Even before Patrick Bourgeois and his girlfriend, Tracy Lynn Bratton, were sent off to prison for killing Bourgeois’ 3-year-old son, P.J., the mechanisms had been put in place to let them out early.
Everyone involved in the case knew it.
Franklin County Common Pleas Court Judge Nodine Miller — who would let the killers out — knew it.
The Franklin County prosecutors entrusted to seek justice for the boy knew it.
The defense attorneys knew it — they had asked for it to happen.
The killers definitely knew it.
There turned out to be no one in court to speak for the child — no one to say that it was obscene to even consider a plan that would potentially reward Bourgeois and Bratton, who had beaten and bitten that 34-pound boy, had bound his legs and taped his wrists behind his back, and had left him to choke on his own blood and die.
The plan had already been agreed to on the day — Oct. 7, 1996 — that Bourgeois and Bratton appeared before Judge Miller for sentencing.
There had been no trial — no witnesses, no testimony. The voices you have heard in these reports — the voices of the medical rescue workers who tried to save the child, of the homicide detective on the scene, of the doctor who performed the autopsy — were never heard in court.
As we have reported, Bourgeois and Bratton had each been allowed to plead guilty to a charge of involuntary manslaughter. Additional charges — felonious assault, endangering a child, kidnapping (referring to the binding of the boy) — had been dropped.
Bourgeois and Bratton would almost certainly have fought a murder charge, and the potential life sentence it carried. A murder charge would have brought sworn testimony, and a jury trial.
Franklin County Prosecuting Atty. Ron O’Brien — who was not in office at the time of the crime or the time of sentencing — told us that prosecutors decided on the lesser involuntary manslaughter charge for a practical reason:
“From what I know about it, [prosecutors] have always had difficulty in cases where children are killed, because we have had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt not only that the accused people caused the death of the child, but that they purposely caused the death.”
Intent was a part of the law, and the one person who could tell a jury whether he thought Bourgeois and Bratton had been trying to kill him — P.J. Bourgeois — was dead.
Judge Miller told us that she believed the prosecution’s decision to charge Bourgeois and Bratton with involuntary manslaughter was probably the correct one: “There was going to be an evidentiary problem. [Bourgeois and Bratton] were the only people who knew what happened. [The prosecution might have had trouble] proving who was more culpable.”
She accepted their pleas — and sentenced them each to 7 to 25 years in prison.
But — as we reported last week — a very important concession had already been granted to the killers by Franklin County prosecutors.
The prosecutors agreed not to oppose something called “supershock probation” after Bourgeois and Bratton had been in prison for a year. Supershock probation meant that the judge, on her own, could let the killers out of prison any time she wanted, after the year had passed.
Ed Morgan, the assistant prosecutor in charge of the case, now says that he never thought Judge Miller would actually grant Bourgeois or Bratton supershock probation; he told us that he agreed not to oppose it because the defense attorneys “were saying, `Give us something.'”
Kirk McVay, Bourgeois’ defense attorney, told us that Morgan’s position — that the concession to the killers was meaningless — is nonsensical: “Of course we were going to pursue [supershock probation],” McVay said, “and of course we hoped to get it.”
When we asked Judge Miller if she thought the agreement was meaningless, she said she took it at face value: “So long as the legislature thinks that shock probation [in some cases] is appropriate, I have a responsibility to consider it for those who request it.”
Were the circumstances of this case not especially terrible — the apparent torture of a 3-year-old child, who is bitten and bound, and left to choke to death on his own blood?
“A life was lost,” Judge Miller told us. “All killings are bad.”
Even though Bourgeois and Bratton went off to prison knowing that, in a year, they would be able to apply to Judge Miller for supershock probation, there was a built-in safeguard in the law that might have worked to protect the memory of P.J. Bourgeois, to provide him with the chance for a semblance of justice.
But it was a safeguard, we have learned, that was routinely winked at — all but laughed at — in the courts of Franklin County. The judge admitted it to us, the prosecutors admitted it to us, Bourgeois’ attorney admitted it to us. The law might say one thing — but, as we will report Monday, the officers of the court had devised a way to get around it.
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Bob Greene’s complete coverage of this case is at chicagotribune.com/go/greene
