When the ceiling leaked and nobody fixed it, everyone stepped over the puddle and went on with the court call, mindful of the overhead drip.
When the lockup smelled or a prisoner threw up, it was no big deal. They simply got used to the stench and called the next case.
When the two big window air conditioners mysteriously disappeared, everyone got used to sweating and fanning themselves with-what else?-arrest papers and warrants.
When the place got so crowded-not just with the defendants and their families, the witnesses and their families, and the victims and their families-that there was no room left for the court files they simply piled them up around the bench, and the judge each morning, in his long black robe, gingerly made his way through the maze of beat-up filing cabinets to his niche on the judicial seat.
When a man in a Santa Claus suit showed up on a disorderly charge; when a dwarf testified that he did not jump over the CTA turnstile, he simply walked under it; when a male transvestite had to be warned not to expose her cleavage to the judge; when the clerk called out the loitering case against a man named Rinso White, nobody skipped a beat or fell over laughing. The bizarre was routine here. Call the next case.
But when they were told they were shutting the place down, the whole court staff paused for a minute and became nostalgic.
A written sign appeared over the toilet in the only bathroom in the courtroom:
– 25 cents reward for pet cockroach. Answers to the name `Uriah Heep.’
-Glasses
– Tattoo of Cindy Crawford on right leg
– Sings Norwegian folk songs from ’94 Winter Olympics
– Can spit from standing or running position.
– Wanted: to move to new courtroom to start new colony.
Yup. Branch 41 of Circuit Court. Misdemeanor Court-the busiest misdemeanor court in America, if not the world. After 35 years of being a neighborhood courtroom-in through the grubby glass doors of the police station at 113 W. Chicago Ave., up a set of grimy stairs, down a boisterous hall to the end and hang a right-it was closing down. Moving downtown to the 11th floor of police headquarters.
“I’ve never been in a more interesting place,” says Judge Ronald Bartkowicz, who spent two years there and now sits in Family Court. “The whole range of life appears before you. You get the first-time offender who is scared to death and the professional (criminal) who is up before you at least once a week.”
`Seen it all’
Says one court clerk: “You get everything from rich women shoplifting on Michigan Avenue to men relieving themselves on the `L’ train to drunken suburbanites on Rush Street to guns and drugs from Cabrini-Green-and everything else in between, and I mean use your imagination because we’ve seen it all.”
Says Judge Bartkowicz: “I remember we were trying a case and the defense attorney was arguing a point. And a cockroach walked across my desk. Well, I picked up a law book and banged it down on him, and the defense lawyer looked up and said, `Did you just make a ruling, judge?’ And I said, `No ruling; I just killed a cockroach.’ That’s Branch 41.”
It was a beat-up old courtroom with no pretensions. The overhead neon lights showed off its bad complexion: falling plaster, smudges, ink stains, Scotch tape marks on the walls, fingerprints on the benches and dusty overhead fans.
“I came from San Luis Obispo in California,” says Assistant Public Defender Sandra Bennewitz, “where the decor in the courtroom was wood with recessed lighting and it was dignified and you had your own desk and your own phone and an interview room for your clients, and I came here and walked into Branch 41 and almost died laughing. No phones. No desk. No interview room. Filing cabinets piled up next to the bench. The judge doesn’t even have his own chamber. All he has is a desk and a water cooler. My first day the judge warned me about crawling things. I said, `Big crawling things or little crawling things?’ He said: `Cockroaches. Check your shoes before you go home.’ “
“You know, it’s an old courtroom and one of the worst I’ve ever seen,” says court clerk Rolf Rossberg. “But we got used to it. In fact, we liked it there.”
Rossberg, an artist and former cartoonist, watches the array of humanity that appears in court and gets inspiration.
“What do I see sitting here calling out the cases? I see everything. I see cartoons. That’s life, you know.”
Life’s rich pageant
One of Rossberg’s favorite cases, as is everyone’s at Branch 41, is that of the mysterious defendant Kent Fly.
“He is up I’d say two or three times a week,” says Rossberg. “Charged with begging or urinating in public. But we’ve never seen him-not even once. When I call out his name I announce `Kent-No-Show-Fly’ and as usual no one answers or comes forward. He was on the court call three times our last day, but nobody stood up.”
Says Bartkowicz, “When `Night Court’ went on the air on television, I told my wife, `That’s my life at Branch 41, only better.’ “
For a long time it was called Bum’s Court because the first calls of the day were the vagrants locked up for the night and brought out before the judge first thing in the morning. But people aren’t called bums anymore, or even vagrants. They’re the homeless, and they always give the address of a shelter.
“I remember when we had the Straw Man,” says Betty Chandler, who was a deputy sheriff in the courtroom for 10 years before recently being transferred. “I walked into the lockup behind the courtroom, and here was this man with a straw hat on and straw tied up all around his body. I said: `You can’t go before the judge like that. Take that stuff off.’ And I walked out. When his name got called, I went back in there to get him and he had stripped naked, tied the straw back onto himself, then put his Long Johns back on over the straw and walked out into court.
“He looked like a stuffed scarecrow. The judge looked down and said nothing more than: `I like that. Looks good. Must be the new fashion.’ Then we went on with the case.”
There was the case of the man charged with taking indecent liberties with a cow in Lincoln Park’s Farm in the Zoo. When the offender stood up, everyone in the courtroom mooed. There was Spiderman (a k a Dan Goodwin), who climbed the Hancock Building, got arrested and when he showed up at Branch 41 asked an attractive female deputy sheriff who body-searched him to search him again-better.
There were battered women whose testimony made the female bailiffs cry. There were graffiti taggers who got assigned to clean up the courtroom and then, just before they left, tagged the mirror in the bathroom with their nicknames, “Fire” and “Ice.” It did not make the judge happy.
“We had some successes and many failures,” says Bartkowicz. “We had one terrible alcoholic who kept getting picked up, and we could never get him into a treatment center; no room. So one day we pooled our money and we made a reservation for him at the VA alcohol-treatment center, so the next time he came in we had a room for him and cab fare to get him there. We gave him the money, put him into a cab and he never made it to the hospital. That’s one of our failures.”
The human toll
Cynthia Ramirez, an assistant public defender assigned to Branch 41, has her memories too. “On Wednesdays we have the gangbangers call. All the gang members who were arrested show up that day. It’s always the same ones, and my partner and I call them frequent flyers. We both came from the Juvenile Court, and tragically we see the kids who got in trouble as juveniles now in adult court. We call them the graduates.
“I guess what disturbs me most is, as an Hispanic, I see the young men I went to school with self-destructing. I see their lives falling apart. That bothers me.”
“You know,” says her partner, Cindy Tucker, “we are there to defend people who cannot afford a lawyer. And you know what they say? When the judge asks them if they want a public defender they say, `No, I want a real lawyer.’ “
“Some days,” says Ramirez, “you feel nothing but compassion for your clients, and other days they try to walk all over you. We feel good when we get them off, but it is a rare day any of them ever say, `Thank you.’ “
“Sometimes,” says Tucker, “I feel I am on an assembly line.”
Branch 41 is closed now. The court staff threw a party its last day-the day before Good Friday-and many people, now long since gone but who’d worked there, showed up to reminisce about life in the trenches. They were all a bit sad about moving.
“Ah,” says Ramirez, “how I will miss it. The smell of Clorox, Lysol and the bums. That was home.”
But in their new digs at 11th and State Streets, where the elevators don’t work half the time and the cockroaches are just as big and there is still no room for the filing cabinets, nothing much has changed.
Kent-No-Show-Fly had been arrested again. And when the clerk called out his name, he didn’t stand up. Next case.
