Justice, Inner-City Style: Fellow Blacks Get No Pity From Veteran Judge

It is late morning in Judge Earl Strayhorn’s chambers, where today’s topic is wasted lives. One young man is dead in a shooting over cocaine. Another, a 19-year-old gang member, will pay for the crime.

Now it’s bargaining time.

The 19-year-old’s lawyer pleads for mercy. The prosecutor talks of murder. Then the judge makes his offer: 20 years, take it or leave it.

Minutes later the young cocaine dealer, jaw jutting and head cocked defiantly, is pleading guilty to murder. His mother, straining to hear in the front row in court, cups her tearful face in her hands. As she leaves, she is comforted by a youth whose T-shirt bears a moniker on the back: “Killer.”

So goes another day in the Cook County courts, another day in which dreams died, mothers cried, where the strangest and saddest stories were told, where a few words from the honorable Earl Strayhorn can made the difference between life and death.

“Yes, this is justice,” the judge says of the plea-bargaining. He estimates that seven trial days were saved by the five-minute session. “He’s not walking away with a slap on the wrist--20 years ain’t chopped liver. The penitentiary is not a country club.”

For almost 20 years, Strayhorn has judged the crimes and misdemeanors of urban America. This tart-tongued veteran of the nation’s largest court system says he is a pragmatist, not a crusader out to right every wrong.

“I am not society’s avenging angel,” he declares. “I am not sitting in order to act as the conscience of society and to impose the horrible wrath of the Lord on people who commit horrible crimes.”

He has heard his share of the horrible--the girl who threw her baby down the chute into the trash compactor, the guy who axed his grandmother to death, the man who hacked off his lover’s head and toes and mailed them.

“Life in this day and age is cheaper than a piece of meat in the meat market,” Strayhorn said. “People will haggle over the cost of steak more than they will consider the worth of a human life.

“I cope with that . . . but,” he added slowly, “I never get used to it.”

In fact, Strayhorn believes society has turned harsher since he first donned robes. It seems to him there is more vicious crime, more drug abuse, younger and younger offenders.

But this man who has climbed the steps of the Depression-era criminal courts building for 42 of his 72 years, as a prosecutor, defense attorney and now as judge, decided, long ago, that he could not allow the cruelty eat him up.

“I put a shield on. I don’t let it get behind that shield,” he said, sitting in his chambers, lined with awards, memorabilia and photos of his wife, lawyer-son, doctor-daughter and grandchild.

Strayhorn disposes of 500 to 550 cases a year. About 60% of them are settled through plea deals or bench trials. In 1989, 28,647 felony cases were filed in the county’s criminal division, more than triple the number of a decade earlier, officials say. An estimated 75% of those cases were related to drug laws.

Strayhorn says that being a black reared in Chicago--he now lives a 15-minute drive from work--helped to prepare him to be a judge: He understands the environment and experiences of many of those who become court statistics.

But when the white-haired, bespectacled judge takes the bench in his cavernous marble and wood courtroom, he is no soft touch.

“Why are you wearing that junk?” he snaps at a bearded drug defendant wearing earrings the judge takes as a sign of gang membership. “When you come into court, you better take it out. You’re caught with them, their dirt is going to spill over on you and I’m going to send you to the penitentiary. Do you understand?”

A burglary defendant fares no better. His lawyer wants the bond reduced and argues that his client has four children. Strayhorn asks how much money he gives their mother each week, and questions his claim that he has a job lined up. The man mumbles a confused answer.

Strayhorn interrupts, snarls at the lawyer: “Don’t make him lie! Tell him to shut up. . . . That’s why he’s here. He’s a liar!”

“You can’t put anything over on the guy,” Jack Murphy, a prosecutor, said of Strayhorn. “He’s seen it all. He’s heard it all.”

Strayhorn has a lighter side too. He teases a balding lawyer that “this case has all the hair on it you lost off your head.” He needles another: “You’re starting off on the short end of the stick. This one happened in my neighborhood.” While officiating at the civil marriage ceremony of a jail inmate, Strayhorn suddenly looks up from his paperwork and barks: “Hey, man, kiss her!”

After a generation on the bench, Strayhorn says that deciding on punishment remains the toughest part of the job.

He has imposed the death penalty twice, though he morally opposes the idea. He once sentenced a gang rapist to 125 years, which prompted the man to retort: “I hope you croak in bed tonight!”

But Strayhorn says he probably gives more probation than other judges--in about 85% of his cases.

“My probation is harder to do than doing time,” he said. “You have to use some self-discipline . . . . That’s punishment, particularly when they know what they’ve got hanging over their head is a big sword.

“If I send this malleable kid down to the penitentiary, all he’s going to learn down there is how to be a bigger, worse crook,” he said.

Strayhorn always tells a convict what the prison sentence will be if his probation terms are violated. He gives no second chances.

“I’m arrogant,” he said. “I have confidence in myself. I feel I’m better than most and as good as the best.”

Still, he added: “Not a day goes by that I don’t remember that I am black, and being a judge really hasn’t changed that.”

Strayhorn says he knows racism and other urban problems often are factors in crimes, but that doesn’t sway him.

“All I can do is put a Band-Aid on the cancer,” he said. “If I allow my sorrow and my pity and my understanding that there is an explainable reason this person is just a step above an animal, if I allow the feeling to outweigh my judgment, I’m not going to be a good judge.”