Courtroom 302 (51 page)

“
ANYONE WITH HALF A BRAIN
can see there’s too much doubt in this case,” Caruso’s friend Rocco LaMantia is saying on a gallery bench. The
jury is still deliberating. It got the case at 1:50
P.M
., and now it’s almost eight. “The lineups, the identifications—nothing matches, nothing fits,” LaMantia says.

Waiting patiently on a bench across the aisle is a retired postal worker named Alonzo Cooper. At eighty years, Cooper, stooped and wizened, is twice LaMantia’s age and half his size. He’s one of the few African Americans who attended the trial. A lifelong south-sider, he comes to trials frequently as a volunteer for Citizens Alert, a police watchdog group. Usually it’s in support of a defendant who Citizens Alert thinks has been mistreated by police. Most of those defendants are black. “When a black person gets caught with drugs it’s a crime, but when a white person gets caught it’s a sickness,” Cooper says. He followed this case hoping to see “that they don’t whitewash the whole scenario.”

Cooper thinks Caruso has been proven guilty. He hopes he’ll be convicted and sent to prison. “If he got some time away from home, maybe he’d change his way of thinking and acting.”

Cooper shakes his head perplexedly. The creases on his face deepen. “I just wonder what influenced him to be that antagonistic toward black people,” he says. “Did he get that from his parents or his peers? He went to a Catholic high school, didn’t he? I just wonder what effect that had on him—or did it all just go in one ear and out the other? That religious training was lost on him from what I can gather. So we have to have a reformation, or a penance. Because it’s not normal for a young man to be so hateful.”

A BUZZ SOUNDS
from the jury room at 10:28
P.M
. Two of the lawyers who assisted Genson and Adam are playing chess at the defense table. One of them jumps to his feet and rushes to the corridor leading to the jury room. Yes, Deputy Rhodes tells him, the jury has a verdict.

The news spreads quickly through the sleepy courthouse, and the gallery quickly refills. The courtroom’s atmosphere, relaxed while the jury was out, quickly sobers. Ties are tightened, voices soften. At ten forty-five
P.M
. the gallery is once again packed. Lenard’s and Clevan’s relatives are in a bench near the front of the gallery. Detective Turner is behind them, along with a squad of prosecutors that includes the boss, white-haired Richard Devine. Most of Caruso’s supporters are sitting in the rear benches or standing at the very back of the gallery. A dozen deputies survey the crowd warily from the front and rear of the courtroom and the center aisle.

Locallo admonishes the spectators to restrain themselves regardless of the decision. Then he directs everyone to stand, and Deputy Rhodes to bring in the jury.

The foreperson—a white suburban woman, a neuroscientist—hands the verdicts to Rhodes, who delivers them to Locallo. The judge reads through them silently once, then shuffles them into the order he wants them read and hands them to his clerk, Angela Villa. Villa reads: “We, the jury, find the defendant, Frank Caruso, guilty of aggravated battery of Lenard Clark on a public way.”

There are sobs and gasps from the Bridgeport contingent.

“We, the jury, find the defendant, Frank Caruso, guilty of hate crime of Lenard Clark,” Villa continues. “We, the jury, find the defendant, Frank Caruso, guilty of hate crime of Clevan Nicholson. We, the jury, find the defendant, Frank Caruso, not guilty of attempted first-degree murder of Lenard Clark.”

Now there are claps and cheers. “Quiet!” a deputy barks.

Reporters rush from the courtroom. In their separate pews, Lenard’s mother and Caruso Senior take deep breaths and exhale almost simultaneously. Rocco LaMantia leans forward from the bench behind the elder Caruso and rubs his shoulders. At the defense table, Frank Junior, arms folded, shows no emotion.

Locallo polls the jurors, several of whom are crying. Then he thanks them for their work. He rises, and his voice cracks as he says, “And for the final time in this case, we stand out of respect for you.”

After the jury has retired to the jury room, he sets sentencing for the following month. He revokes Caruso’s bond and orders him taken into custody. Genson gives his client’s shoulders a squeeze before deputies escort him away.

WHEN THE VERDICT WAS READ
, a police lieutenant was on a phone in an anteroom, waiting to relay the results to the police superintendent’s office, from which they’d be radioed to police citywide. Locallo says later he had this in mind when he shuffled the verdicts so his clerk would read the guilty ones first. He figured that if the convictions were emphasized when the news went out, there’d be less chance of postverdict disturbances. And indeed, none were reported.

With the intensive-care photo of Lenard on the table in front of them, the jurors had quickly decided that Caruso was guilty of aggravated battery and of hate crime. Most of the deliberations were spent on the attempted murder charge. By the time everyone agreed there wasn’t sufficient evidence that Caruso tried to kill Lenard, the panel was drained. “We weren’t upset because we had to convict him on the other charges,” one juror, a white male who asked to be anonymous, says. “We were upset because we couldn’t get him on the big one. I knew he [Caruso] didn’t care
if the kid lived or died. And I knew that he thought he could get away with it. But he never said, ‘Kill him.’ He didn’t have a bat or a club in his hand. It was so damned frustrating.”

Atif Sheikh, the Pakistani American juror, was troubled by the acquittal even though he agreed to it. “Let’s say Frank Caruso got beat up like that by a black kid,” Sheikh says. “Would the black kid get convicted of attempted murder? I think it’s a ninety-nine percent chance he would.”

As he always does, Locallo stopped in the jury room after the verdict to thank the jury directly. The jury presented him with a thank-you card. The judge “got choked up and said, ‘I’ll cherish this card,’ ” one juror recalls. Most of the women were crying. Locallo told them he thought he knew why they were crying—because they weren’t satisfied with their verdict. He reassured them that they’d made the right decision given the evidence. “Some people wanted to make sure that [Caruso] wasn’t going to get a slap on the wrist,” says the forewoman (who also asked that her name not be used). “The judge was sort of assuring us that that wouldn’t happen.”

The morning after the verdict Mandeltort woke up retrying the case in her head, wondering what she could have said or done differently to get Caruso convicted of attempted murder. But then she thought about the hurdles she and Berlin had had to leap, such as DeSantis’s disappearance and Cutler’s murder, to get any conviction at all. “And then I said to myself, ‘You know what? We won a really tough case.’ ”

Genson likewise claims victory. The case “may not have ended up exactly as I wanted it to,” he says, “but it wouldn’t have ended up as good as it did if it had been another lawyer.” And if not for the bias against Caruso, he’d have prevailed completely, he says. “I tried to get past the emotion and prejudice and innuendo, but I couldn’t get past all of it. I couldn’t get around the fact that it appeared to the jury he was a punk Italian kid from Bridgeport.”

SEVENTEEN

Blame the
Po-
lice

ON SEPTEMBER
29, eleven days after the Caruso verdict and in front of a nearly empty gallery in 302, Locallo rejects Leroy Orange’s bid for a hearing on his torture allegations.

Orange filed “inconsistent” affidavits regarding his alleged abuse, Locallo tells the lawyers and Orange. In a 1991 affidavit, Orange alleged that he’d been struck in the mouth, kicked, shocked with needles in his buttocks and anus, and bagged, and that his testicles had been squeezed. But in the affidavit he recently filed, Orange “no longer claims that he was kicked,” the judge observes.

There’s sarcasm in Locallo’s voice, unusual for him on the bench, and his tone only grows more disdainful as he continues. He repeatedly calls Robert Kirschner, the former Cook County medical examiner who deemed Orange’s torture claims authentic, the “receptive doctor.” “Incredibly, fourteen and a half years after the murders, petitioner now reveals for the first time to the receptive doctor that the electroshocks caused his teeth to crack,” the judge says. “Suddenly, the receptive doctor has petitioner being shocked to petitioner’s front and back forearm, with no electric shocks noted to the buttocks or anus. Instead, the receptive doctor has noted that the rectal bleeding is consistent with the type of injury produced from the insertion of a foreign object in a rectum.”

Orange had testified at his trial in 1985 that he’d been shocked on the arm, so that was nothing new, although Locallo seems to be suggesting it was. And in his affidavit Kirschner didn’t comment specifically about shocks to Orange’s buttocks or anus. He didn’t say that a foreign object
inserted into Orange’s rectum couldn’t have also shocked him, but Locallo seems to have interpreted it that way.

The judge also notes that in Orange’s formal confession he “said his treatment was fine” at the police station.

Locallo says the firing of Area 2 commander Jon Burge, and the police department investigation that found that suspects had been systematically abused at Area 2 in the 1980s, don’t prove to him that torture was a routine practice at Area 2, let alone that Orange was a victim of it. Orange’s claims are simply “not corroborated.”

The judge turns the discussion to Orange’s sentencing hearing. He soon continues the case to late October. But no action regarding Orange’s sentencing will be taken that month, or through the end of 1998, because Geraghty will be appealing today’s ruling by Locallo to the Illinois Supreme Court.

GERAGHTY IS DISAPPOINTED BY
Locallo’s ruling, but he’s not surprised—either by the decision or by Locallo’s justification for it. Locallo had said he based his decision partly on inconsistencies he found in Orange’s claims about the torture. But it’s easy to find contradictions in a case that’s fourteen years old, Geraghty says. People inevitably forget things, he says. “The bottom line for me is, does the person tell a story that would be difficult to make up? And is there some internal consistency to what the person is saying? The fact that there are some inconsistencies on peripheral points means little to me. But it’s typical of how judges wind up ruling in favor of the state in these cases.”

Geraghty thinks judges at 26th Street are reluctant to rule for defendants in cases involving allegations of police abuse because of the courthouse’s “insular culture.” Many judges are former prosecutors with “long-standing relationships that make it difficult for them to rule objectively” in such cases, he contends. Dennis Dernbach, the assistant state’s attorney who took Orange’s confession and who testified at Orange’s trial that he saw no evidence of coercion at the police station, was a colleague of Locallo in the state’s attorney’s office, and he’s still a colleague—he presides in Courtroom 301. Locallo considers Dernbach a friend. From 1983 to 1986 Dernbach was supervisor of felony review, the unit of the state’s attorney’s office that takes confessions. Attorneys serving under him took confessions in many of the Area 2 cases in which torture has been alleged.

Geraghty could have asked Locallo to recuse himself because of his relationship with Dernbach. But Orange’s case then could easily have wound up in front of another former prosecutor. And Geraghty wanted to
keep the case in front of Locallo in the event it did proceed to sentencing, since Locallo has never given the death penalty.

Locallo says later that his ruling wasn’t a close call. Orange made up his torture charges to try to save himself after he confessed, the judge says. The fact that so many other defendants had made similar accusations about Area 2 didn’t persuade Locallo in the least that the claims had any merit. Defense lawyers “say that because ten or fifteen people make the same claim, it must be true. Baloney. The bottom line is, that allegation is glommed onto by a lot of people. I’m telling you, I am convinced. It is a cottage industry out there: blame the
po
-lice.”

Nor did it matter to the judge that Orange was one of the first to claim he was electrically shocked. “I don’t care if he was the first,” Locallo says. If Orange really had been tortured, he would have told Dernbach about it when Dernbach was preparing to take his confession, the judge says. “Denny Dernbach asked him, ‘Well, how were you treated?’ ‘Fine.’ ‘Any problems?’ ‘No.’ I don’t think the prosecutor is gonna lie.”

And if Orange didn’t feel comfortable reporting the torture while he was still in police custody, he should have done so when he got to 26th Street, Locallo says. “The bottom line is, as soon as you get within reach of a judge, you yell out, ‘Hey, I’ve been tortured.’ ”

When I remind Locallo that according to the transcript of Orange’s bond hearing, and the affidavit of Orange’s public defender at that hearing, Orange apparently had tried to do that, Locallo just shakes his head. Even if Orange
did
complain immediately, the judge says, no sign of physical abuse was found when he was examined.

Locallo isn’t convinced that Commander Burge ever tortured anyone at Area 2 despite the city’s admission that he did. That admission was “political,” the judge says. Burge had become a “lightning rod for lawsuits,” and the city “wanted to get rid of the lightning rod.” In Locallo’s view, Burge was a “sacrificial lamb.”

But why did Orange make such a peculiar allegation? Unlike many defendants who allege coercion, he didn’t say detectives slapped him around. At his bond hearing, Orange said: “I got pin marks on my butt. Only bruise I got to show. Other things happened. That is all that is visible right now.” What did Locallo make of that? “I have no idea,” the judge says.

EIGHTEEN

Compassion

CARUSO APPEARS IN COURT
in a jail uniform for the first time on the morning of Tuesday, October 13. Like the outfit he’d worn throughout the trial, this one is too big for him. He grabs the waist of his baggy tan pants and hikes them up as he’s escorted into the courtroom by two burly guards in black uniforms and shiny black boots.