Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse
By Steve Bogira
Knopf, 404 pages, $25
In September 1998, the attention of many Chicagoans was focused on the trial of Frank Caruso Jr., charged with severely beating Lenard Clark, a 13-year-old African-American, while Clark bicycled through a white neighborhood on the city’s South Side. The case was closely watched because of the racial tensions it aroused and because Caruso’s family was alleged to have ties to organized crime.
On the second day of the trial, Caruso’s defense team asked for a continuance because the lead lawyer, Edward Genson, was ill and unable to attend. Defense lawyers and prosecutors gathered in the chambers of Cook County Circuit Judge Daniel Locallo, and all agreed to postpone the case.
They emerged into the courtroom to put the decision on the record and, quite unexpectedly, Assistant State’s Atty. Ellen Mandeltort, who had agreed to the continuance in chambers, objected–an objection Locallo promptly overruled (and later characterized as “playing to the crowd”).
As she left the courtroom, Mandeltort, wearing pearls and a powder-blue suit she had bought specifically for the trial, realized the jury had seen the suit and therefore didn’t want to wear it again. Out of the jury’s hearing, she said, “I wasted a perfectly good [obscenity deleted] new suit.”
That anecdote is just one of scores of remarkable insights into the workings of–and, at times, posturing within–the criminal-justice system in Steve Bogira’s “Courtroom 302,” a well-written, meticulously researched account of one year spent in Locallo’s court-room.
Caruso’s trial wasn’t actually held in 302; it was moved to a bigger courtroom to handle the large number of onlookers and reporters expected, but that matters little. The book is written chronologically, spanning January to December 1998, and by the time readers find themselves at the Caruso trial, we know the characters involved and particularly Locallo, a veteran Chicago jurist who has since been assigned to a different courtroom.
I covered the Caruso trial for the Tribune and, indeed, spent many days covering other news at the Criminal Courthouse that year. In the course of covering my beat, I would see Bogira in Locallo’s courtroom. It was a poorly kept secret that Bogira, a longtime writer for the Chicago Reader newspaper, was researching a book about the criminal-justice system.
Seven years later that book has been published, and it does not suffer for the passage of time. It is so crammed with the rich detail that comes from being immersed in the community of Courtroom 302–including access to inmates in the lockup and conversations in the judge’s chambers–that it appears he became virtually invisible.
The result is a vivid tapestry of the day-in and day-out workings of criminal justice, ranging from the mundane to the bizarre and from the humorous to the gut-wrenchingly sad. There is no better proof than his recounting of some of Locallo’s remarkably candid musings.
For example, Bogira asked him about a bizarre contest in which prosecutors competed to be the first to convict 4,000 pounds worth of defendants. Called “the ‘Two-Ton Con-test,’ ” or, more despicably, ” ‘Niggers by the Pound,’ ” the competition was first publicized in the Tribune.
Locallo, according to Bogira, said he knew of it but that it was no longer in practice when he was a prosecutor in the early 1980s. “He found it amusing, however,” Bogira writes. Locallo laughed as he said that ” ‘a lot of fat guys [defendants] were getting great deals. . . . Let’s say a prosecutor’s got a guy who’s 350 pounds. Where the guy normally would have gotten ten years, the prosecutor might offer him a year. . . . Skinny guys wouldn’t get offered anything.’ “
Asked if the contest sounded racist to him, Locallo replied, ” ‘Not necessarily.’ ” While he considered the term using the racial epithet ” ‘very offensive,’ ” Locallo said the competition itself was “harmless ‘gallows humor.’ “
Another time, likely one of the 32 formal sit-down interviews Locallo granted Bogira, the judge mentioned that some of his friends had been among those convicted in federal investigations of court corruption in the 1980s and 1990s. Among them was Judge Thomas Maloney, who was convicted of fixing cases, including murders, and is now serving a prison sentence. Locallo said “he has doubts about Maloney’s guilt and still considers him a friend.”
And in discussing allegations of torture of suspects by former Chicago Police Lt. Jon Burge and some of his detectives–actions confirmed by a city investigation–Locallo said he remains unconvinced Burge tortured anyone. The city’s admission that Burge was involved in torture, Locallo said, was ” ‘political,’ ” and Burge, who was fired, was a ” ‘sacrificial lamb.’ “
This book is far more than a collection of conversations with Locallo, a well-regarded and plainspoken jurist whom bar associations in Chicago have consistently given high ratings for his courtroom demeanor, legal abilities, intellect and work ethic. “Courtroom 302” is also a down-and-dirty primer on the expediencies of a large caseload, fueled largely by minor drug cases, back-alley beatings and tavern fights, penny-ante murders and the occasional “heater” cases, involving “crimes with a special twist that are likely to captivate the press,” such as the trial of Caruso. It is much like David Simon’s book “Homicide,” for which the author similarly spent a year with Baltimore homicide detectives, in that it is particularly revealing of the mindset of the players in the system. For example:
Locallo: ” ‘When you hear about man’s inhumanity to man, twenty and thirty and forty times–it’s not like you become completely indifferent to what you hear, but you build up a mechanism to deal with it.’ “
Prosecutor Mike Nolan: ” ‘[E]verybody lies.’ Defendants, witnesses, defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges, cops–‘we all have our own agenda. It’s part of the game, I guess.’ “
Public defender John Conniff, a few weeks after winning an acquittal of a defendant named Terrence Pouncy: ” ‘I subscribe to the bathtub theory of litigation. . . . You have to bathe in the waters of the case. But after it’s over, you pull the plug and let out the water. Mr. Pouncy is now down the drain.’ “
Sheriff’s Deputy Gil Guerrero, speaking of the beating Clark suffered that resulted in the Caruso trial: ” ‘I’m not saying he deserved to get beat like that. But you gotta know where you can go and where you can’t go. I mean, you can say you should be able to go wherever you want, but c’mon–this is Chicago.’ “
An unidentified juror heard through closed doors during contentious deliberation in a murder case: ” ‘It don’t take no Charlie Chan to figure this one out!’ “
The book is enhanced by interviews with defendants well after their cases were concluded, particularly their assessments of Locallo. One defendant, after being sentenced to life in prison, wrote Locallo to thank him for allowing him to meet and embrace his family members before being sent away.
Given rare access, Bogira has made the most of it.
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mpossley@tribune.com
Maurice Possley, a Tribune staff reporter who covers criminal justice, is the author of “The Brown’s Chicken Massacre” and the co-author, with Tribune senior writer Rick Kogan, of “Everybody Pays: Two Men, One Murder and the Price of Truth.”
