Courtroom 302 (18 page)

Locallo chafes at such criticism. He says he’ll impose death when he gets a case that merits it. He points to other respected 26th Street judges—William Cousins, for one—who never sent anyone to death row. “You don’t judge a judge by how many times he gives death,” Locallo says. “If that’s the criterion, I guess I’ll be on the low end. But I’ll be with judges I’ve always admired who never gave it either.”

In Illinois a defendant convicted in a capital case can opt to have either the jury or judge decide whether to impose the death penalty. On the advice of his lawyers, Betts has already agreed to have Locallo decide his fate if the jury finds him guilty. Since it would be his second murder conviction, the minimum sentence would be natural life.

The curious course of events since the barbershop shanking has put Betts in the position of asserting his innocence of an attack he has already pled guilty to. The jury won’t be informed of the plea, however, Locallo precluding mention of it as prejudicial.

“
THIS CASE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
, is about a violent act committed by a violent person, Kevin Betts,” prosecutor Joe Alesia tells the jury in his opening statement. He sketches the shanking of Bernard Carter in the barbershop and his slow demise in an infirmary bed. “The last thing he felt was that shank going into his neck,” Alesia says.

Betts’s lawyer, public defender Tony Eben, begins his opening statement by standing behind Betts at the defense table, resting a hand warmly on one of Betts’s shoulders, and introducing “Kevin” to the jury, displaying a palpable fondness between lawyer and client.

The fondness is an act, however; there’s no love lost between Eben and Betts. Betts thinks he got a bad break when Eben was dealt to him by the public defenders’ Homicide Task Force. The fifty-four-year-old Eben has been a lawyer for twenty-four years, a member of the task force for thirteen. Colleagues laud his courtroom skills. But Betts says Eben hasn’t given his case the time of day. In a November 1997 letter to Eben, Betts noted that in the more than two years since he’d been back in the Cook County Jail after being indicted for the Carter murder, Eben had visited him only once to discuss his case and that consequently, Betts was firing him. Betts then also wrote Locallo asking for a new lawyer, and he wrote a
letter of complaint against Eben to Illinois’s attorney disciplinary committee. (That complaint was ultimately dismissed.)

Eben says that although he may not have visited Betts much in the jail, he spoke privately with him in the jury room or the conference room of 302 on numerous pretrial court dates, and he also sent an investigator to the jail several times to get information from Betts.

After Betts wrote the letter saying he was firing Eben, the lawyer visited his client in the jail, and the two men had a heated exchange. Betts admits making not-so-veiled threats during this meeting regarding Eben’s well-being if Eben didn’t devote more time to the case.

“They trying to give me the death penalty or natural life—and he [Eben] taking it all nonchalant, casual, like it’s nothing,” Betts says later. He thought the PD assisting Eben, Amy Campanelli, was more interested in helping him but unable to because she was the junior lawyer.

Locallo denied Betts’s petition for a new lawyer. A judge can’t grant such a request lightly, Locallo says, or soon many of the defendants with PDs will be asking for a different one. If he’d heard of other complaints about Eben, he’d have given Betts’s request more consideration, the judge says. Betts considers the denial an example of how judges and lawyers protect each other at the expense of defendants.

Eben regards Betts as a bright if unreasonable client. He says their differences won’t affect how hard he works for Betts. “Sometimes clients are hard to deal with. It’s the nature of the business. You just have to do a professional job.”

Eben now tells the jury that jail authorities botched their investigation and ended up charging the wrong inmate. The defense will present five witnesses who were in or near the barbershop at the time of the shanking who will testify that an inmate named Angelo Roberts did it.

Betts looks like an up-and-coming accountant at the defense table—a bright-eyed young man with rounded shoulders, at home in his fine brown suit, suspenders, crisp white shirt, paisley tie, and shiny shoes. It’s his brother’s suit, but his brother can’t use it; he’s doing twelve at Stateville for armed violence and aggravated kidnapping. The clothes hide the skeleton and tombstone tattooed on Betts’s chest, the “Sir Kevin” and the “4” on his right forearm (signifying his gang, the Four Corner Hustlers). He’s clean-shaven, and his hair is trimmed to the scalp, thanks to another visit to the jail barbershop.

During opening statements the jurors size up Betts, their eyes straying from the lawyers. Betts had already sized up the jury, and it has him worried. Half of the jurors are over forty, and seven are men. He thinks a younger jury with more women would be more sympathetic. There are ten
whites, one Hispanic, and only one black. Most disturbing to Betts is the fact that six of the jurors are from the suburbs, and none of the city residents live anywhere near the west-side slum where he was raised. “A jury of my peers would’ve been a bunch of people from the city sleeping under them viaducts,” he says. Betts believes that middle-class people tend to trust the authorities, whereas poor people know from experience that law enforcement officers will lie to make a case.

The life-and-death witness is Bernard Carter’s grandmother, Ora Lee Carter. Bernard was her only grandchild, and she visited him regularly when he was in the jail here. She saw him on the morning of March 18, 1993, before he was shanked. He seemed healthy that morning, she tells the jury. She also visited him twice a week in the infirmary in Dixon, Illinois. “Some days I would go and he would know who I was,” she says. The only part of his body he could move was his head. She saw him in the infirmary the day before he died, and then she saw him at the funeral home.

After Ora Lee Carter the prosecutors call James Jackson, the officer on duty in the barbershop at the time of the shanking. Jackson looks to be in his sixties, and he’s now retired. He says there were five barber chairs in the shop, and a desk, at which he was sitting. Carter was cutting Betts’s hair in chair number one, right next to the desk. After Carter finished the haircut, he turned to the table behind him to get a brush to clean off Betts. Betts then jumped out of the chair, pulled off the cape he was wearing, and punched Carter in the back of the neck—or at least it looked to Jackson as if he’d merely punched him. Carter collapsed to the floor, and Betts ran out of the shop. Jackson phoned the security post down the hall, alerting the officer there to stop the man running toward him.

Johnnie Debergh, the officer who answered that call, tells the jury he stopped an inmate headed his way and escorted him back to the barbershop. Asked by prosecutor Alesia if he sees the individual in the courtroom, Debergh points to Betts at the defense table. Debergh says he noticed red droplets on the shoulder of Betts’s jail shirt. In a search of the hallway after the attack, Debergh found a seven-inch spike behind a radiator just outside the barbershop.

Investigator Robert Sullivan describes how Carter was shown an array of photos in the hospital and nodded at the one of Betts.

The state’s case is compelling, but it’s not without weaknesses, which Eben and Campanelli highlight on their cross-examinations. While questioning Jackson, Eben refers to a log indicating there may have been as many as fourteen inmates in the barbershop, not counting the barbers, at the time of the shanking. He wants the jury to picture a barbershop that was more chaotic at the time of the crime than Jackson made it seem on
direct. Campanelli confronts Officer Debergh with a memo he wrote for an investigator on the day of the attack, in which he says he stopped two inmates who were leaving the barbershop, not one, and that he returned both of them to the shop. Debergh acknowledges that he encountered a second inmate just outside the barbershop door. He also acknowledges he made no mention in his memo of any red droplets on Betts’s shirt; nor did he make sure the shirt was inventoried.

The jury has seen the spike that Debergh found behind the radiator outside the barbershop. But in her cross of Debergh, Campanelli focuses attention on a second shank that was discovered after the attack, this one in a towel bin inside the barbershop. Campanelli knows that the authorities say they now can’t locate this shank—the state only has a photocopy of it. It’s a good fact for the defense. Campanelli asks Debergh what he did with this second shank. Debergh says he put it in a brown envelope and gave it to an investigator.

“Where is the shank today?” Campanelli asks.

“I have no idea,” Debergh says.

WHEN THE BETTS JURORS
entered the courtroom for opening statements, they may have presumed that this was a case of exceptional public interest—the gallery was packed with young white spectators. But these were students from a suburban religious college on a field trip. They filed out after opening statements, returning the gallery to its usual desolate state during a trial. A few defendants on bond stroll in and out, alternating between naps on the benches and cigarette breaks in the hallway. Locallo will deal briefly with their cases during recesses. The only spectator with a personal interest in the trial to watch it for an extended period is the victim’s grandmother, Ora Lee Carter, who watches the whole thing.

The seventy-year-old Carter has lavender lipstick and nails, and several of her teeth are gold. The first day of the trial, she’s wearing gold bracelets on one wrist, a gold-banded watch on the other, and sequined earrings. A large velvet handbag leans against her on her gallery bench. A retired factory worker, recently widowed a second time, she spends much of her days reading the Bible. She grew up in Yazoo City, Mississippi. She was raised by a sister from the time she was twelve, after her father went to prison for killing her mother. She married at fifteen, a year after giving birth to her first child—Bernard Carter’s mother, Catherine. Catherine died of cancer in 1993, at age fifty-two, two months before Bernard was shanked. Ora Carter then felt a greater responsibility toward her grandson, and in his last months in the prison infirmary she was his sole regular visitor, driving the hundred miles to Dixon from her home on the near west side. “Four tolls
there and four back, and I went there twice a week,” she says during the lunch break on the trial’s first day.

She isn’t looking for retribution from the trial. She’s just curious about exactly how and why her grandson was attacked. “Vengeance is not mine,” she says. “I never want to judge right from wrong—God’s the only one can do that. To tell you the truth, I don’t really care [what happens]. Whatever they do it ain’t gonna bring him back.” She feels only pity for Betts.

Betts’s mother lives in Chicago, as do various aunts, uncles, and other relatives, none of whom have shown for the trial. “This ain’t nothing new,” he says.

He’s closest to his only sibling, Shawn, the brother who’s in prison. Shawn is thirty, a year and a half older than Kevin. He was convicted of snatching a purse shortly after his seventeenth birthday, and he’s been in and out of jail ever since. During a 1996 presentence interview by a probation officer, Shawn described his childhood as “fucked up.” He said he’d been physically abused by the relatives and friends who’d raised him.

Kevin Betts’s early years were also marked by trouble with the law—trips to the juvenile detention center for stealing, arrests as a young adult for theft, drug possession, unlawful use of a weapon, and aggravated assault—charges that were dropped or tossed out. At nineteen he pled guilty to car theft, drug possession, and violation of bail bond and was shipped to prison with a six-year term. Soon after his release, he was charged with the murder he was convicted of in 1993—but he fled to Tennessee before he could be arrested. When he picked up charges there of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated sexual battery, and aggravated robbery, he fled back to Chicago. An informant tipped police to his whereabouts, and he was arrested shortly after his return.

An evaluation by a school psychologist when he was sixteen and living in a shelter said he needed a strongly structured environment. “It is evident that his dependency needs have never been met,” the psychologist wrote. “He is suspicious of others and has strong hostile impulses.”

Betts says his parents broke up around the time he was born. His father moved to California, leaving his mother to raise him and Shawn. She’s strong-willed and strict, he says, a devoutly religious teetotaler. She worked steadily to support the family, first as a security guard, then as a nurse after she went back to school and earned a nursing degree. “We got some of the best genes, some of the best equipment, as far as thinking and being able to persevere through all types of trials and tribulations,” he says.

But his mother also had a fierce temper, he says. “The dumbest things would set her off. A kid would get what I call brain-lock and just do something that an average ordinary kid would do, and—she ain’t going for it. A
lot of the things she done, man, there wasn’t cause for.” He and Shawn ran away from home when they were eleven and twelve. “It was either stay there and deal with her, or go out there and deal with the world. I guess we felt braver dealing with the world.” They lived “house to house, with friends, in vacant apartments—just basically waking up wherever we laid down at. Wasn’t no set place.

“I put no fault on her, though,” he says of his mother. “I haven’t been an angel, and I’ve done some wrong things, and I hope and I pray I’ll get a chance to even things out.”

IN THE AFTERNOON
and on the following morning, the defense puts on five of the convicted killers who’ve been waiting in the lockup to testify for Betts. They each come to the stand in a white dress shirt and black trousers they’ve been issued by prison officials for their courtroom appearance.

The first four of these witnesses tell the jury they were in the barbershop when the shanking occurred. The shop was crowded with inmates, they say. Betts walked out of the shop after his haircut, they all remember—and then the inmate who’d been in the chair
next
to Betts, Angelo Roberts, got out of his chair and hugged Carter, with Carter then falling to the ground. One of the four witnesses recalls seeing a knife in Roberts’s hand. The public defenders have the witnesses disclose on direct examination the murder sentences they’re serving—otherwise the state will bring it out on cross, and it’ll look as if the defense were hiding the fact. The four witnesses are serving terms of forty, seventy, eighty, and a hundred years. Eben and Campanelli save their choirboy for last—a young man doing a mere twenty for murder. He was sweeping and mopping the hallway outside the barbershop on the morning in question and saw Betts leave the shop, followed by Roberts. He says Roberts put something behind the radiator outside the shop.