Free Courtroom 302 by Steve Bogira Page A

well fitted for his position.… Business must go forward, or the courts will get immediately clogged.”
    Locallo ranked below average in dispos in his first few years in a trial courtroom. But last year hesurged to tenth among the building’s thirty trial judges, cracking the one-thousand mark for the first time, with 1,058 dispos.(That includes 150 pretrial dismissals by the state.) He says the spike in his dispos as his retention election nears is coincidental—he’s just gotten faster with experience.
    WHEN LOCALLO BEGAN his criminal justice career as a Cook County prosecutor in 1978, the primary lesson he was taught from the beginning was “how to move cases.” And he was an eager learner.
    After six months in traffic court, he was transferred to the municipal division, where he handled misdemeanor cases in police station branch courtrooms.Misdemeanor arrests were soaring in the late 1970s, and so the branches were even busier than usual, making efficiency all the more important. In a grimy courtroom in the police headquarters building downtown—“whore court,” as Locallo and most lawyers and judges called it—Locallo helped the judge rush hookers and shoplifters past the bench. “Defendant pleads guilty, found guilty, two days’ time served,” the judge would say over and over. Locallo soon moved on to a south-side branch, where he helped process waves of accused wife-beaters, barroom brawlers, and window-breakers—defendants who paused at the bench long enough to have their cases tossed because the complaining witness hadn’t shown, or to grab conditional discharge or probation.
    After prosecuting drug cases in various 26th Street courtrooms for a year, Locallo graduated to a regular assignment as a third-chair prosecutor in a courtroom. While the stakes were higher in the felony courtrooms than in the branches, the essential task was the same: moving cases quickly. Locallo was blessed with an incomparable tutor in one of the first courtrooms he was assigned—Judge James Bailey, the courthouse’s perennial dispo champ for twenty years. “What’s next, what’s next?” Bailey would bark at his prosecutors as soon as a case was disposed of. The judge offered unbeatable deals to petty offenders, reminding his prosecutors that time spent on a theft case was time taken from a murder. Defendants charged with violent crimes, on the other hand, got no breaks from Bailey.
    This philosophy made sense to Locallo. He had a chance to apply what he learned when he was transferred to the courtroom of Judge William Cousins Jr. as a second chair. Locallo would come to admire Cousins more than any other judge. But efficiency wasn’t Cousins’s forte; when Locallo arrived in 1981, Cousins’s call was hopelessly clogged. After Locallo was promoted to first chair, he began wheeling and dealing, making tantalizing offers to defense lawyers in lesser cases. “Counsel? What can we do for you today?” Locallo would greet the lawyers. “It was like white sales,” Locallo recalls now with a laugh. The backup cleared.
    “In Cousins’s courtroom, we were trying the murders, rapes, and robberies,”Locallo says. “And the rest of the stuff? I couldn’t care less. If it wasn’t a violent offense, I’m sorry, I admit it, I plead guilty—I gave away the store. But I got rid of a case, defense counsel got rid of a case.” He made it a practice to check with the arresting officer and the victim before finalizing a deal. “Most police officers tell you, ‘I don’t give a shit. All I get credit for is the arrest.’ And most victims say, ‘You mean I don’t have to come back to court?’ ”
    Plea bargaining has been a staple in criminal courthouses throughout the nation since at least the late nineteenth century. The practice used to have many ardent critics. Conservatives said it let criminals off too easily; liberals said it promoted mindless, routinized sentencing of defendants. In 1973 the National Advisory