Courtroom 302 (20 page)

When Locallo resumes the bench, Eben makes the motion. The judge can’t hide his disappointment. He’s found a case that says he can indeed
allow the jurors to go home for the night and resume deliberations tomorrow. He denies the mistrial motion. He says he’ll inform the jurors of his preference to let them go home tonight instead of to a hotel before resuming tomorrow. If the jurors say it won’t help them reach a verdict, he’ll reconsider the motion.

At seven-fifteen in the evening, after the jurors tell Locallo they’ll never reach a verdict no matter where they spend the night, Locallo declares a mistrial.

“
I’M FRUSTRATED
, because we didn’t do our job,” Hillebrand says later. “Now somebody else will have to do it.” He describes Massey as “stubborn as a mule.”

Massey says, “I understood that it was my job to make the state prove its case.”

He assumes investigators didn’t visit Carter in the hospital again after he could talk because they were afraid he might not identify Betts. But “justice is being sure of things, not going in and trying to slip something in quickly,” Massey says.

Some jurors seemed to side with the authorities just because they were the authorities, he says. This didn’t surprise him. “You see similar things every day—people listening to the news and accepting what they’re hearing at face value without ever questioning it.” He was bothered that several jurors appeared to be in such a hurry to decide so serious a matter. Some of the jurors had speculated that it was a death penalty case even though the lawyers hadn’t said anything about that. “But the attitude was ‘So it’s the guy’s life. So what? I’ve gotta be home by six.’ ”

Betts is relieved he’ll get a second chance and amazed about who made it possible. He’d tried to guess before Locallo declared the mistrial who his lone supporter was. Massey never came to mind. “Here I am, complaining about a race issue,” he says, “and it was a white guy that held out for me.”

He marvels at Massey’s fortitude. “I know the judge was mad. I know the state’s attorney was mad. I know my lawyer was mad. I know the other jurors was mad. Anybody that don’t conform to the rules of these people here or to this system, they’re not gonna like him. For a person to stick to his beliefs regardless of what everybody else is thinking—you definitely admire a person like that.”

Alesia has a different view. “I wanted to kick him in the face,” he says of Massey. “I wanted to grab him by the neck and say, ‘What were you thinking?’ ”

Hung juries aren’t common at 26th Street. Locallo says this was the fourth or fifth he’s had in more than a hundred jury trials. In his chambers
the day after the trial, the judge says he’d have preferred a verdict either way to the mistrial just so he could have gotten the case off his call. But “it’s not something I’m going to get an ulcer about. Instead of throwing my hands in the air, shaking my head and groaning, I’ll just set it for another date.” He hopes to retry the case in the spring.

Though he doesn’t get a dispo, the trial has benefited the judge in another way. Foreperson Hillebrand’s first opinion of Locallo was that he was “pompous—a know-it-all maybe.” But he was impressed by the way the judge ran the trial and by his graciousness afterward in the jury room. The judge made everyone feel their efforts were worth it despite the mistrial, Hillebrand says. So Hillebrand asked the judge when his next retention election was, and how the jurors might help. When Hillebrand called later to reiterate the offer, Locallo said it might be inappropriate for him to use former jurors to promote his retention. But at Hillebrand’s prodding, the judge sent the foreperson a list of the names and addresses of the jurors, Hillebrand promising to send each a note urging them to push for the judge’s retention.

Eben says he considers the mistrial a victory because the state didn’t convict his client. He’d hoped for a “finality” to the case, though, and his pleasure in the “victory” is tempered by his understanding that the case will require yet more work. He didn’t push for a mistrial earlier because he genuinely felt the eleven jurors might be favoring acquittal, he says. He dismisses Betts’s suggestion that he’d have preferred a loss. “We don’t go into these cases callously just wanting to put them on and get rid of them,” he says.

The case’s twists and turns thus far haven’t really surprised him. He’s been at 26th Street long enough to know how things work. “The stars come together, and you never know what’s gonna happen.”

SIX

Busted Again

LARRY BATES
, the forty-four-year-old probationer Locallo had warned in January to finish up his community service, did indeed quickly take care of that business. He picked up litter with the sheriff’s neon-vest crew in February, and the four remaining days he owed were history. This street-cleaning didn’t cure him of his crack addiction, though.

On March 15 police caught Bates selling drugs on a west-side corner. Since he was on probation, the bond court judge wouldn’t give him a recognizance bond. The judge set his bail at $10,000. Bates didn’t have anything near the $1,000 he needed to walk, and so he was jailed. But eight days later, on March 23, jail officials gave him a recognizance bond. Prisoners with low bonds are often released this way to ease overcrowding as part of the jail’s AMF program—Administrative Mandatory Furlough, or as jail guards call it, “Adios, Mother Fucker.”

Bates was due back in Locallo’s courtroom on March 25, the deadline Locallo had previously set for him to complete his community service. And so on that morning Bates again takes the stairs to the third floor, hoping not to be seen by anyone he knows.

Bates is superstitious. Before he sells drugs on a street corner, he’ll look for wood to knock on—a tree trunk will do—asking Lady Luck to keep the police away. As he steps into Courtroom 302 at 9:20
A.M
., fingers on both hands are crossed.

Locallo isn’t here yet. Bates, wearing a thin blue jacket and tattered black jeans, slides onto a bench and watches the gallery fill.

Not long after his arrival, a tall, olive-skinned woman enters the gallery
from the front of the courtroom. “Larry Bates?” she asks, scanning the benches. Bates raises his hand and says, “Right here,” and the woman sits down next to him. She glances at a file, then tells Bates he’ll probably be jailed again today—it’s Locallo’s usual practice when a probationer is arrested for another felony. Bates purses his lips and nods. The woman heads to the hallway in search of another probationer. Bates remembers her from his last visit to 302—she’d stood next to him in front of the bench. Bates had assumed she was his public defender. When I tell him now that she works for probation, Bates frowns. “They don’t explain nothing to people here—they think we’re all psychic,” he says. Then he laughs. “If I was psychic, I wouldn’t be here.”

Locallo assumes the bench a few minutes later. No private lawyers are here yet, so the judge begins with his probation cases, which are presented to him by probation liaison Rhonda Schullo, the woman who had talked briefly with Bates.

The first probationer, Anthony Coleman—a forty-six-year-old African American in a dark suit—pled guilty fourteen months ago to his third DUI. In Illinois, drunk driving becomes a felony upon the third conviction. (In Illinois as in most states, possession of a minuscule amount of cocaine or heroin is a more serious offense than drunk driving. Bates’s first conviction, in 1996, for possession of 0.08 grams of crack cocaine, was a Class 4 felony, as was a third drunk-driving conviction.) Locallo had given Coleman probation and two hundred hours of community service. Coleman’s probation officer had him called before the judge last October, because he’d been terminated from his community service work site—he kept arriving drunk. He’d done only thirty-nine of the two hundred hours at that point. Locallo had warned Coleman he’d send him to jail if he didn’t make significant progress on the community service by his next court date. Now, six months later, Coleman has done only eighteen hours more. But the jail is too crowded to view this as anything but significant progress. “All right, good work,” Locallo says. The judge tells Coleman to return to court in six months for another progress report.

Coleman hurries out of the courtroom. This appearance before Locallo worried him greatly, he says in the hallway; he feared that the judge would indeed jail him. He gave up on sleep and got out of bed at four this morning, he says. He reeks of booze.

The next probationer has completed only half of his two hundred community service hours in three years. There are limits to Locallo’s permissiveness with his probationers. Locallo instructs deputy Guerrero to take the man into custody. A third probationer has complied with all of his requirements; Locallo congratulates him and formally ends his probation.

Schullo tells the judge that’s it for her probation cases today. It’s only after she steps into the gallery and sees Bates that she remembers his case. But Locallo has already moved on—he’s doling out continuances hurriedly now, because he’s got a jury in the jury room waiting to hear closing arguments in a trial that began yesterday. Schullo tells Bates he’ll have to sit tight now until the trial finishes. Bates sighs and heads to the hallway for a cigarette.

He lights it near a window in the grimy hallway. It worried him to see a probationer taken into custody. “But that guy didn’t finish his community service, and I have,” Bates says. He’s hoping Locallo will let him stay on house arrest while his new case is pending, but his expression betrays his doubts. He gazes out the window down at the traffic on California. He says he feels foolish waiting here for them to possibly jail him when he could walk out of the courthouse right now. But he knows he’d be digging himself a deeper hole if he left.

Bates allows that he hasn’t often acted in his long-term interests lately. Locallo gave him probation almost a year ago today. He’s reminded himself frequently since to keep on walking when he passes one of the innumerable drug spots in his neighborhood. He’s already gotten probation twice; catch another case and I’m definitely going to prison, he’s told himself again and again. But “the thought of that taste”—crack cocaine—is overwhelming, he says.

The easiest way to get drugs when you’re broke, unemployed, and a convicted felon, he says, is to work at a drug spot. The spots always need help, and they don’t do criminal background checks. He worked as a lookout at first, watching for police, then began slinging the drugs himself, serving the walk-up and drive-up customers. A supervisor would give him a “jab” to sell—thirteen tiny tinfoil packets of brown heroin, or a like number of white rocks in thumbnail-size Ziplocs. These “blows” of heroin and rocks of cocaine went for $10 each; a “server” turned in $100 and got to keep the other $30. Bates could sell a jab in half an hour—faster when whites came to buy. Whites tended to buy in quantity, sometimes purchasing a whole jab. He’d have turned a decent profit if his earnings hadn’t always gone up in smoke.

The arrest earlier this month came after he sold two rocks, for $20, to an undercover officer. Anyone who works on a corner knows he’ll sell to an undercover sooner or later; as Bates puts it, the police have plenty of black officers willing to go unshaven and dress raggedy just to catch a brother in the act. “You ain’t no police?” he sometimes asked a customer, while recognizing the futility of the question. Like the person was going to say, “Yeah, I’m a cop, don’t serve me.”

They didn’t arrest him immediately after the sale—that’s not how the
“buy-busts” work. Different officers swoop in to make the arrest so the phony buyer doesn’t blow his cover. A young woman cautioned Bates that the “five-ohs” (police) were in the area, but as he later realized, he’d already made the fateful sale. He had five rocks left in his jab, but after the woman’s warning he headed over to a nearby apartment building to alert the teens who ran the operation.

He was inside an apartment in the building, talking to the teen “supervisors,” when there was a rap on the front door of the apartment. One of the youths opened the door, even as Bates warned him not to. The police rushed in, guns drawn. “We all scattered like roaches,” Bates says. He scrambled into a bathroom and deposited his five unsold rocks inside the bathtub. He walked out of the bathroom when ordered to and was handcuffed. An officer surveyed the bathroom quickly but didn’t seem to find the rocks Bates left in the tub. It didn’t much matter. One officer slapped him in the head, he says. “I’m thinking, ‘I’m already handcuffed—why you got to give me this abuse?’ ”

After a night in a district lockup, a police wagon took Bates and the other prisoners to 26th Street, where they received the standard welcome from the guards in the courthouse basement. “They was cussing and going on, calling us dogs and all that, threatening, ‘If you do this and that, we gonna beat your ass,’ ” Bates says. As he sat in a bullpen awaiting his bond hearing, “I kept saying to myself, ‘Why’d you act stupid and bring yourself back in here, knowing how they talk to you and treat you?’ ”

He drops his cigarette butt to the tile floor now, flattens it with the sole of his shoe, and returns to the courtroom, fingers crossed.

Prosecutor Joe Alesia is in the middle of his closing argument in the jury trial. He’s talking about the “face of evil” at the defense table, pointing at the eighteen-year-old African American accused of a carjacking. “Today is the day he’s held responsible for what he did,” Alesia is telling the jury. Bates resumes his seat on a rear bench. Soon his breathing deepens and his eyelids flicker shut. They spring open periodically with the swellings in Alesia’s delivery, then flutter closed again.

LARRY BATES LOOKS HARMLESS
, dozing on that gallery bench, but he’s really Public Enemy Number One—he and his fellow drug offenders.

They must be a real menace, considering how much is spent trying to thwart them. Nationally,
more than 320,000 drug offenders are in prison, and it costs well over
$7 billion to keep them there. That’s on top of the cost for police officers to arrest alleged drug offenders, for courts to process them, and for jails to house them while their cases are pending. It
also doesn’t include the cost for the probation officers who monitor the
nearly one million drug probationers like Bates who hover near the prison door.