Courtroom 302 (6 page)

TO PLEAD OR NOT
to plead: that’s Tony Cameron’s dilemma on this same January morning.

He’s downing a bowl of bland oatmeal and a soggy piece of toast in a Division 2 cafeteria as he once again considers his options, at four-fifteen
A.M
. If you want breakfast in the Cook County Jail, this is when it’s served.

Cameron is tired and not just because of the hour. He hasn’t been sleeping well. The housing in Division 2 is dormitory style: fifty men in one large room, sleeping on metal cots topped with flimsy foam mattresses. Cameron tends to distrust people to begin with, and this open arrangement has kept him on constant guard. You never know when someone’s going to go off on you, or when you might get caught in the middle of some other brothers’ beef. Hefty and broad-shouldered, he’s been in more than his share of fights; but he’d just as soon avoid them here, so he’s been sleeping with one eye open and one eye closed, as he likes to say. He worries about thievery, too. Inmates keep their possessions in a basket under their cots. When something turns up missing, there are only forty-nine possible culprits. Cameron is protective of his basket even though it currently holds only a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a bar of soap. He’s not one of the lucky inmates who’s getting money from home for the commissary.

Cameron has been in the jail five months now, since his arrest last August for armed robbery. The judge had set his bond at fifty thousand dollars. Five thousand to walk—about five thousand more than his family had.

He wanted to go to trial, he told his public defender every time he was in court. But nothing much had happened on his first five trips, as far as he could tell. He suspected the PD and the state’s attorney were ganging up on him, trying to squeeze out his guilty plea. Go to trial, and you could get thirty years, the PD had told him; cop out, and the state will recommend the minimum six. If the plan was to wear him out, it was working; he was so sick of the jail that he’d pretty well decided to take the deal today and go ahead on downstate, do his bit, and get it over with.

After he finishes eating, he returns to his dorm. Like the cafeteria, it’s on the first floor of the three-story building. Most of the other prisoners are still in their cots, having skipped breakfast or gone back to bed after
eating. Cameron takes a seat at the front of the dorm and watches the news on the TV.

He isn’t fond of these court days. Some of the younger prisoners look forward to the chance of meeting up with friends in one of the bullpens on the way to the courthouse or in the courtroom lockup. Court days also provide a rare opportunity to see prisoners of the opposite sex. The male and female lockups behind most courtrooms are only a few feet apart; often the younger men and women stand at the front of the cells, chatting through the bars. Cameron is thirty-four, though, and for prisoners of his age, going to court is often just a nuisance. A prisoner gets bumped along from one bullpen to the next on the way to the courthouse and back. If he were in the jail, he could at least be watching TV; in the courtroom lockups, there’s just a camera watching him. The PD is likely to tell him she’s too busy to discuss his case, that she’ll catch him next time. He’ll be strip-searched before he’s returned to his division. He goes through all the fuss for maybe two minutes in front of the judge; when he gets back to his dorm later in the day, what he’s learned about his case is his next court date.

At five forty-five
A.M
. Cameron and three dozen other Division 2 inmates with court dates today are lined up in a hallway. They’re all in their jail uniforms—the tan shirt and pants with the big black DOC (Department of Corrections) across the back, an XL or an XXL or an XXXL over the breast pocket. A guard distributes jail IDs and courtroom passes. Each prisoner also gets a navy jacket to zip on over his shirt for the walk to Division 5, the first stop on the way to the courthouse.

At six
A.M
. sharp this bleary-eyed, yawning platoon is marched in pairs out the door into the chilly predawn darkness. Court isn’t scheduled to start for three and a half hours, and the courthouse is five minutes away. But it’s
no small task to deliver six hundred prisoners to thirty-four courtrooms (thirty trial and four preliminary hearing courtrooms). And the judges want their prisoners in their courtroom lockups early, no matter if the judges themselves are late. The divisions on the periphery of the jail grounds start shipping their prisoners even earlier. Most of the divisions are linked to the jail’s tunnel system; between five-thirty and six-fifteen each weekday morning there’s a pulsing of tan uniforms through the tunnels toward Division 5. An hour later a blue procession begins from the female divisions. A yellow line is painted on the tunnel floor; the prisoners walk on the narrow side, the guards on the other.

But Division 2 isn’t linked to the tunnels, so its prisoners take this short walk outside first. Cameron and his cohorts traipse quietly past a damp basketball court, two guards behind them. They round a corner and then
descend stairs into the tunnel, where they pause to slip off their jackets, which a prisoner collects in a sack. Then it’s onward through the tunnel to the Division 5 bullpens.

Those bullpens are already swarming and noisy when the Division 2 prisoners arrive. They’re quickly parceled out to three large lockups based on the floor of the courthouse they’re bound for. Cameron threads his way to a spot near the back of the bullpen he’s assigned to. His main goal in a bullpen is to stay out of any mess. He tends not to talk to anyone he doesn’t know and tries not to crowd anyone, though that’s not easy in here. Prisoners are often on edge on their court days, as he well understands; saying the wrong thing or stepping on someone’s foot by accident can lead to a whole lot of drama.

A few minutes later Cameron is called out to the hallway, where a nurse gives him his meds—two antipsychotic tablets and one for his manic symptoms. He’s been taking psychotropics since he was sixteen.

Soon Cameron and his cellmates are on their way once more, heading north through the dank tunnel, then east. The guards dock them at a string of bullpens just short of the courthouse basement.

In his lockup here, Cameron mulls his options again. He realizes no one can deny him a trial if he insists on one. But he’s also been around long enough to know that the judges here don’t play. They don’t appreciate defendants who won’t bend over and cop, he reminds himself. If I go to trial, I better win—because if I don’t, the judge is gonna bang me, he thinks. And the PD ain’t gonna do nothing to stop it. His PD seemed nice enough, but he’s sure she doesn’t really care about his case. How can she, when she has so many of them? Besides, he thinks,
her
ass ain’t on the line,
she
ain’t looking at prison; don’t matter if I go home, get six or thirty, she’s gonna get paid tomorrow.

Cameron committed the robbery he’s accused of, he admits to me later. But on his way to court this morning, that’s not what he’s thinking about. He’s thinking he could beat this case if only he could afford a real lawyer.

At seven-thirty the prisoners going to third-floor courtrooms are summoned out of the pens. Two guards sitting at a podium call out names from a printout, and the prisoners step forward one at a time, displaying their jail IDs. Another guard hands them each a plastic juice bottle and a plastic-wrapped cardboard tray with a baloney-on-white and crackers.

Cameron and ten other prisoners headed for Courtroom 302 are buzzed through a door to the “bridge,” the main tunnel in the courthouse basement. This is where the jail guards hand off custody of the prisoners to the courthouse deputies.

“Step right up, step right up, the greatest show on earth!” a deputy on
the bridge blares at the prisoners. “Spread out, empty your pockets! Drop your lunches on the yellow line! Take off your shoes and pull out the insoles! Turn around, grab some wall!”

The prisoners fan out in the tunnel, a half-dozen gloved deputies behind them. Matchbooks, sugar packets, jail IDs, courtroom passes, scraps of toilet paper drop to the concrete. Deputies scoop the matchbooks off the floor and set them ablaze, to mask the odor budding as the prisoners slip off their shoes.

Cameron presses his palms against the brown brick wall in front of him and leans forward while a deputy paws him, shoulders to ankles, with a token swipe at his crotch.

Some of the deputies assigned to courtrooms work the bridge first each morning, helping with the pat-downs until their prisoners arrive, then shepherding them upstairs to their courtroom. The deputy for 302, Gil Guerrero, is here now, doing pat-downs and chiming in with the repartee.

“Can I have my comb back?” a young Hispanic prisoner a few feet down from Cameron beseeches a deputy after he’s been searched.

“No, you can’t have your comb back,” the deputy sneers.

“I need my comb,” the prisoner says meekly.

“Use your fingers. You remember
Happy Days
?”

“He
needs
his
comb
,” another deputy whimpers.

“I need my fucking
comb
,” Guerrero says.

The Hispanic youth doesn’t respond. Cameron can imagine what he’s thinking. At home and in the streets, Cameron isn’t shy about running his mouth. But he knows that the smartest plan here is to go along with the program. He’s seen prisoners slapped silly for answering back.

“Let’s
go
!” a deputy hollers. “Get your motherfucking shoes on and get outta here!”

Cameron and the others rush to comply, jamming insoles back into shoes and yanking on the shoes, grabbing lunches and IDs off the floor and hurrying down the tunnel toward the elevators, under the constant encouragement of the deputies: “Move, move, move! Get the fuck outta here!”

At the end of the tunnel Guerrero handcuffs his ten prisoners for the elevator ride. Another deputy joins him for the trip. The prisoners—seven blacks, two Hispanics, and one white—are silent while the elevator shudders upward.

The elevator opens at the 302 bullpens. Guerrero unlocks the men’s cell with a large brass skeleton key. He uncuffs each prisoner, and they hand him their IDs and head in.

“Can you tell my lawyer I wanna speak to him before we go in court?” a prisoner asks Guerrero.

“I don’t know who your lawyer is—it’s not my problem,” Guerrero snaps over his shoulder. He drops the handcuffs, the IDs, and the key with a clang onto a metal desk in an anteroom around the corner.

Although he’s been wearing gloves, Guerrero heads straight for the jury room washroom now, as he always does after a stint on the bridge. “Gotta wash my hands,” he says on the way. “Been touching DOC all morning.”

Meanwhile, Cameron has found a spot on a bench and has started peeling the plastic from his lunch tray. He’s not hungry yet—it’s only eight
A.M
. But he’d rather eat his lunch before one of his bullpen mates tries snatching it from him. The other prisoners are unwrapping their lunches, too. Ain’t no way I’m gonna win on this case, Cameron thinks as he bites into his sandwich. It’s gonna go like everything else in my life.

LARRY BATES
glances at the clock on the wall above the jury box: 9:25. Six black women and two black men have joined him in the gallery. Like Bates, they’re stiff, silent, and grim on the benches. The gallery has six wooden pews, three on either side of an aisle, all of them carved with gang insignia—pitchforks, stars, and crowns. The gallery is separated from the front of the courtroom by tinted Plexiglas and a glass double door.

The benches rapidly fill, and the courtroom staff begin arriving as well, marching through the gallery and on into the well of the courtroom. Bates recognizes some of them from his previous visits and guesses at the rest of the cast. He remembers that the chubby balding man in the short-sleeved shirt and tie is the clerk. The man lugging a steno machine in one hand and a laptop in the other is obviously the court reporter. The two young men with the closely shaven chins, the dark pin-striped suits, and button-down shirts have prosecutor written all over them. That means the two young women in business suits, cradling file folders, must be the PDs. Bates can tell that someone works here as soon as he or she enters the door at the back of the gallery, and not just by how they’re dressed. The workers move with the comfort of those who belong, and they greet each other amiably as they pass through the gallery, like one big happy family. Not to mention that they’re all white.

Bates checks the clock again. Nine thirty-five; still no judge. Sure,
he
can come late, Bates thinks;
we
do, and it’s a warrant.

AT HIS KITCHEN TABLE
, Dan Locallo sips tea, munches on toast, and scans the morning’s
Chicago Tribune
. His wife, Jean, and his twelve-year-old son, Kevin, are elsewhere in the house, dressing for their day at a Catholic grammar school, where Kevin is a seventh-grader and Jean a
teacher’s aide. His seventeen-year-old daughter, Lauren, has already left for her Catholic high school. By eight-thirty
A.M
. he’s out the door as well.

The Locallos live on the outskirts of Chicago, in Norwood Park, one of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods, an area of brick homes and quiet streets whose residents fear property tax hikes more than crime or unemployment. Polish, German, Italian, and Irish ancestries predominate. There are
virtually no blacks. Locallo grew up not far away.

The reassuring drone of an AM news station fills his 1992 Lumina as he cruises south on Austin Boulevard—traffic and weather, sports, business. The overnight crime reports always interest him. They’re like coming attractions—the first accounts of the mayhem wrought by future 26th Street customers, any one of whom could end up in his courtroom. His ears are tuned especially for the potential heaters, the crimes with a special twist that are likely to captivate the press; those he
hopes
end up in his courtroom. The heaters can burn a judge, and many of his colleagues would just as soon keep their distance. Locallo likes the challenge.