the type of person who will stand on what I believe to be right and not back down or give in.” His lawyer Fred Cohn later calls to the stand one prison guard after another—eight in all—who’ve had Titone under their supervision and who say he’s been a model inmate.
McKay reads to Locallo “victim-impact” statements from two sisters and a sister-in-law of one of the slain men, Tullio Infelise. All three women say they want Titone put to death.
According to the statement of Tullio’s sister Rosario, Tullio had described the shootings to relatives in the hospital before he died. Tullio said that Titone taunted him and the other victim, Aldo Fratto, when they were in the car trunk, telling the two men he was going to leave the trunk lid open so the light would stay on, so they could watch each other die. Titone “laughed and joked and tormented” her brother and Fratto before he and the other gunman, Joseph Sorrentino, shot them, according to Rosario.
The sister-in-law, Christine Infelise, says she and her relatives resent supporting Titone in prison with their taxes.
Titone’s smile is gone and he’s gazing vacantly at the carpet as McKay reads these statements. He’s thought often about the Infelise and Fratto families since his imprisonment. “I know there’s suffering, and hurt, and pain. These people have a right to feel hatred toward the persons they think did it.”
He can especially imagine the grief of Infelise’s and Fratto’s parents, he says, having himself witnessed, albeit from prison, his own parents’ suffering when two of his brothers died at early ages. One succumbed to cancer in 1980, at age twenty-two; another brother killed himself in 1989, asphyxiating on carbon monoxide in a garage at age twenty-five. Between these two deaths, Titone got his death sentence, in 1984, when he was twenty-three. “My parents have suffered more heartache and pain than fifty families,” but they’ve always been loving and supportive of him, he says.
Titone fought constantly in his neighborhood as a youth and usually won. But he sees no parallels between himself at a younger age and Caruso, whom he considers a “spoiled brat living off of his father’s name and reputation.” Titone adds, “I would have given him a beating myself for what he did to that black kid.” He senses an affinity with Locallo, however. “I know if things were different and if he grew up with me, we would have been the best of friends.”
Abiding by Titone’s preference, Cohn doesn’t call any relatives or friends on Titone’s behalf. Titone doesn’t want to subject his loved ones to McKay’s cross-examination, and he doubts the judge is going to be swayed by such testimony anyway.
When it’s time for arguments, Cohn tells Locallo that Titone is now a more prudent person than he was in his youth. “The testosterone that sometimes causes young men to do foolish things is burned up,” he says.
Cohn also asserts that it would be unfair to sentence Titone to death when his two codefendants have been sentenced to life. According to the state’s evidence, Titone’s responsibility for the murders was no greater than that of his codefendants, Cohn observes: Robert Gacho was the ringleader, and Titone had been an equal partner with Joseph Sorrentino—both of them had shot the victims.
And a natural life sentence is no prize, Cohn reminds Locallo. It would keep Titone locked up “until he’s old and his body is falling apart,” when he might be shipped to a nursing home for inmates.
But McKay parries that standard defense argument with the standard state reponse: since the only options now are death and natural life, the latter is the minimum punishment. “If you don’t give him the death penalty, your honor, you’re giving him what he wants. You’re giving him the opportunity
to watch color TV, to lift weights, to play basketball.… You’re not sending a message to him and any other murderer out there when you give him the minimum.”
McKay also points to trial testimony indicating that after Titone and Sorrentino shot the victims, Titone laughed about it. “That makes him far more evil” than his codefendants, McKay says. “That makes him inhuman. That makes him undeserving of any mercy you could show.”
McKay doesn’t often ponder what brings certain people to commit monstrous acts. “Maybe we’re incapable of figuring some of these criminals out, because they’re just so far removed from general mankind,” he says later. “Maybe we don’t want to figure them out.” His mission is to get them locked up for as long as he can—and in some cases to get a lethal injection prescribed if possible. “They just need to be held responsible,” he says.
Locallo asks Titone if he’d like to say anything before he’s sentenced. Cohn quickly declines for his client. An apology wouldn’t enhance Titone’s appeal chances.
Locallo prefaces his ruling by saying he has no doubt that Titone took pleasure in the killings, but that he doesn’t think this is indicative of Titone’s character today.
He says case law generally frowns on greater punishment for one codefendant unless he’s more culpable than his partners in crime. Titone, if anything, played a lesser role in the murders than did his codefendants, Locallo says. Gacho was indeed the ringleader, the judge says. And as for Sorrentino, the judge notes that according to the evidence, he used a .25-caliber gun, and both victims were shot with a .25; whereas Titone fired a .38, and only one of the victims had wounds from a .38. Thus Sorrentino likely shot both men, Locallo says, while Titone shot only one. It’s a point that even Cohn hadn’t made.
So Locallo says he’s decided to sentence Titone to life. Titone nods slightly. In the gallery, his sister sighs loudly and claps once. The judge adds that he knows the sentence will be a disappointment to the families of the victims and to the prosecutors. “But the court has the final say on whether justice or mercy is given.”
LOCALLO RECEIVED
good news earlier this week, when six bar groups announced their recommendations for next month’s judicial retention election. All six bar groups recommended that he be retained. This in itself was no great feat: of the seventy-two Cook County judges up for retention, only nine had been found wanting by any of the bar groups. But Locallo was one of only eleven judges to get a “highly recommended” and a “highly qualified” rating from the two bar groups with such categories.
Bar ratings are important for all judges but especially for judges with an eye on a higher seat. Locallo could never be accused of underestimating their significance. His submission to the bar groups that rate candidates “is probably the largest that they get,” he says. He sends each of them every ruling he’s written, every appellate court opinion issued in his cases, and all of the summaries he’s written of death penalty and traffic cases. Guerrero and Rhodes share the assessment of some prosecutors that Locallo kowtows to defense lawyers with his ratings in mind because defense lawyers outnumber prosecutors in the bar groups. Upon learning of the judge’s high marks this year, Rhodes said, “It’s because he kisses up to all those attorneys.” And Guerrero added, “It’s ’cause he gives all those contact visits.”
Considering his ratings and reputation, Locallo should have little reason to worry about the election. Even judges who are criticized by the bar groups rarely get voted off the bench. Illinois judges must run for retention every six years as part of a general election. They need 60 percent approval from those who actually vote on their retention. (Many voters skip the lengthy retention ballot rather than render a verdict on judges they’ve never heard of.) Citizens complain about the quality of their judges, but they’re forgiving come election time. Since Illinois began holding retention elections in 1964, sitting
judges have been retained 98 percent of the time. The
retention rates are even higher in other states, a function of the fact that only 50 percent approval is needed elsewhere.
But the judges up for retention this year are concerned that because of a logistical matter, retention might not be a sure thing this time. The nonjudicial portion of the ballot is particularly lengthy, and a change in election law has eliminated one-punch, single-ticket voting—voters can no longer vote for all members of a party by punching a single number. Judges fear that as a consequence, voters will grow weary as they work their way through the ballot, and more voters than usual will skip the retention election at the end of the ballot. This will make the votes of the small but dependable antijudge constituency—the bloc of voters who turn thumbs down on all judges up for retention—more significant.