Authors: Steve Bogira
Two other probationers who are called before Locallo aren’t as lucky as Bates. One has gone AWOL from a stretch of home confinement mandated as a condition of his probation; the other hasn’t done any of his required forty hours of community service in the six months since he was sentenced. Locallo orders both men into custody. Deputy Guerrero escorts one and then the other back to the lockup. After lunch, however, Locallo will give the two men firm warnings and fresh court dates and free them. The jail is crammed enough without judges locking up every probation violator.
The judge is hoping the few hours in the lockup will scare some future compliance out of them.
Locallo signs an arrest warrant for a defendant on bond who hasn’t shown this morning and continues several more cases. Then Sundberg calls Jermaine Tidmore, and a skinny youth, charged with car theft, steps forward from the gallery. Amy Campanelli, the courtroom’s senior public defender, tells Locallo that Tidmore wants a 402.
That’s the number of the Illinois Supreme Court rule governing plea-bargain conferences.
More than four of every five cases here are disposed of in 402s.
In a 402 the judge must issue a long series of admonishments to ensure that the defendant’s plea is “knowing and voluntary”—or at least looks that way in the record. When he was a novice on the bench, Locallo, like most new judges, plodded through these warnings. But soon he could dash them off from memory. As usual, he’s sprinting through them now. It’s a testament to the dancing fingers of court reporter Marzano that he can keep pace; many of his colleagues turn on their cassette recorders when Locallo starts a 402.
“Mr. Tidmore, your attorney’s requesting a conference to discuss the possible disposition of your matter, are you asking to have that conference, sir?” Locallo says in a breath.
“Yes,” Tidmore murmurs.
“D’ya understand at the conference we’d be discussing facts about you, about this case, and about your background, some of the information that might be brought to my attention would normally not be admitted at trial, d’ya understand?”
“Yes.”
“If you do not wish to plead guilty, nothing said or done during the conference can be used against you, d’ya understand?”
“Yes.”
“D’ya still wish to have that conference?”
“Yes.”
There’s little conferring in a 402 conference. Usually the sale has already been made; this is just the closing. The lawyers have come to terms, and often they’ve also checked with the judge to make sure he’ll approve the deal. In Locallo’s courtroom, when the parties can’t agree on a sentence, the courtroom PD will frequently ask Locallo for a 402 anyway, knowing the clearance-sale offers he makes to dispose of his “bullshit” cases. In these instances, Locallo and the lawyers will indeed confer during the 402—for perhaps two minutes. The prosecutor will inform Locallo of the defendant’s criminal background. The PD will counter with some
commendable nugget about the defendant she’s managed to mine from a brisk interview with him through the bars of the courtroom lockup—his recent job at a Burger King, his work on a GED. Then Locallo will announce his offer, the defendant and his lawyer will whisper briefly, and the defendant will usually accept. Prosecutors aren’t required to go along with the judge’s offer;
in fact, prosecutors, not the judge, are the ones who are supposed to be making the offer. But as Locallo well knows, the assistant state’s attorneys aren’t often going to fight him on the smaller cases, because they want his help in the bigger ones.
The defense lawyer sometimes serves as floor salesperson before the 402, softening up the defendant by stressing the maximum he might get if he insists on trial—even when the lawyer knows the judge would never go that high. Next to the sticker price, the wholesale offer is attractive.
Not many defendants would plead, of course, if they had nothing to lose by going to trial. But a jury trial usually takes two days to a week, and if the jury convicts, there will be post-trial motions and a sentencing hearing as well. A guilty plea can usually be wrapped up in twenty minutes. The jail behind the courthouse—
the most populated single-site jail in the nation, with more than nine thousand inmates in 1998—has always been overcrowded. But its eleven divisions couldn’t possibly contain all the defendants if even a tenth of them insisted on a jury trial, instead of the
one percent who do.
The simple solution: make the defendant pay for a trial. Not with money, of course, but with a stiffer sentence if he rolls the dice and loses. The trial tax is as much a part of the courthouse as its limestone columns. The markup for a jury trial is higher than for a quicker “bench” trial, in which the judge decides the case. Lawyers trade scouting reports on particular judges’ standard assessments. Inmates do likewise in the courtroom lockups and on the jail grapevine. The book on Locallo says his taxes are modest but that he’ll bluff about sizable tariffs to get a defendant to fold.
Since it’s unconstitutional to coerce a defendant into surrendering his Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial, the most that judges will admit is that some other judges do it. (“I have heard about it,” Locallo says of the trial tax.) And the subtext to every 402 never is spoken, never makes it into the record:
In return for the favor of your guilty plea and the time it’ll save us, I’ve agreed not to bang ya, d’ya understand?
Everyone understands.
Perusing a police report, assistant state’s attorney Alesia gives Locallo the alleged facts of the Tidmore case. The arresting officers observed a 1996 Buick Century being driven erratically, ran the car’s plates, and discovered it was stolen. When they gave chase, Tidmore jumped from the car and fled, and the officers caught him under a porch. The Buick’s driver’s-side
window was broken, the steering column peeled, and a screwdriver was on the floor of the car.
Tidmore has no felony convictions, Alesia says. (He turned seventeen—majority age under criminal law in Illinois—just eleven days before his arrest.) Public defender Campanelli tells Locallo that Tidmore lives with his grandmother and is a high school student.
“Suggest he consider eighteen months’ conditional discharge, with a condition he obtain his high school or GED degree,” Locallo says.
If probation is a tap on the wrist, conditional discharge is a tickle. Tidmore won’t even have to report to a probation officer. But the plea will give him a felony conviction. And if he commits another offense during the next eighteen months, he could be sentenced to prison on this case. On the other hand, Campanelli has already told the youth that if he goes to trial and is convicted, he could get as many as seven years. Tidmore nods to Campanelli: he’ll cop to the judge’s offer.
“Before I accept your plea of guilty, d’ya understand by pleading guilty that you’re giving up your right to trial by jury?” Locallo asks.
“Yeah.”
Locallo has given these admonishments too many times to be anything but mechanical in his delivery. In the preceding year, he presided over
fifteen jury trials and eighty-eight benches. And he took 805 guilty pleas.
He races through the remaining admonishments. Tidmore says yes, no, and at the correct time, guilty. Fifteen minutes after his case was called, the young man is on his way, and Locallo has his first “dispo” of the morning.
The judges here get weekly printouts from the presiding judge listing the disposition totals for the week, the month, and the year, for each judge in the building. When a judge is up for retention—as Locallo is this November—his disposition totals will be published and disseminated before the election by the Chicago Crime Commission. Dispo totals have been important for judges since at least 1920, a year after the crime commission was formed. The commission
began sending its clerks into courtrooms to tally judges’ dispositions, in accordance with the group’s belief that swift punishment was the key to cutting crime. Judicial efficiency was prized in Cook County long before that, however. In 1885 historian A. T. Andreas, writing about the Cook County Circuit Court, observed that
a trial court judge who hesitates, “trying to decide every case exactly right and beyond cavil is not a good judge nor well fitted for his position.… Business must go forward, or the courts will get immediately clogged.”
Locallo ranked below average in dispos in his first few years in a trial courtroom. But last year he
surged to tenth among the building’s thirty trial judges, cracking the one-thousand mark for the first time, with 1,058 dispos.
(
That includes 150 pretrial dismissals by the state.) He says the spike in his dispos as his retention election nears is coincidental—he’s just gotten faster with experience.
WHEN LOCALLO BEGAN
his criminal justice career as a Cook County prosecutor in 1978, the primary lesson he was taught from the beginning was “how to move cases.” And he was an eager learner.
After six months in traffic court, he was transferred to the municipal division, where he handled misdemeanor cases in police station branch courtrooms.
Misdemeanor arrests were soaring in the late 1970s, and so the branches were even busier than usual, making efficiency all the more important. In a grimy courtroom in the police headquarters building downtown—“whore court,” as Locallo and most lawyers and judges called it—Locallo helped the judge rush hookers and shoplifters past the bench. “Defendant pleads guilty, found guilty, two days’ time served,” the judge would say over and over. Locallo soon moved on to a south-side branch, where he helped process waves of accused wife-beaters, barroom brawlers, and window-breakers—defendants who paused at the bench long enough to have their cases tossed because the complaining witness hadn’t shown, or to grab conditional discharge or probation.
After prosecuting drug cases in various 26th Street courtrooms for a year, Locallo graduated to a regular assignment as a third-chair prosecutor in a courtroom. While the stakes were higher in the felony courtrooms than in the branches, the essential task was the same: moving cases quickly. Locallo was blessed with an incomparable tutor in one of the first courtrooms he was assigned—Judge James Bailey, the courthouse’s perennial dispo champ for twenty years. “
What’s next, what’s next?” Bailey would bark at his prosecutors as soon as a case was disposed of. The judge offered unbeatable deals to petty offenders, reminding his prosecutors that time spent on a theft case was time taken from a murder. Defendants charged with violent crimes, on the other hand, got no breaks from Bailey.
This philosophy made sense to Locallo. He had a chance to apply what he learned when he was transferred to the courtroom of Judge William Cousins Jr. as a second chair. Locallo would come to admire Cousins more than any other judge. But efficiency wasn’t Cousins’s forte; when Locallo arrived in 1981, Cousins’s call was hopelessly clogged. After Locallo was promoted to first chair, he began wheeling and dealing, making tantalizing offers to defense lawyers in lesser cases. “Counsel? What can we do for
you
today?” Locallo would greet the lawyers. “It was like white sales,” Locallo recalls now with a laugh. The backup cleared.
“In Cousins’s courtroom, we were trying the murders, rapes, and robberies,”
Locallo says. “And the rest of the stuff? I couldn’t care less. If it wasn’t a violent offense, I’m sorry, I admit it, I plead guilty—I gave away the store. But I got rid of a case, defense counsel got rid of a case.” He made it a practice to check with the arresting officer and the victim before finalizing a deal. “Most police officers tell you, ‘I don’t give a shit. All I get credit for is the arrest.’ And most victims say, ‘You mean I don’t have to come back to court?’ ”
Plea bargaining has been a staple in criminal courthouses throughout the nation since at least the late nineteenth century. The practice used to have many ardent critics. Conservatives said it let criminals off too easily; liberals said it promoted mindless, routinized sentencing of defendants. In 1973 the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals called for the
abolition of plea bargaining within five years. Under plea bargaining, the commission said, the focus wasn’t on rehabilitation or even deterrence but merely on the disposal of cases, the quicker the better. The commission imagined sentencing hearings in which judges paid more attention to the offender than the offense; in which they considered not just an offender’s criminal background but his upbringing, skills, and deficits; and in which a plan was devised for actually changing him into a law-abiding citizen—a plan whose implementation would be monitored by the judge.
The number of felony cases has risen dramatically throughout the country since the commission made its recommendation three decades ago, so instead of being abolished, plea bargaining has been relied on all the more, and the critics have largely disappeared. The concept of studying an offender and devising a rehabilitation plan isn’t frowned upon so much as not looked upon at all; the proper sentence is whatever both sides can agree on to belch out one defendant and make space for the next. Locallo, like many judges here, has little regard for the ivory tower notions of yesterday’s commissions. “We don’t live in a theoretical world,” he says. “Under ideal circumstances, you’d get a complete analysis of the defendant you were going to sentence. But you’re not gonna have that. So you take the realistic approach.”
JERMAINE TIDMORE
’
S PLEA
is a dispo for Locallo, a conviction for the prosecutors, and one less case for the public defenders to fret. The conveyor is humming along this particular morning—until Tony Cameron manages to gum things up.
It happens after Campanelli’s partner, public defender Diana Bidawid, informs Locallo that Cameron wants a 402. (Like most courtrooms at 26th Street, 302 has two public defenders and three assistant state’s attorneys
assigned to it.) Cameron is in front of the bench with Bidawid at his side, and prosecutor Alesia is next to Bidawid.
“Mr. Cameron, your attorney is requesting a conference to discuss the possible disposition of your matter, are you asking to have a conference?” Locallo begins.