Justice? Hogwash

Toward the end of his legal career, Clarence Darrow summed up all he had learned during a lifetime peddling high ideals and lofty principles to American juries: “There is no such thing as justice -- in or out of court.” In his excellent “Courtroom 302,” Steve Bogira shows that were Darrow to return to his native Chicago and visit the Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the nation’s largest and busiest, he’d find little has changed: Justice is still not being served in or out of court.

Only the book’s subtitle -- “A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse” -- is misleading. Bogira did not spend just one year in Judge Daniel Locallo’s courtroom, observing the trials and tribulations of the wretched, drug-addicted and misguided accused. The material makes clear that he spent at least five years, not merely following cases to verdict but digging into the backgrounds of the proceeding’s participants and getting to know the lawyers, defendants and court personnel in ways that juries never could and that the press of court business never would allow.

The result is a powerful and moving consideration of how the justice system deprives some of their liberty and others of their ideals. When a defendant asks a deputy where his lawyer is, the officer’s answer sums up the system: “Number one, I don’t care. Number two, I don’t care. Number three, you’re guilty.”

An award-winning writer for the Chicago Reader, Bogira brings an anthropologist’s eye to the world of felony court, a unique society with its own characters, customs and codes. He can make us smell the musty cellar lock-up where inmates are initially processed; his description of Locallo as often wearing “a bemused expression, as if he knows the joke but is above laughing at it” tells us all we need to know about the man. But Bogira is more than a gifted writer: He’s also a disciplined and committed one who has devoted enough time to observing the life cycle of court cases and their impact on those involved.

Bogira’s reward -- and ours -- is a complete understanding of who these defendants are, what led them to be charged and what really happened in their cases. “This book intends to show more of what’s typical about a courtroom,” Bogira writes. “It is about how justice miscarries every day, by doing precisely what we ask it to.”

Take the case of 16-year-old Leslie McGee, who shot a Chicago cabdriver to death with a .357 magnum. “I said, ‘God bless you,’ and a couple of other words that I don’t remember,” McGee later confessed to police. “Then I gave him a peck on the cheek and I shot him.”

No one ever asks McGee why she did it -- not Locallo, a former prosecutor whom Bogira portrays as ambitious to become an appellate judge and eager to move his docket along; not the police, who were only too happy to close the case with her confession; not the prosecutor, who, by law, never needs to prove a defendant’s motive; not even McGee’s defense lawyer, who fears that establishing McGee’s prior relationship with the cabbie will only convince the jury that this was a premeditated murder.

When Bogira asks the defense lawyer about this surprising lack of curiosity among the finders of fact, the response is characteristically hard-bitten and revealing: “How do I feel about the fact that the truth never comes out in court? The truth never comes in life.” Or as the foreperson of the jury who later convicts McGee tells Bogira: In court “there are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and what really happened.” By following McGee through the duration of her sentence, only Bogira learns that the truth might well have affected the course of justice. If only someone had asked sooner.

Bogira was immensely fortunate to audit a courtroom blessed with unusually interesting cases. The most noteworthy involves Frank Caruso, the 18-year-old son of a purported organized crime figure. Caruso is charged with the beating and attempted murder of a 13-year-old African American boy who biked through an all-white neighborhood, a savage and stupid crime that drew calls for justice from civil rights leaders and then-President Clinton. The case is a “heater,” the kind that attracts high-paid defense lawyers, stirs up racial and ethnic tensions and, as Locallo well knows, destroys careers.

Locallo admits to being painfully aware of the political implications of the case; he also reveals an injudicious attitude toward the family of the accused. Judges are, I’ve found as a former federal prosecutor, among the most inaccessible and suspicious people on Earth. That Bogira got Locallo to open up to him says much about his talents as a reporter. Indeed, other than Quentin Reynolds’ “Courtroom,” I have never read a more complete or honest portrayal of a sitting judge in any U.S. court. For this achievement alone, Bogira is to be lauded.

“Courtroom 302” is the place where Bogira’s illusions of justice fade under the unending callousness of a system that cares more about processing defendants than affording them due process. For me, it was Courtroom 215, Superior Court for the District of Columbia, a Dickensian world of street thugs, low-rent lawyers and craven police, where I spent my first year as a prosecutor. I would spend the next seven years in the relatively rarified world of federal court in genteel Southern California, yet Darrow’s cynical verdict on justice was rarely proved wrong.

The ideal of justice, however, is hard to kill. Those of us who have looked behind the scenes of criminal court know it is rotten, yet we hope it can get better. “How long we shall continue to blunder along without the aid of unpartisan and authoritative scientific assistance in the administration of justice, no one knows, but all fair persons not conventionalized by provincial legal habits of mind ought, I think, unite to effect some such change.” So wrote the great Judge Learned Hand in 1911. So Bogira writes now.

Bogira’s genius is to remind us that great reporters don’t need to discover new worlds to tell compelling stories; great reporters can make any story compelling. Bogira is an inspiring reminder of what investigative reporting can and should do to keep our national institutions cleaner and better than they are. His book might not lead anyone to enter law school, but it ought to inspire at least a few people to fight for the ideals we all believe in. *