Violence Court starts promptly at noon, seven days a week. It’s a painful thing to watch.
One after another, accused criminals are led into Courtroom 101, a carpeted, unadorned, antiseptic room on the first floor of the Cook County Criminal Courts Building at 26th Street and California Avenue on Chicago’s West Side.
The people brought into this room are not accused of “petty” things, of breaking into cars or holding up dime stores or even attempting to murder someone but not getting the job done.
The procession of people into Violence Court each day consists only of those facing the most violent criminal charges from the previous 24 hours: those who bludgeoned, stabbed or shot people to death; those who raped girls not legally old enough to consent to sex; those who molested little children who shouldn’t have to live in fear of their father or their brother or their uncle or their mommy’s boyfriend.
I didn’t know about this sad daily ritual until a few months ago. But my bosses had asked me to temporarily cover the criminal courts. A few of the things I saw and wrote about from Violence Court were pretty big news.
There were the husband and wife who not only were accused of delivering more than 160 blows to their 12-year-old daughter but also of forcing their other youngsters to participate in the fatal beating by tying their wailing sister down.
There was the man accused of forcing his onetime girlfriend out a 9th-floor window and then shoving her to her death even while she clutched the windowsill so tightly that her fingernails popped off.
There was the woman accused of crushing her 11-month-old son’s stomach with her own hands until the baby’s liver nearly tore in half and he tearfully uttered his last word: “Mama.”
All these cases were bad. But, even worse, I soon began to think, were all the things I didn’t write about from Violence Court, the things that weren’t big news over at 26th and Cal (as reporters and lawyers and criminals refer to the cavernous old courthouse).
Covering violent crime in this place had a set of mores, of things that are done and things that are left undone, of untouched stories that those who had been around the building for a long time referred to as “cheap.” I learned these unspoken rules by watching the other reporters, by noticing when they scribbled furiously and when they shoved their pens behind their ears.
We didn’t write about all the gangbangers who killed each other for wearing the wrong colors or walking on the wrong side of the street or fooling around with each others’ girls. These people wanted publicity, wanted people to fear and revere their little clubs that went by names like Latin Kings and Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples and Four Corner Hustlers.
Too many cases to report
We rarely wrote about the drug dealers and users who murdered each other over unpaid bills and impure cocaine. There were too many cases like that, and the metro sections wouldn’t have the space to cover it all if they tried.
We almost never filed stories about the scores of children who had been molested, because doing so more often than not identified the victim. Their abusers are almost always a parent or relative or friend.
I found Violence Court to be a hybrid of all that the ever-popular TV legal shows condition us to expect and all that human decency prevents us from being able to imagine:
There are the black-robed judge on a high wooden bench, the prosecutors on one side and the public defenders on the other, the parcel of media scribes plopped on chairs in the back.
But what I couldn’t have predicted was how graphic it all is.
The prosecutors, in what were called legal “proffers,” tell the judge what they believe the facts of the case to be.
They describe in painstaking detail how a wheelchair-bound 6-year-old with advanced cerebral palsy has been raped and sodomized by her older brother’s friend. They explain how a man has molested a half-dozen of his own nieces, little girls he lured to his house by inviting them to slumber parties with his own daughters, whom he also was molesting. They describe which body parts have touched which body parts, which fluids have been exchanged, exactly what had been said in exactly what tone of voice at exactly which points in time.
Maybe it was because we heard so many proffers like these–sometimes a dozen a day–that reporters initially coined the phrase “cheap” to refer to a story they couldn’t write about. Maybe it was a defense mechanism, a way to make the story less personal, less disturbing. If one of the usual members of the press corps missed Violence Court for some reason, they’d bound into our dirty, smoke-hazed press room and ask, “Anything important in V.C.?” And we’d respond, “Just a bunch of cheap sex cases,” or “cheap gang stuff,” or “cheap drug deals gone bad.”
But behind the bravado, none of us really felt that way. One woman I worked with would forever pester a judge about why he set bail so low for sex offenders, saying, “Isn’t it almost a worse crime than murder because this victim has to live with it every day for the rest of her life?” Another guy, a young father, would squirm in his seat when prosecutors described how a little girl had been molested by someone who should have been protecting her.
I skipped lunch on a pretty regular basis.
Neighborhood sanctuary
I know a priest assigned to a parish not too far from 26th and Cal. Some afternoons, when not much was going on in the courthouse, I would drive the few blocks to his beautiful church and spend a few hours talking with him about crime and justice and God.
When the days were nice, we would walk through his parish’s rough-and-tumble neighborhood, past the gangbangers and the drug dealers and the guys out on bond.
The priest would tell me stories about needless funerals and broken-hearted mothers and entire families terrified of the world outside their front door. One day the priest walked me to a corner where three young men had been murdered in the last two years. He told me that each time, before the blood had even disappeared from the sidewalks, he had led a procession of parishioners to the site to pray.
He took me to a manhole that was covered with a makeshift wooden top. The original steel one had been used to beat a man to death not long ago and hadn’t yet been replaced, he told me.
He showed me the tree-lined street that is the unofficial line of demarcation between two rival gangs whose members will kill each other simply for crossing it. Sometimes both the shooter and the victim are members of this priest’s church.
As I got settled into covering the madness that is 26th and Cal, I found I liked talking with this priest more and more. Talking with him gave me another perspective on everything I was seeing inside that dark, dank old courthouse where people unapologetically smoked while leaning up against a “No Smoking” sign.
One afternoon when no interesting trials were under way, I drove over to the church for another visit. My priest friend looked exhausted and I asked him why.
“Murder last night,” he told me, explaining that the victim had been Hispanic and that, when his family arrived at the emergency room, none of the doctors or nurses could communicate that their loved one was dead. The priest, who speaks Spanish and is on an overnight on-call rotation at the hospital for circumstances just like this, was called in to break the news and to pray with them.
As we walked along Central Park Avenue the priest explained the particulars of the crime:
Reuban Hernandez was working as a deliveryman for Taqueria el Ranchito when he got a call Sept. 2 to take some tacos over to a house on the city’s West Side. The three men who had called for the food–Dante Starks, David Wells and Derrell Little–allegedly demanded Hernandez’s money when he arrived at their door and then shot him with a .32-caliber handgun when he refused to turn it over. Hernandez was just 21, recently here from Mexico with his brother to work hard and earn money to send home to his impoverished parents.
A couple of days after the priest told me about Hernandez, the three guys charged with his murder came through Violence Court. The trio of twenty-something men was in and out of the courtroom in a matter of minutes, and the story didn’t make any of Chicago’s front pages. Truth be told, if I hadn’t heard from my priest friend about Hernandez’s case, I probably wouldn’t have given it much notice either. Just another guy senselessly killed in a neighborhood where too many guys are senselessly killed. “Cheap,” I might have decided when I saw that none of the other reporters was scribbling wildly.
Each crime has victims
The priest’s voice was in my head as I took notes that noon. We only ran a brief item about Reuban Hernandez, but I felt we owed him that. The West Side deliveryman had poignantly reminded me that there is no such thing as a “cheap” violent crime. He had reminded me that even though it would be impossible to write about every one of the thousands of awful cases that come through the courthouse each year, there are victims behind each of the men and women who shuffle through Courtroom 101 at noon, seven days a week. There are girlfriends and babies and employers and neighbors. There is a priest answering the phone in the middle of the night. There is a mother in Mexico, getting word her son is coming home in a box.
The first thing I had ever noticed about Violence Court was that the room was always freezing. The temperature hovered somewhere near the Minnesota-in-January range. And as the men accused of murdering Reuban Hernandez were led from the courtroom that day, I found myself thinking that maybe that room is frigid for a reason. Maybe it’s kept that way so we never forget to shiver at what we are seeing in there.
