Domestic Violence Court has been in session for only 45 minutes, and already a man who choked his 58-year-old mother, a father who hit his grownup daughter and a dozen accused wife beaters have appeared before Judge Oliver Spurlock.
The pace is hurried. But even though it`s the Tuesday after a three-day weekend because of Lincoln`s birthday, it`s not much busier than usual in Branch 60, Spurlock`s court.
The Cook County circuit courtroom`s three rows of benches are filled, forcing defendants and victims alike-most of them angry ex-lovers-to sit by one another in the jury box. On the wall behind them, large letters proclaim: ”In God We Trust.”
For many of the women here, that is the only trust they have left. Their families torn asunder by off-and-on physical abuse, they have simply had enough.
They come to two crowded courtrooms-Spurlock`s and adjoining Branch 61, presided over by Judge Francis Gembala-on the second floor of a court building at 13th Street and South Michigan Avenue. If a woman files battery or other misdemeanor charges against a boyfriend, husband or other family member in the city of Chicago, this is where the case ends up.
Most of the victims are young women, many clutching babies. But increasingly, their numbers include the elderly, victims of abuse at the hands of their own, grown children.
Just when a visitor thinks he can make a few generalities about this court, though, in walks an older man. Like many of the first-timers to this court, he wants an emergency order of protection, but in this case it`s to keep his wife of 22 years at bay. She is 63, and he is 59.
”Everyone says women are so nice and easy,” said the man, his protection order in hand after his court appearance. ”Women are the most violent people in the world. She drawed a gun on me, that`s what.”
There is a war taking place every day in America`s living rooms and bedrooms. It is man against wife, girlfriend, lover, mother, father, son and daughter.
”People do not believe you when you give them the statistics,” said Jeri Linas, executive director of a shelter for battered women on the Southwest Side. ”A woman will be beaten in this country every 15 seconds. One out of four children will be sexually abused by 16.
”People don`t believe you,” Linas said. ”They don`t want to. It`s too scary.”
Nationally an alarming number of murdered women are victims of husbands or ex-husbands and lovers. In Chicago in recent months several women have been killed who had sought help through domestic violence court. One woman had an order of protection in her purse when police found her fatally wounded near a bus stop. Her ex-boyfriend was convicted of her murder.
Last year in Chicago, 22,000 people, mostly battered women, were fed up enough to file misdemeanor charges of abuse, almost double the number of filings in 1987. Typically, defendants who are convicted get probation, and those who are sent to jail usually stay only briefly.
To handle the rapidly increasing volume, the Circuit Court intends to open a third Domestic Violence Court for Chicago in a few months in the 13th and Michigan building. Court calls also have been expanded in the suburbs to handle swelling caseloads.
For now, Branches 60 and 61 continue to bear the brunt of the load in Chicago. On this day, almost 150 cases are scheduled to be called in the two courtrooms. That, however, doesn`t include the unannounced walk-ins, often the victims of abuse a day or two earlier, seeking emergency protection orders, the abuser`s agreement to quit harassing or beating the accuser, usually for a year.
Tension in evidence
At 10:40 a.m., about 45 people are crammed into Spurlock`s courtroom, at least double its intended capacity. Out in the narrow, smoke-filled hallway, another 25 people wait for their cases to be called. Accusers and accused sit or stand near each other. It can be a tense, uncomfortable place.
In the courtroom, emotions run high. Often, the combatants can`t control their anger in front of the judge.
Spurlock asks a man charged with battery against his mother if he has a job. The man, who at 30 still lives at home, says he lost two jobs after flunking drug tests. He tested positive because his brother uses drugs at home, he claims, ”and it showed up on me.”
The judge continues the case so an assistant public defender can confer with the man.
Spurlock and others say alcohol or drug abuse often underlie the violence at home.
In the hallway, the victim, a 58-year-old woman, takes another drag from her cigarette. ”He was drunk when I came home,” she says of her son. ”He thought I was his brother, so he started beating me up. He and his brother don`t get along.”
The woman said her son punched her and choked her so hard ”I didn`t talk for five days.”
Police arrested him, but he was quickly released from the 13th District station on his own recognizance, the woman says.
That`s not unusual. In the rare cases in which an arrest occurs, the abuser, like other accused misdemeants in Chicago, is usually back on the street in a few hours. The Cook County Jail, forced by overcrowding to free hundreds of accused felons each week on their own recognizance, doesn`t have room to incarcerate wife beaters.
To move the court call along, Spurlock is trying to persuade a number of women to drop their criminal charges in return for a protection order.
”That way you folks will get out of here in a few minutes,” he tells one couple. ”Otherwise, you`ll have to talk to lawyers and be here most of the day.”
Spurlock appears a bit exasperated when the woman sticks to her guns and insists on pursuing the charges.
Later, at the end of another long day, the judge is almost apologetic for the morning`s frenetic pace. ”When you see crowds like we had today, if I didn`t push the cases early on, can you imagine how late we`d be here?”
Spurlock says.
Beaten while pregnant
A woman named Patricia is only too happy to get Spurlock`s emergency order of protection against her husband. Yet she`s unsure just how much of a safeguard the order will prove once her husband is notified of the next court date in two weeks.
The order ”might be enough to scare him,” she says of her husband,
”but it might make him angry. It`s just a piece of paper. It doesn`t mean he`s going to listen. I don`t know. I`ll see what happens.”
This is the second time in seven months she has fled from him because of a beating, she says. Last July, when she was kicked and pummeled the first time, she was eight months` pregnant with her fourth child. She and her children now are staying in an undisclosed location.
”I was huge,” says Patricia, wrestling with the product of that pregnancy, an at-the-moment cranky 4-month-old girl.
That time, she says, she encountered uncooperative police and, feeling alone, she returned to her husband after driving aimlessly around for three hours.
Patricia, 29, doesn`t have the hardened features of some veteran victims of abuse, but she says she has endured beatings for much of her 13-year marriage. A decade ago, she says, her husband broke her jaw.
On the previous Friday, Patricia`s husband was driving her home from her job at a fast-food restaurant when, she says, he didn`t like an answer she gave to a question. He was drunk.
”If I don`t tell him what he wants to hear,” she says, ”that`s his excuse for hitting me.”
He punched her in the mouth, yanked her by the hair under the steering wheel and repeatedly struck her head, she says.
Patricia escaped from the car and hid behind two trucks near their home.
”I was terrified,” she says. ”I remember thinking, `If he catches me, I`ll never make it to a phone.` ”
She ran to a neighbor`s and called police. This time, the response was much better, Patricia says. Officers arrived in about 10 minutes, not 40 minutes, as the first time. They were sympathetic and helpful.
Patricia, a housewife most of her adult life, realizes it would be easier financially to return to her husband, a city employee. But she`s had enough.
”I`m just tired of seeing my kids frightened,” she says. ”That`s the bottom line.”
Her oldest child, 11, has threatened to run away if Patricia returns home. She is afraid her father will kill her mother, if given another chance, Patricia says.
”Men have to realize it`s unacceptable behavior. I mean how would you like to get smacked around by Mike Tyson?” says Patricia, whose husband outweighs her by 75 pounds. ”That`s what it`s like, knowing you can`t fight back. When he swings, you feel it.”
”He says, `If I really wanted to hurt you, I could have killed you,`
” Patricia says of her husband. ”That`s suppose to make me feel better.”
Hallway fights common
Suddenly, in the hallway, there is a confrontation. A young father, charged with abusing his ex-lover, is upset about the little time he has seen his baby daughter. He loudly protests to his former girlfriend. Too loudly.
The ex-lover`s male companion challenges the father after following him to the other end of the hallway. ”Come on, let`s go with it,” he taunts.
The two are face to face, inches apart. A fistfight appears seconds away. Then four deputies, hearing the commotion, rush from the two courtrooms to separate the two.
It`s not uncommon to see fights break out or abusers try to harass victims into dropping charges in the narrow, 45-foot-long corridor, one of the deputies says later. ”Every day, every day,” he says.
Daughters against mom
Back in Spurlock`s court, Emma, who alleges she`s put up with physical and mental abuse from her husband for 23 years, is having trouble confining her remarks to the latest incident that brought her to court.
”I`m tired of being hit,” she says. ”I`m not being whipped no more by no man.”
But this is an unusual case. Her three grown daughters are siding with their father. Emma says she moved out of the home to escape the abuse, but the father`s lawyer contends she abandoned the family to move in with a young boyfriend.
Emma answers the lawyer`s questions with anger and bitterness. Her husband, standing only three feet away, frequently shakes his head from side to side at her answers and turns away in disbelief.
Emma testifies that the final confrontation occurred when she returned home at 11 one night last month to find her husband waiting up for her, broomstick at the ready.
”He was telling me he was going to beat my you know what, sitting with a beer can, asking me all kinds of questions about where I`ve been,” she says. ”I was called every last name in the book except the right one.”
Despite noticeable scars on Emma`s eyebrow and forehead, the husband, Bennie, denies he ever hit her and accuses his wife of cheating on him.
Emma wants Bennie thrown out of the house, but Spurlock, swayed in part by the testimony of the children, refuses. He gives her a one-year order of protection, which forbids Bennie from beating her.
”How could I kick him out?” Spurlock says later. ”He`s the one unemployed. He`s the one who`s been caring for the girls. This guy is hurt, he`s angry, he thinks she`s catting around.”
”The women often come in and say, `I want him out,”` says Assistant State`s Atty. Jeanne Morrow, assigned to Spurlock`s court. ”Legally, there`s little that can be done about it.”
An `age of violence`
Over in Gembala`s court, as the judge talks a long-haired man in the second row is arguing with his estranged wife. He hits her on the knee in an apparent attempt to quiet her down. When things get too loud, a deputy comes over to quiet them.
After Gembala scheduled their case for trial in March, the woman raced from the courtroom, along the hallway and down a flight of stairs-her husband step for step behind her the entire way.
Moments later, in the same courtroom, a mother jumps to her feet, visibly angry with her daughter`s ex-fiance. She complains to a deputy, who instructs the man, smartly dressed in a dark suit, to sit in the jury box. He declines and instead steps out into the hallway.
Later, the mother says the man was harassing her and her daughter, warning them they`re wasting their time. The woman says she had overheard other women`s horror stories earlier as she sat in the hallway.
”I think it`s the age of violence against women, so much unnecessary violence against women,” she says.
By the end of the day in Domestic Violence Court, the two judges have issued 64 orders of protection, presided over a trial apiece and taken six pleas of guilty. Gembala convicted one man who had dumped a rat on the lap of his ex-girlfriend, ordered a psychiatric exam for a man who says he adjusts his TV antenna to pick up messages from aliens and sentenced another man to jail for repeatedly violating court orders. And, surprisingly, the two judges dismissed a total of 90 cases, usually because the victim failed to show.
Victim advocates blame the high number of no-shows on intimidation by abusers and frustration over court delays.
Spurlock isn`t so sure that`s true. ”I`d only be guessing as to why, but I`d guess they made up,” he says.
Spurlock isn`t trying to make light of a serious subject. He`s seen too many serious injuries to do that. In fact, he says he`s become something of an authority on bruises in his 14-month stint in Domestic Violence Court.
”I can tell how old a bruise is by looking at it,” the judge says.
