Free Courtroom 302 by Steve Bogira

instead of theone percent who do.
    The simple solution: make the defendant pay for a trial. Not with money, of course, but with a stiffer sentence if he rolls the dice and loses. The trial tax is as much a part of the courthouse as its limestone columns. The markup for a jury trial is higher than for a quicker “bench” trial, in which the judge decides the case. Lawyers trade scouting reports on particular judges’ standard assessments. Inmates do likewise in the courtroom lockups and on the jail grapevine. The book on Locallo says his taxes are modest but that he’ll bluff about sizable tariffs to get a defendant to fold.
    Since it’s unconstitutional to coerce a defendant into surrendering his Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial, the most that judges will admit is that some other judges do it. (“I have heard about it,” Locallo says of the trial tax.) And the subtext to every 402 never is spoken, never makes it into the record: In return for the favor of your guilty plea and the time it’ll save us, I’ve agreed not to bang ya, d’ya understand? Everyone understands.
    Perusing a police report, assistant state’s attorney Alesia gives Locallo the alleged facts of the Tidmore case. The arresting officers observed a 1996 Buick Century being driven erratically, ran the car’s plates, and discovered it was stolen. When they gave chase, Tidmore jumped from the car and fled, and the officers caught him under a porch. The Buick’s driver’s-sidewindow was broken, the steering column peeled, and a screwdriver was on the floor of the car.
    Tidmore has no felony convictions, Alesia says. (He turned seventeen—majority age under criminal law in Illinois—just eleven days before his arrest.) Public defender Campanelli tells Locallo that Tidmore lives with his grandmother and is a high school student.
    “Suggest he consider eighteen months’ conditional discharge, with a condition he obtain his high school or GED degree,” Locallo says.
    If probation is a tap on the wrist, conditional discharge is a tickle. Tidmore won’t even have to report to a probation officer. But the plea will give him a felony conviction. And if he commits another offense during the next eighteen months, he could be sentenced to prison on this case. On the other hand, Campanelli has already told the youth that if he goes to trial and is convicted, he could get as many as seven years. Tidmore nods to Campanelli: he’ll cop to the judge’s offer.
    “Before I accept your plea of guilty, d’ya understand by pleading guilty that you’re giving up your right to trial by jury?” Locallo asks.
    “Yeah.”
    Locallo has given these admonishments too many times to be anything but mechanical in his delivery. In the preceding year, he presided overfifteen jury trials and eighty-eight benches. And he took 805 guilty pleas.
    He races through the remaining admonishments. Tidmore says yes, no, and at the correct time, guilty. Fifteen minutes after his case was called, the young man is on his way, and Locallo has his first “dispo” of the morning.
    The judges here get weekly printouts from the presiding judge listing the disposition totals for the week, the month, and the year, for each judge in the building. When a judge is up for retention—as Locallo is this November—his disposition totals will be published and disseminated before the election by the Chicago Crime Commission. Dispo totals have been important for judges since at least 1920, a year after the crime commission was formed. The commissionbegan sending its clerks into courtrooms to tally judges’ dispositions, in accordance with the group’s belief that swift punishment was the key to cutting crime. Judicial efficiency was prized in Cook County long before that, however. In 1885 historian A. T. Andreas, writing about the Cook County Circuit Court, observed thata trial court judge who hesitates, “trying to decide every case exactly right and beyond cavil is not a good judge nor