Authors: Steve Bogira
“Yes,” Cameron says.
Locallo sails through the first part of the 402 without a stoplight. Alesia, surveying a police report, tells the judge that the robbery occurred outside a currency exchange on Chicago’s south side. According to the arresting officers, Cameron got into the victim’s car, sat in her lap, put a gun to her head, and told her, “Give me your money or I’ll blow your ass away.” She handed over $260. Cameron fled, Alesia says—but he returned to the scene, and the victim identified him, as did her sister, who’d also been in the car.
Cameron has one other conviction, Alesia tells the judge: in 1986 he was found guilty but mentally ill in another robbery case, for which he got six years.
Public defender Bidawid takes a half minute to summarize Cameron for Locallo: thirty-four, lives with his mother on the south side, does odd jobs, has an eighth-grade education, learning disabled, a long history of mental disorders, taking an antipsychotic in the jail.
“All right. We did have a fitness hearing on December fourth,” Locallo says, scrutinizing the court file in front of him.
“Correct. He was found fit,” Bidawid says.
A defendant can be mentally ill, or even insane, and still be deemed fit for trial.
He’s fit if he understands the nature of the charges against him and the basics of the court proceedings, and if he can cooperate with his lawyer’s efforts on his behalf. At the December hearing, a county psychiatrist testified that based on his interview of Cameron and his review of some of his mental health records, Cameron was “fit to stand trial, with medications.” Cameron has been
in psychiatric hospitals sixteen times, and he’s received treatment from outpatient clinics throughout his adult life as well; yet the psychiatrist made his determination without reviewing any of Cameron’s treatment records from the last twelve years, other than notes on the medicine he’d been prescribed in the jail. Following the psychiatrist’s testimony, Locallo declared Cameron fit. The hearing had taken less than ten minutes.
Now Locallo glances down at Cameron. He sees a dark-skinned African American with wide-set eyes, a pencil mustache, and a wispy goatee. The judge asks him if he understands what’s going on; Cameron says he does. Locallo then explains that armed robbery carries six to thirty, and that in
return for his guilty plea, Cameron would get the minimum six. With day-for-day credit and other credits Cameron can compile in prison, minus the five months he’s already spent in jail, he’ll likely have to serve only another two years. (In 1998 convicts in Illinois get a day off their sentence for each day served. This is called a “good-conduct” credit—but
inmates usually get it regardless of their behavior because the prisons are so overcrowded. A “
truth-in-sentencing” law that will go into effect later in 1998 will require those convicted of murder to serve 100 percent of their time, and those convicted of many other violent offenses to do 85 percent of their time.)
“I’ll accept that,” Cameron says.
Cameron’s 1986 conviction came in a bench trial. His public defender had sought a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, a finding that would have committed Cameron to a mental hospital. The judge’s rejection of that verdict in favor of a finding of guilty but mentally ill had sent Cameron to prison instead. In that sentencing hearing, his PD had told the judge that if the aim was to steer Cameron from further crime, he needed psychiatric treatment. The PD urged the judge not to “turn the clock back here maybe a century or so and punish someone such as Tony by sending him to prison for being psychotic.” But prison it was, though the judge did tell Cameron, “I hope you’ll solve your mental difficulties” before sending him away. (
It’s up to prison officials what treatment, if any, to give a prisoner who’s been found guilty but mentally ill. Cameron says he mainly got pills.)
Bidawid opted not to attempt an insanity defense in Cameron’s present case. The county psychiatrist had concluded not only that Cameron was fit but that he’d been sane at the time of the offense. That opinion would have been hard to overcome. Bidawid didn’t think it would be worth seeking another guilty-but-mentally-ill finding for Cameron, given the lack of benefit for such convicts.
In 1986 Cameron’s mental status at least merited prolonged consideration. But in today’s plea conference, the only real issue is whether he’ll take the six.
Bidawid tells Locallo that Cameron is addicted to crack and asks the judge to include a recommendation in his sentencing order that Cameron be assigned to the Graham Correctional Center, a prison with a drug treatment program. Locallo quickly assents. He’s always happy to make such a recommendation. He knows that prison officials don’t necessarily follow such a suggestion from a judge, and he normally cautions defendants of this (though he neglects to advise Cameron of the possibility). But such recommendations are helpful to Locallo if not to the defendant; they’re
another extra he can offer to ice a deal. Locallo is adept at closing 402s, throwing in contact visits with family in the courtroom on the day of the plea and recommendations to particular prisons as if they’re power windows and CD players.
Locallo asks Cameron if anyone is forcing him to plead guilty instead of taking his case to trial.
“I’m just tired—I’m really tired,” Cameron says. His voice is deep and scratchy. “I just wanna get this over with.”
Red alert. The defendant has departed from his lines. A 402 is a tightly scripted exercise, and when the defendant starts ad-libbing, it ruffles everyone. Locallo seems to sense Cameron wavering. Time to sweeten the pot.
“How long has he been in custody?” the judge asks Bidawid. One hundred forty-five days, she says. “I’ll give him credit for 145 days,” Locallo says, glancing benevolently at Cameron. It’s like telling him if he buys the car, he’ll get the tires for free; Cameron has that 145-day credit coming by law.
“Mr. Cameron, I’m going to ask you some questions,” Locallo says. “If there’s anything that you don’t understand, I want you to tell me. I’ll try to explain. All right, sir?”
“Yes, sir,” Cameron says.
“All right. Is his mother here?”
“Yes, Judge,” Bidawid says, peering into the gallery.
“She can come in.”
A short woman in a Fila coat, sweatpants, and sneakers steps meekly through the glass doors, stopping a dozen feet behind Cameron.
“He’s also asking for a contact visit,” Bidawid says.
“Sure,” Locallo says. “Good morning—thank you for coming to court,” he tells Cameron’s mother. “If there’s anything you don’t understand, tell me, and I’ll try to explain, all right?”
“Yes,” the mother says, looking blankly at the judge.
Locallo again advises Cameron of the charge against him and of the six-to-thirty-year term he is subject to. “Knowing the nature of the charges and the possible penalties, how do you plead to the charge of armed robbery, guilty or not guilty?”
“I plead guilty,” Cameron says.
“Has anybody forced you, threatened you, or made any promise to you to get you to do this?”
“No, I just did it because I’m tired,” Cameron says again. “I mean, I feel that no matter what I’m saying, it’s not gonna go in my favor.”
Clerk Sundberg looks up from an arrest warrant he’s been filling out and studies Cameron.
“Well, you’re entitled to have your trial,” Locallo says.
“Yeah, but I was here twelve years ago in the same type of case like that,” Cameron says. “It was purse-snatching instead of robbery. I didn’t get no say-so on my behalf. So that’s why I said, ‘Well, okay,’ because I’ll never be heard, okay?”
“You will have an opportunity to say something before I sentence you,” Locallo assures him.
“I understand, but nothing will happen for me,” Cameron says. “It just never do.”
Cameron’s father abandoned the family when Cameron was small. The family lived off the disability check his mother got for her own mental disorder. Cameron later describes his mother to me as “sweet” but “slow, like a real little kid.” Various aunts and uncles lived in the household, several of them with alcohol and drug addictions. (One uncle has a drug case pending on this floor.) School was a mystery to Cameron, perhaps because he had an IQ of 62 and hearing loss in one ear. He was barely a teen when he began hanging on corners with a forty-ounce bottle of beer, his pills, and marijuana joints. His mother brought him to a mental hospital when he was sixteen. He’d been hearing voices, and whenever the doorbell rang, he’d hide in a closet, she reported; he refused to go outside and did little inside but sit and stare into space. The psychiatrists said he was schizophrenic and retarded. He was hospitalized almost two years. During one psychological test, when he was shown a certain picture, he said the character in the picture was happy because he jumped out the window and died. Before he was released, a psychologist observed that Cameron had “the unfortunate combination of a handsome, well-developed body of an adolescent with the mind of a ten-year-old and the emotional development of a four-year-old.” Some of his problems likely were organic, the psychologist said, but they were also probably due to Cameron’s having been “vastly deprived intellectually, socially, and emotionally” at home and in school.
Cameron says he did get guidance as a youngster from one of his uncles. “Uncle Poochie” would gather Tony and his two brothers and their cousins in a bedroom, lock the door, match the boys up by size, and direct them to fight until blood was drawn. Cameron got his nose broken once, and he recalls losing most of the fights; but he appreciates Uncle Poochie’s attempts to “teach us how to be a man.” Cameron absorbed numerous beatings from an older brother as well. Cameron’s two brothers have been arrested repeatedly for battery and assault. But such troubles aren’t due to
a lack of discipline in the household, according to Cameron; when he and his siblings were kids, several of the adults in the home were willing to administer the necessary whuppings. Uncle Poochie was feared the most; he’d order his target to strip, then lash him with an extension cord “on your legs, arms, your ass, didn’t make no difference.” Cameron’s mother was gentler, he says, though she whupped him with “extension cords, bottles, shoes.” Cameron isn’t squawking about how he was punished. “When you bad kids, that’s what you get.”
Locallo isn’t familiar with any of these details about Cameron. The judge has more than three hundred cases involving more than 350 defendants on his call; how could he be expected to delve into such minutiae? Besides, it isn’t relevant to the matter at hand, which still is whether Cameron will go through with his plea.
When a defendant hesitates in the middle of a plea, some judges rush to wrap things up, lest the defendant back out. Locallo responds instead with patience. It isn’t that he wants to learn more about Cameron; it’s that he not only wants to get the plea, he also wants it to stick. He’s dropped well below the speed limit in his delivery of the admonishments, and he’ll explain everything three times if he must, to make it clear in the record that Cameron knew what he was doing when he pled—so Cameron would have a hard time claiming on an appeal that he didn’t. (The watchdog group that publishes judges’ dispo records tracks their record of appellate reversals as well.) “A bad plea is like a vampire—it can always come back,” Locallo often tells younger judges. He urges them to take the extra few minutes sometimes needed “to kill a case—to put that stake in the vampire’s heart.”
So Locallo now tells Cameron: “Well, you understand that if you wanted to have a trial, I would give you a trial. You know that.”
“Yeah, but I mean, you would still—I’ve been looking at six to thirty years.”
“That’s if you’re found guilty,” Locallo says.
“That could be the maximum, you know, or whatever you could find.”
“Oh no, you can’t be penalized for taking a trial,” Locallo responds, grasping Cameron’s allusion to a tax. “What I’m saying to you, I can’t force you to plead guilty. I can’t force you to plead not guilty. You understand?”
“Right,” Cameron says. “But if I take the trial, I mean, would I get thirty years? That’s what I’m scared of. That’s what I’m looking at.”
“The range is six to thirty, but I can’t tell you what your sentence would be,” Locallo says.
“That’s what I’m saying. I got no choice.”
“I realize that,” Locallo says. “But I’d have to hear the facts and I’d have to make the decision as to what your background is.”
“There ain’t no kinda way that I’m gonna win on this case at all,” Cameron says with a shake of his head. “Ain’t nothing gonna go in my favor. It never have, you know.”
“All right,” Locallo says. “Now, do you understand that by pleading guilty, there’s not going to be a trial?”
“Yes, I understand all of that,” Cameron says.
“You understand by pleading guilty you’re giving up your right to see, to confront, and question any of the witnesses who’d testify against you?”
“I understand all that,” Cameron says. “I mean, you know, that’s why I have a problem, because I always been rejected from society. I never had a chance in life.”
“Other than the promise that in return for your plea of guilty your sentence would be six years—which is the minimum—other than that promise, have there been any other promises made to you to get you to plead guilty?”
“I ain’t gonna win,” Cameron says.
“Well, is anybody promising you anything other than the six years?”
“Ain’t nobody promising no freedom,” Cameron says. Deputy Guerrero, standing a few feet behind Cameron, shakes his head and chuckles softly.
“All right,” Locallo says. “But I’m asking you, has anybody promised you anything other than the six years?”
“Nobody did promise me anything. Nobody told me nothing. I don’t know nothing. I’ve been stuck here, going back and forth to court. I don’t know what I’m here for or what I’m supposed to have done. I’m just up against something I don’t know nothing about.”
“Well—”
“I don’t understand nothing whatsoever, but I’m just taking something that I don’t even understand myself,” Cameron says.
“Do you understand what the charges are?” Locallo tries again.