Courtroom 302 (36 page)

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“
INTELLIGENT PEOPLE
now know that every human being is the product of the endless heredity back of him and the infinite environment around him,” Clarence Darrow told a judge in a Cook County criminal courtroom in 1924. Darrow was asking the judge to spare the lives of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb after they’d pled guilty to the kidnapping and murder of fourteen-year-old Bobbie Franks. “When I think of the light way nature has of picking out parents and populating the earth,” the renowned defense lawyer said, “I cannot hold human beings to the same degree of responsibility that young lawyers hold them when they are enthusiastic in a prosecution.”

Darrow argued that crime would not be reduced until the focus of courts shifted from meting out punishment to addressing motives and causes. “If a doctor were called on to treat typhoid fever, he would probably try to find out what kind of milk or water the patient drank, and perhaps clean out the well so that no one else could get typhoid fever from the same source,” he said. But a lawyer called on to treat a typhoid patient “would give him thirty days in jail, and then he would think that nobody else would dare to catch it.”

The prosecutor opposing Darrow scorned his “weird” and “dangerous” ideas. The responsibility for the Franks murder belonged to no one but the defendants, whom he called “snakes,” “cowardly perverts,” and “mad dogs.”

Darrow saved Leopold and Loeb from the gallows, but determinist views such as his rarely fared well in criminal courtrooms in the 1920s. Nor are they given much credence today at 26th Street, where the bedrock doctrine is free will and individual responsibility.

Locallo is a strong free-choice disciple, notwithstanding what he says he learned from his brother Victor’s life. “There’s nothing I’m aware of that programs somebody to rob people or kill people,” he says. “Nobody’s putting a gun to anyone’s head and forcing him to do that.”

As a prosecutor in 1982, Locallo won conviction of a defendant named Mark Clements for setting a fire that killed four people. Clements was a sixteen-year-old eighth-grader when he was charged with the murders. He’d become a ward of the state at age three after his parents abandoned him. He had an IQ of 58. At his sentencing hearing before Judge Cousins, public defender Brian Dosch said the state bore some responsibility for how Clements had turned out, given that he’d been its ward most of his life and it had done little to set him on a proper path. Locallo responded that the state didn’t set the fire, Clements did. Clements delivered a rambling plea for mercy, sketching his troubled childhood and talking about racism in society. He spoke for an hour and fifty-five minutes. (Clements’s other
lawyer, Bob Cooney, says it was the longest speech by a defendant before sentencing he’d ever heard “
by about
an hour and fifty-four minutes.”) Clements was wasting his breath; a life sentence was mandatory with the multiple-murder conviction. Locallo was unmoved by the speech. “I felt, ‘So what?’ ” As Clements talked on and on, Locallo says he was mainly thinking about his next case.

EVERY FEW WEEKS
this spring and summer Dan Young Jr. is steered by guards from his bunk in the jail’s mental health unit, through the tunnels, and up on the elevator to the lockup behind Courtroom 302. The other prisoners in the lockup are called one by one before the judge; by lunchtime, Young frequently has the lockup to himself. After lunch one of the deputies walks him out to the defense table in the courtroom, where he takes a seat next to Mr. Mayfield, his PD. Then Mr. Mayfield and the lady prosecutor and Judge Locallo and the witnesses say Dan Young this and Dan Young that for most of the afternoon. Then he goes back to his bunk in the jail.

Young is a short, slight, thirty-seven-year-old African American with wide, wondering eyes and a jutting jaw. His IQ is in the fifties. “He knows the judge is going to make a ruling,” public defender Mike Mayfield says. “He doesn’t really know what it’s about. He just knows that he wants to go home.”

That won’t be happening anytime soon—not without help from Locallo. Young is doing life for a murder and sexual assault. An appellate public defender recently won him a hearing to determine whether the medicine he was being given in the jail at the time of his trial, in 1994, impaired his fitness for trial—that is, whether the drugs made him too groggy or disoriented to understand the nature of the proceedings and to help his lawyer defend him. If Locallo rules that the drugs did indeed impair Young’s fitness, Young will get a new trial.

In May two county psychiatrists testified about the typical effects of the medicine Young was given in the jail at the time of his trial, lithium, a mood stabilizer used to treat manic depression, and Stelazine, an antipsychotic. But the psychiatrists told Locallo their exams of Young showed no signs of these disorders, and they weren’t sure why he was given the drugs. They were powerful medicines with sedating qualities, the psychiatrists said, but they doubted they made Young particularly sleepy at his trial—he’d been on them for months by then and likely would have developed a tolerance.

Judge Thomas Durkin, who presided over the trial, also testified in May. He allowed that Young had seemed to doze at times during the trial and
that he’d also made some outbursts. According to the trial transcript, Young had called out during the testimony of one witness, “You don’t even know me”; another time he’d suddenly announced from the defense table, “I didn’t kill Kathy Morgan. I didn’t kill anybody.” But Durkin testified that nothing Young did during the trial made him question the defendant’s fitness.

That assessment by Judge Durkin hurt Young’s chances of a favorable ruling from Locallo, especially given Locallo’s relationship with Durkin. Locallo considered Durkin a friend, and before Durkin left 26th Street in 1994 for a civil courtroom, Locallo considered him a mentor as well. “He was a great source of knowledge, has good common sense, a great sense of humor—he’s just a wonderful man,” Locallo says.

If a potential juror knew a witness in a case and had such a high opinion of him or her, the potential juror would almost certainly be dismissed. But when the appellate or supreme court sends cases back to 26th Street for hearings, judges are frequently called upon to appraise decisions made by colleagues. The judges almost never recuse themselves in such situations; it’s presumed they won’t let their personal relationships affect their rulings.

On the afternoon of June 9 public defender Mayfield calls Cheryl Bormann, a fellow PD, to testify about Young’s behavior during his trial. Bormann represented a codefendant of Young’s at the trial, so she sat at the defense table near Young. He was a constant distraction, she tells Locallo. She remembers him frequently rolling his fingers across the table and tapping his feet, as if he were playing a piano. Once when she was at a lectern questioning a witness, she noticed that the jurors’ attention was on the defense table. She glanced over and saw Young looking “like something out of
The Exorcist
”—he had one arm in the air “like it was reaching for something that was above him” and his face turned backward. Bormann also observed Young in the courtroom lockup during breaks in the trial while she was talking with her client. He was often “incredibly agitated, walking in circles, babbling to himself,” so the other inmates kept their distance, she says.

The second witness this particular afternoon is Steve Greenberg, the lawyer who defended Young at his trial. Greenberg recalls Young contorting his body at the defense table and dozing through some of the testimony. Greenberg says he realized when he first met Young that he was “not a normal functioning adult.” But whereas before the trial Young had been “somewhat helpful in terms of describing how he was arrested and what had occurred,” during the trial he was “basically no help at all, totally
worthless in terms of an assistance,” Greenberg says. “I mean, I felt like I was all alone.”

On the state’s cross-examination, Greenberg allows that during the trial he never described for the record his client’s odd body movements; nor did he tell Judge Durkin about the difficulty he was having with Young. This was only his second or third murder trial, and he didn’t know it might prove important to put such matters on the record, Greenberg says.

After Greenberg is excused, Locallo continues the hearing until July.

In the hallway outside the courtroom, Greenberg tells me he usually charges $5,000 to $10,000 for a murder trial; but he’d continued representing Young even when it became clear Young’s mother couldn’t pay him any more than the $1,000 she gave him originally. He simply felt sorry for Young, Greenberg says. “He was the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged—the poor retarded guy nobody cared about.”

Greenberg asked for a psychiatric evaluation of Young before the trial. He didn’t see how Young could meaningfully help him put on a defense, given the extent of his retardation. But two psychiatrists had deemed Young fit for trial. Then he was convicted, largely on the basis of a confession he’d signed.

“The case makes me sick to my stomach,” Greenberg says. “I don’t think Dan Young said any of that stuff that’s in his confession. I have no doubt that the detectives concocted his statement. There’s only a couple of defendants whose cases I’ve lost who I thought were innocent, and he’s one of them.”

YOUNG WAS SLOW
to walk and talk. As a child in Yazoo City, Mississippi, he would sometimes “foam at his mouth like a mad dog,” his mother, Lillie Young, testified at his trial in 1994. Other children in the neighborhood “didn’t never want to play with him when he was coming up,” she said. “All the other kids used to call him, you know, crazy, and they just didn’t—they didn’t like the way he looked.”

In 1969 Lillie Young and her five children moved to Chicago. (Later she had a sixth child, who’s also retarded.) The family settled on the south side, and Lillie enrolled Dan, then age nine, in school for the first time. He was placed in classes for the trainable mentally handicapped, the lowest level of classes for retarded children. When he was about twenty, an acquaintance introduced him to booze, according to his mother, and soon he’d do most anything for a drink. He’d walk into a tavern, announce the arrival of the Cigar Man, put five cigars in his mouth, and light them. Sometimes he’d light cigarettes in his ears as well. A glass of wine was a sufficient reward. The police picked him up on occasion for being drunk
and disorderly. They’d keep him in their lockup overnight and let him go in the morning.

On a March evening in 1992 detectives brought Young in for questioning about a sexual assault and murder.

That crime had occurred in October 1990. While putting out a blaze in an abandoned building in Englewood, a south-side slum, firefighters had found the body of thirty-nine-year-old Kathy Morgan. She was nearly naked, and her face was bruised and swollen. Wooden dowels had been shoved deep inside her rectum and into her vagina. The medical examiner attributed her death to the blunt trauma to her head and the internal injuries caused by the dowels. The extensive internal bleeding made it impossible to say whether semen was present.

The Morgan case soon was just another of Englewood’s many unsolved rapes and murders. But the night before the detectives picked up Young, they’d stumbled onto a lead while working on another case. Detectives were questioning eighteen-year-old Harold Hill about a robbery when, according to the detectives, Hill said he knew something about the Morgan murder. Hill subsequently confessed that he and two other men had forced Morgan into an abandoned building and raped and killed her before torching the building. He identified the other two offenders as Dan Young and Peter Williams.

Young, who’d been living in Englewood seven blocks from Morgan’s apartment, at first denied any involvement in the crime. But several hours later he admitted joining in the attack with “Harry” and “Pete,” according to detectives. An assistant state’s attorney wrote up his confession. Young can’t read and can write just a few words, but he could sign his name to a confession.

When the detectives picked up nineteen-year-old Peter Williams, he too at first denied any involvement in the crime. But before long he gave a detailed, court-reported confession, in which he acknowledged committing the crime with Hill and Young.

After Williams signed his confession, however, he asked a detective not involved in his interrogation when exactly this crime had occurred. The detective gave him the date—October 14, 1990. Williams said he was pretty sure he was in jail that day. Jail records confirmed that he was locked up on a drug charge from September 26 to October 25, 1990, so he wasn’t charged in the Morgan case. But Young and Hill still were, even though they’d confessed to doing the crime with a man who was locked up.

Williams testified for Young and Hill at their trial. He told the jury that during his interrogation, a detective had slapped him in the face and hit him in the chest and legs with a blackjack and had told him he’d never go
home again if he didn’t cooperate. Williams said the detective showed him photos of the crime scene and drilled him on the details of the rape and murder, and he’d then spat the story out in front of the court reporter. The lawyers representing Young and Hill argued that their clients, likewise, had been coerced into false confessions. Young’s lawyer, Greenberg, told the jury that Young, the “neighborhood idiot,” would have signed the confession in exchange for an M&M. Young testified that he didn’t rape or kill Morgan and that he signed the confession after the detectives threatened him, kicked him, hit him in his stomach, and “tore my fifty-dollar coat up.”

But several detectives testified that they didn’t coerce Young, Hill, or Williams in any way. Separate juries convicted both Young and Hill, and Judge Durkin sentenced them to life.

At Young’s sentencing hearing, the prosecutor declared him “not fix-able.” Judge Durkin, who had referred to Young during hearings in the case as a “mental defect” and a “defective product,” conceded that “life hasn’t been fair to Mr. Young,” that “he was dealt something less than a full hand.” But the judge quickly added that Young “chose, and the operative word here is
chose
,” to involve himself in Morgan’s rape and murder. When Durkin asked Young if he wanted to say anything before sentencing, Young responded, “I’m going to the penitentiary for something I didn’t do.”