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Courtroom 302
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Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Busted Again”
Larry Bates completes his community service as part of his probation, but the punishment “didn’t cure him of his crack addiction” (107). Bates is nabbed selling drugs again, and this time, his bail is set at $10,000, far more money than Bates can access. Eight days later, however, he is released on a recognizance bond—meaning that he is free without paying a fine. Judges often make this decision to avoid overcrowding in jails. Bates has already twice gotten probation. If he is caught again, he knows he’ll go to prison. Still, he can’t resist the “taste” of crack cocaine, which he found “overwhelming.”
Bates is arrested for selling “two rocks,” worth $20 together, “to an undercover officer” (109). On the night of his arrest, when he is taken into lockup on 26th Street with other incarcerated individuals, he curses himself for being so stupid.
At the time of the book’s publication, there are 320,000 people convicted of drug offenses in prison; it costs taxpayers over $7 billion to incarcerate them. The “compassionate approach to drug abuse” that prevailed during the 1960s declined in the late 1970s when illicit drug use among white people declined (111).
In 1980, Bates was laid off from the warehouse job he had for five years. The national economy had gone into a recession, and manufacturing jobs were disappearing. He drank more and smoked marijuana to stave off boredom. He remained unemployed for two more years. In 1982, the unemployment rate for Black people was 19%—over “twice the rate for whites” (111). Drug use increased, and President Reagan responded with the "War on Drugs." While those in despair saw no relief, the problem of unemployment was somewhat alleviated: The war on drugs necessitated additional police officers, attorneys, judges, clerks, prison guards, and construction workers to build prisons.
Some people, like attorney Neil Cohen, who represented a man named Nelson Miranda, who was addicted to heroin and was accused of theft, believed that it would be far better to spend money “on drug treatment and job training” and less on prisons and law enforcement (112). Cohen insisted that treatment would be more cost-effective than incarceration. Judge Locallo gave Miranda 10 years in prison for stealing cars to fund his habit. With the day-for-day credit, this amounted to half of the time sentenced, but Miranda’s incarceration still cost around $100,000.
Larry Bates is back in Judge Locallo’s courtroom on his third drug possession charge. Locallo decides that Bates will remain in jail for around three weeks until he can appear before a branch court judge “for a preliminary hearing in his new case” (116).
The 26th Street Courthouse plays a historic role in the drug war. Courtroom 506 was “the first court in the nation devoted solely to drug cases” (116). By the 1980s, 506 was so overwhelmed by drug cases that a night court had to be set up. The drug courts encouraged police officers to arrest all people who commit drug offenses—even those in possession of only a small amount. In the 1980s, at the height of the drug war, “teams of cops” conducted cleverly and aggressively named operations designed to arrest people using or dealing drugs in “slums and housing projects” (118). The drug courts were quickly overwhelmed with cases—many of them involving people who used drugs and were most often African American—like Donna Gillam (a pseudonym), a 30-year-old Black woman from “a west-side slum.” Both of her parents were abusive and her mother frequently drank. Gillam left school before starting high school and began smoking crack—a drug that “took away her feeling that she was worthless and unlikable” but that also “made her jittery and paranoid” (120)—when she was 21. She began using heroin “to temper the jumpiness” (120). She took to stealing, dealing, and prostitution to fund her habit. She was also the mother of seven children, all of whom stayed with relatives.
On June 6, Gillam got arrested again on another drug-dealing charge. While in jail, she suffered heroin withdrawals. She contended that the 0.5 grams of heroin the police found in a bush weren’t hers, but no one believed her. Judge Locallo sentenced her to eight years. She would likely serve only four, which would cost taxpayers $80,000.
When the drug wars began in the 1950s, the police and the courts reduced civil liberties in the interest of making arrests. In Chicago, people who used drugs were often arrested “without legal cause” (121). They also took to searching bystanders of color on street corners. Judge Locallo wasn’t sure what could diminish drug use and addiction, but was strongly averse to legalization, believing that it would “lead to more drug use and, in turn, more birth defects” (123). Instead, he thought people who insisted on using drugs should be sterilized.
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Real Lawyer”
Public defender Amy Campanelli was on the job for 10 years before she decided to quit. She, like many public defenders, was burned out from the job. The public defender’s office was created at the 26th Street Courthouse in 1930. Before this, poor defendants “had their cases assigned to one of the novice lawyers who hung around the presiding judge’s courtroom looking for work” (124). The nation’s first public defender’s office was established in Los Angeles in 1913.
On an April afternoon, Judge Locallo heard the case of Terrence Pouncy, who was “charged with residential burglary” (125). The state’s first witness was the victim of the burglary—73-year-old Washington Demus, a security guard living with his wife on the Southside of Chicago. He recalled seeing someone run out of the back door of his house on the afternoon of May 5, 1997, as he “parked his car in the garage” (127). The burglar stole clothes, fur coats, and a rifle. Demus, who was licensed to carry a gun, shot the burglar when it looked as though he was going to shoot Demus after the homeowner confronted him.
Demus’s account of the shooting, however, was contradictory. Later, he said that he missed Pouncy on the third shot and got him on the fourth. Catherine Crittenden, a witness for the defense, said that Pouncy was in the neighborhood working on her car when he was shot. She testified that she saw Demus chasing Pouncy with a gun. Two other witnesses told the same story. When Demus took the stand, he claimed that the jewelry found in his pants pocket when he was at the hospital belonged to his girlfriend. He said that he fought with her that day, and she threw the items at him.
Mia McPherson, “a third-year law student clerking for the PD’s office” (130), was struck by a photo of a black sneaker Pouncy left at the crime scene. There was a downspout behind the shoe. In a second picture, which showed the front of Demus’s house, McPherson saw “a downspout in the gangway north of the house—the gangway through which Pouncy [said] he fled from Demus” (130). McPherson concluded that the photos proved the shoe was in the gangway and not in front of the house, which corroborated Pouncy’s account in which he claimed he fled down the gangway to escape Demus.
The defense also argued that Pouncy would have been “very foolish” to burglarize the house “next door to one he frequents” (130). Judge Locallo asked the prosecutor to explain how the shoe was found in the gangway, which the prosecutor was unable to explain. Pouncy’s defense attorney suggested a field trip to investigate the scene.
Despite the dubiousness of Pouncy’s guilt for this crime, he had a long history of being accused of theft. In 1994, “he pled guilty to two burglaries” (132). He blamed drug addiction for his behavior, but that was a lie he told to get probation.
Court authorities, including Judge Locallo, the prosecutors, the defense attorney and Pouncy, Deputies Guerrero and Rhodes, and the court reporter all boarded a bus to the crime scene. Pouncy was confident that observation of the crime scene would exonerate him, but he was also worried that he could be found guilty, which would have made this his last glimpse of his neighborhood. A third burglary conviction could have gotten him a sentence “between six and thirty years” (135). When Locallo and the attorneys observed “the gangway on the north side of the house, the one Pouncy [claimed] Demus chased him through,” they found the downspout “attached to the building next door,” which matched that in the photo (135). Based on the evidence, Judge Locallo found Pouncy not guilty. He then “[admonished] Pouncy” and warned him to “stay out of trouble” (137). Pouncy agreed that he should eventually return to school.
In late April, Judge Locallo and his staff took another trip. This time, they moved from Courtroom 302 to Courtroom 600—an older, more spacious courtroom—to preside over the Bridgeport case. Jury selection was set to begin at 10:30 am. The prosecutor in this case cited “security concerns” for Richard DeSantis—“a key witness for the prosecutors” (138). DeSantis signed a statement that “[implicated] all three defendants in the attack on Lenard Clark and Clevan Nicholson” (139). Sometime after the three young men were arrested, the DeSantis family moved to Scottsdale, Arizona. Then, DeSantis disappeared from his new family home and hadn’t been seen in weeks.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Charlie Chan”
Without Richard DeSantis, only two of Frank Caruso’s friends could have served as witnesses for the prosecution—one of them was Mike Cutler, who recalled Caruso threatening to beat “two young black boys” they drove past (141). Later, Cutler heard Caruso brag about beating Lenard Clark.
Tragically, Cutler was shot and killed near his car while on a date. He drove his date to the west side so that she and her best friend could visit a former classmate. They were in the “small middle-class enclave of Austin, a solidly black, generally impoverished neighborhood” (142). Detectives concluded that Cutler was shot during a robbery, but some, including Judge Locallo, wondered if it was “a hit.” The prosecutor in the case, Joe Alesia, believed it was.
On the same day in May that Locallo was dealing with the Bridgeport case, a jury waited for the second day of Kevin Betts’s retrial, which began on the last Friday. The prosecutor strongly asserted that Betts was a violent person and that the defense had a weak case for acquitting him. On the first day, the jurors heard statements from Ora Lee Carter, Betts’s grandmother, and Officer James Jackson, who was guarding the barbershop. Judge Locallo called a recess for lunch at 1:00 pm.
The next case he called was a rape case involving a Black victim and a Black offender. This case attracted no media attention. The public defender cross-examined the young woman on the stand, who averted her eyes and gave an incomplete testimony. Locallo tried to rush it along but gave up on getting the woman’s complete testimony. He suspended the trial for the rest of the day.
The Betts trial resumed. Three witnesses, all convicted of murder, gave their testimony. They asserted, as they had back in February, that Angelo Roberts was Bernard Carter’s murderer. The jury in the Betts case found the defendant not guilty. Rufus McGee, the only Black man on the jury who wanted Betts found guilty, gave up fighting for his view “because he found the evidence lacking” (147). He was also tired of being confined to a small room. Still, he despised “gangbangers” and was annoyed with the female jurors, who he found “too sentimental” (147-48). He later asserted that women shouldn’t even be allowed to serve on juries.
Betts later stated that he and Bernard Carter were both affiliated with different branches of the Vice Lords, and these factions of the same gang were warring when the shanking occurred. Carter whispered something offensive to Betts while cutting his hair, prompting Betts to stand and punch Carter, but he insisted that he didn’t stab Carter. Betts didn’t know who killed Carter but insisted Carter “got what he had coming” (148). Betts returned to prison in Joliet to finish his 65-year sentence for a murder he committed in 1993. The length of the sentence was partly due to the charge against him for the shanking. Betts intended to petition for a new sentencing. Ultimately, he wanted a new trial and acquittal for the first murder, too—despite how far-fetched that would be.
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
These chapters address the nation’s commitment to its War on Drugs, dating back to the Nixon Administration. Statistically, the “war” proved to be unwinnable, doing little to dissuade drug use and addiction and accomplishing little beyond fueling The Prison-Industrial Complex by filling jails and prisons. Public policy toward drug addiction during the War on Drugs focused on punishment—particularly against Black and poor communities—rather than recognizing addiction for the medical problem that it is. In the book, Larry Bates is a symbol of the nation’s stubborn insistence on perpetuating this war, which is a burden to taxpayers, yet a boon to corporations that construct and furnish prisons. Bates, like many Black men from poor urban communities, is regarded by Judge Locallo as a moral reprobate. Therefore, Locallo ignores Bates’s requests for treatment for his crack addiction. Bogira notes that the war on drugs ramped up after drug use among white people declined in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but increased after the emergence of the crack epidemic in the mid-1980s.
Judge Locallo’s aversion to people who use drugs is one example of how personal biases can mar the abilities of police officers, judges, jury members, and others to fairly mete out justice. This bias also reflects The Influences of Corruption and Politics on Criminal Courts. The War on Drugs was largely a matter of electoral politics—a way for politicians to win votes by promising to protect largely white suburbanites from the supposed threat of Black, urban criminality. These attitudes, devised for presidential campaigns, filtered down to local judges and prosecutors—who in many cases both sincerely believed them and used them for their own campaigns. Bogira underscores this in another instance, during an interview with Rufus McGee—a juror in the Betts case. McGee claimed to despise all gang members. He also exhibited sexism in his hostility toward female jurors. Bogira presents McGee, with all his prejudices, as an example of the many citizens who serve on juries. Ideally, he and the rest would keep their personal prejudices out of the courtroom, but this seldom occurs in reality.
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