It was not a night to be locked up. Not a good night to be stuck sitting in a jail cell trying to listen through the walls to the rest of the city whooping it up outside.
In the expressions on the faces straining to peek out the prisoner`s door leading to the courtroom, there was no cockiness, no defiance, no anger. Just tentative expectation.
Maybe, just maybe, somebody in the small group of visitors sitting in the brightly lit courtroom was a cousin, a buddy, a girlfriend, a mother, who had come with money to bail them out.
The prisoners lined up, waiting at the door for their turn in Chicago`s night bond court. All had just been arrested, either during the day or the early hours of the night before. It was New Year`s Eve, and they were all ending 1985 the same way, in trouble with the law.
A clock in the back of the courtroom ticked toward midnight and a brand new year.
Across 26th Street outside, a small twinkling Christmas tree with a blinking star could be seen in a window. About 100 yards away, near California Avenue, passing revelers blew horns and shook noisemakers out their car windows.
The rest of the cavernous criminal courts building was empty, quiet and dark.
Judge Jerome Garoon was sitting on the bench when the night call began. Clerk Thomas Perez, his glasses riding halfway down the bridge of his nose, sat up next to the judge and called each case.
One by one, defendants stepped before the judge to have bond set. Each looked woefully around to see if anyone was in the courtroom to get him out.
The majority of the 32 cases on this New Year`s Eve involved drugs, heroin and cocaine. One pregnant woman was charged with murder, and a teenage girl had been caught allegedly breaking into a public school.
A Colombian couple faced drug charges after they had been spotted at O`Hare International Airport, and followed 40 miles in a cab, before police stopped them and discovered $23,000 in cash in the woman`s purse and almost $2 million worth of cocaine in valises.
Garoon and Perez were working Tuesday through a new night court for Chicago, a court that has been more centralized and computerized since April 14.
Assistant States Atty. James Piper said that in the past, night court consisted of a judge sitting alone in courtroom, making a decision on bonds by looking at arrest reports and Chicago Police Department rap sheets.
The judge had no access to information of arrests made in other cities or states. He often never knew whether a defendant was on parole or probation. He also never saw the defendant, who sat in a police station lock-up waiting for the judge to send information on what his bond would be.
”Some of the worst elements were getting out on low bonds,” Piper said, ”and those low-risk defendants who should have gotten out . . . were being kept because they didn`t have $100.
”Some used to say of the old night court that if you just locked the door and turned off the lights, it would be an improvement,” Piper said.
”This new night court is an enormous improvement.
Piper said the judge and prosecutors now are ”able to figure out who they are and what they`ve done in the past before their bond is set.”
Earlier in the evening, hours before the last court call of 1985 began, the two assistant state`s attorneys on duty, Norma Reyes and Dawn Overend, had used the ”war room,” where the name of each defendant to be called that night was checked on the National Crime Information Computer.
Although the prosecutors and just about everyone else had volunteered to work New Year`s Eve, everyone hoped to finish by midnight.
Robert Currie, alias Nichols, alias Nicholson, alias Jones, was up before the judge. He had been arrested and charged with possessing $1,176 worth of cocaine.
The prosecutor told the judge Currie had been arrested 40 times, and had several cases pending. He had been arrested 13 times in 1985 alone, three within the last month. The prosecutor asked the judge to set bond at $10,000. Currie`s public defender noted that he had two children and was unemployed.
The judge listened and set the bond at $10,000.
The man looked around, saw there was no one to pay his bond, and walked from the courtroom, accompanied by a deputy sheriff to spend New Year`s Eve in jail.
As the next several defendants approached the judge, Garoon listened to the drug charges against the men–all young, poor, who had spent hundreds of dollars for tin packets of white powder.
Then Javier Arturo Arbelaez, 43, who gave an address of 8625 N.W. 8th St. in Miami, walked before the bench.
Not shabbily dressed like many other defendats, he wore a ski parka and after-ski boots.
He was soon joined by his alleged accomplice, a small, tired-looking woman named Marina Velez-Posada, who gave the same Miami address. It had been in her purse that police found the $23,000. It was in their blue valises that police found $1,800,310 worth of cocaine, about 6.6 pounds, prosecutors said. The couple, Colombian nationals, had been spotted earlier at O`Hare by an agent who thought there was something suspicious about how they hugged their valises.
Followed after they climbed into a cab, they were curbed by police on Int. Hwy 57. The cab driver told police, ”I was just taking these nice people to St. Louis.”
The prosecutor asked for no bond, and the judge agreed.
While eight people waited in the courtroom for defendants they knew, a 17-year-old girl appeared before the judge. She had been charged with breaking into the Walter Reed School, 6350 S. Stewart Ave. It was her first arrest.
An older man, her father, stood quietly behind her. The judge allowed him to take her home on her own recognizance.
A 21-year-old woman was called next, on a charge of possessing cocaine and heroin. The judge set $2,500 bond. The mother, present in the courtroom, did not have the $250 needed to bail her out.
”That`s not her apartment,” the mother said, referring to the apartment where the drugs were found. ”She don`t live there.”
”I”m sorry,” said a court sergeant. ”Her bond is $2,500.”
Glancing at the clock, which showed it was just after 11 p.m., the mother put on her coat and left. She would not see the new year with her daughter.
When the judge looked at the clock and saw it was 20 minutes before midnight, the judge began to grin.
”We`ve got one more, you`re honor,” said the clerk.
The last case was a mother of three, who was one-month pregnant, charged with the fatal stabbing of a 67-year-old man in his apartment. The judge set bond at $50,000. She had no money and returned to jail.
”That`s it,” said the judge.
”Have a Happy, happy new one,” said a deputy sheriff.
The judge got up and left. The two prosecutors went to their office and called the people they loved to wish them a happy New Year.
The 22 defendants who could not make bail were led to the Cook County Jail for the night. The courtroom was empty, the great polished halls outside it, unearthly quiet.
The clock hit midnight.
In the neighborhoods around the building, firecrackers sputtered and exploded in the dark.
County corrections officers, just getting off duty, fired blanks in the parking lot.
In the window of the house across 26th Street, someone pulled the plug and the twinkling Christmas tree with the blinking star went out.
