Courtroom 302

Three beat reporters were assigned to cover cases in the courthouse; their focus was on the racially charged Bridgeport case. They seldom paid attention to the trials of Black men unless they were accused of crimes against white people. Thus, none of the reporters were aware of the trial of De’Angelo Harris. On an evening in May 1995, Harris, then 17, fired three shots into 20-year-old Bennie Williams’s parked car. Harris belonged to a local gang—the Gangster Disciples—and shot Williams because he had assumed that the “T” on Williams’s Texas Rangers baseball cap indicated that he was a member of a rival gang—the Vice Lords. In fact, Williams was a student at the University of Arkansas who was home for the summer and visiting the city’s west side, where his infant daughter lived. Williams’s family lived in suburban Oak Park, and he wore the baseball cap because the “T” indicated his middle name—Terrell. 

An eyewitness testified about seeing Harris commit the shooting, and Harris confessed. Locallo was eager to dispose of the case, which had been on his roster for some time. Prosecutor Mark Ostrowski brought Williams’s mother, Diane Smith, to court. She was the life-and-death witness whose presence made it clear to the jury that the victim was deceased. Her possible emotional suffering in court could have also been beneficial to the prosecution. Smith hoped that Harris would get life in prison. She also hoped to walk away from the trial with some understanding of why Harris killed her son. Across the aisle from Williams’s family were the Harrises, including Karen Harris—De’Angelo’s mother. Harris's seven-year-old sister, Tiara, sat beside her mother. Harris was one of Tiara’s three brothers—all of whom had been in trouble with the law. 

Mary Ann Armstrong, the grandmother of Williams’s daughter, testified that she saw Williams enter the driver’s seat of his car and get shot by a man who approached from the rear and fired through the back window. Armstrong originally identified the wrong man in a lineup but insisted that she identified the correct one in the second lineup. 

Susan Butera, the assistant state’s attorney, read Harris’s confession to the jury. In it, Harris stated that he was “a member of the Gangster Disciples and [had] been…for the past four years” (75). He also noted that the Vice Lords were a rival gang. The gangs had been at war since May 25, 1995. 

Diane Smith admitted that she had gone into the courtroom wanting to hate the young man who killed her son. Then, she thought of how compassionate her son had been and realized that he wouldn’t have appreciated her urge for vengeance. While in the courtroom, Smith also observed Karen Harris’s sternness toward Tiara—the eagerness with which she threatened the little girl with beatings to get her to stop fidgeting. This gave Smith some sympathy for Harris.

Karen Harris was 14 when she became pregnant with De’Angelo in 1977. She raised him and three more children in the impoverished West Side neighborhood of Garfield Park. Karen had been arrested before due to her own history of violence, but all the cases against her were dismissed. She also beat De’Angelo. While pregnant with Tiara, Karen began using crack. When Tiara was two, Karen’s mother filed a complaint against her for neglect. Karen had been leaving Tiara with her mother for days, without providing any food or money, while she spent her welfare aid on cocaine. 

De’Angelo Harris began to run away from home. He went to stay with his mother’s friend, Lorraine Butts, who lived “in a Rockwell Gardens high-rise” (78). Butts, too, had a history of violence. When Harris was 12, he joined the Gangster Disciples. He sold marijuana around the housing project “from five in the evening to midnight” and earned enough money to purchase himself “gold chains […] and Nikes or Air Jordans” (78). Butts encouraged Harris’s dealing, advising him, simply, not to get arrested. 

In 1990, Harris met his father for the first time in nine years when he attended his paternal grandfather’s funeral. When Harris addressed his father as “Dad” and attempted to console him, the elder Harris rebuffed him. Meanwhile, he established a paternal bond with Butts’s boyfriend, Anthony Perkins, who assisted Harris’s marijuana trade by getting him more customers. Later, Perkins would tell police that it was he who had shot Bennie Williams. 

Two months before Harris was charged with shooting Williams, Karen Harris was charged with her first felony—“selling two rocks of cocaine to an undercover officer” (78). She was sentenced to probation but performed no community service and paid none of her fines. She was thus “sentenced to two months in jail” (78).

On the evening after Harris’s first trial, a woman named Evelyn Cruz called the state’s attorney’s office to notify authorities that she saw De’Angelo Harris kill Bennie Williams. Harris had previously given Cruz’s name to his lawyers “as a possible alibi witness” (79). However, Cruz’s reliability as a witness for the prosecution was also tenuous, considering she had given conflicting stories about what she had seen. Judge Locallo, however, believed the jury should decide on Cruz’s credibility as a witness. 

When sentencing a defendant, Locallo thought that it was important to consider the victim’s background. Williams had been a university student and uninvolved in crime. His colleagues disagreed, believing that no victim’s life was more precious than another’s. Locallo also looked for the victim’s surviving relatives. Did they show up to court, as Williams’s family had? In such an instance, he was also likely to give a longer sentence to a defendant. Some of his colleagues also disagreed with this as a form of bias. Despite their reservations, Locallo offered Harris a 40-year sentence in exchange for his guilty plea. Harris’s lawyers encouraged Harris to take the deal, reminding him that, “with the day-for-day good-conduct credit he’d really need to do only twenty years” (82). With the three years he had already served, Harris would have only done 17 more years behind bars. However, if he insisted on proceeding with his trial, he faced a possible 60-year sentence. Harris didn’t want to plead guilty to a crime that he insisted he didn’t commit, but in the end, he took Locallo’s sentencing offer and pled guilty. 

Karen Harris believed that her son was probably imprisoned for his own good. He might have otherwise ended up dead—like most of her friends’ children. Judge Locallo, too, thought it worked out for the best. If the case had continued and Harris had been convicted, his family would never have seen his release. This way, Harris was punished for his crime, but he would not spend his entire life in prison. Like Bennie Williams, De’Angelo Harris also had a child—a toddler named Tyreece. Harris was already in jail when his son was born. Though Tyreece had seen his father “through a Plexiglas window in a jail visiting area” (83), they had never touched. Harris also had a three-year-old daughter, whom his mother didn’t know about. Tyreece reminded Karen of her son, “a cheerful little boy who liked sports and music and got A’s in grammar school” (84). Seeing Diane Smith in the courtroom, Karen whispered an apology to the other mother for her son’s crime. Smith thanked her. 

The sentencing hearing began with Williams’s surviving relatives reading victim-impact statements. Bennie Williams’s stepfather, Theodis Smith, read a prepared statement on behalf of the family. The letter described Williams’s kindness and compassion and his work for people in his community. They blamed Harris’s family for failing to give him proper guidance. After Theodis read the statement, Judge Locallo issued Harris’s 38-year sentence. As deputies led De’Angelo Harris away, Diane Smith thought of how yet another life had been wasted. 

Harris was sent to the Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton, Illinois. The facility is 155 miles southwest of Chicago and “the second-leading employer in Canton, a town of fifteen thousand” (85). Canton is 98% white, but its prison population is 64% Black. The facility was designed to hold 1,211 incarcerated individuals. By the time Harris entered, it was holding 1,900. Given the distance between Canton and Chicago, Harris knew that no friend or relative would have had the means to visit him and gave up on the possibility.

Harris’s public defenders tried to get Judge Locallo to give Harris a shorter term, treating his lifelong poverty as a mitigating circumstance. Judge Locallo, however, considered this no excuse. Locallo’s mentor, Judge William Cousins, had risen above poverty and racism, and Locallo therefore didn’t see why anyone else shouldn’t be able to do the same. For his own relatives, such as his uncle Victor, who dealt with paranoid schizophrenia and died by suicide, Locallo was more empathetic, understanding that people sometimes do whatever they can to survive.

Marcus Ferguson was one of numerous court clerks who doled out cases to judges using a computer program called the Randomizer, which sent a defendant to any one of the judges at the 26th Street Courthouse. 

One day in February, jury selection for the Kevin Betts murder trial was set to begin. Betts had been charged with stabbing fellow incarcerated individual Bernard Carter with a crude instrument. Both Betts and Carter were in prison on murder convictions at the time of the stabbing. In March 1993, Carter had a job as a barber; Betts was the last incarcerated person Carter served. Carter lived for nearly two years after the stabbing and identified Betts as his attacker. Betts was charged with attempted murder one month before he was sentenced to 65 years for murdering one man and attempting to murder another during an argument on the South Side of Chicago. However, with the day-for-day credit, Betts could have been freed by his 58th birthday. A second conviction would have not only spoiled the possibility of leaving prison while still middle-aged, but it would also have “[made] him eligible for the death penalty” (93). In June 1995, the Randomizer assigned Betts’s case to Judge Locallo, who had never imposed the death penalty.

Betts was represented by public defenders Tony Eben and Amy Campanelli. Betts, believing that first-chair Eben was uninterested in his case, petitioned for a new counsel; Locallo denied his petition. Eben and Campanelli presented five witnesses willing to testify that another incarcerated man, Angelo Roberts, committed the murder. The jury members were mostly white, half of them were over 40, and none of them came from the “west-side slum where [Betts] was raised” (95). Carter’s grandmother, 70-year-old Ora Lee, served as his life-and-death witness—a person close to the victim whose presence reveals to the jury the impact of the loss on a family. 

James Jackson, “the officer on duty in the barbershop at the time of the shanking” (95), testified he saw Betts punch Carter in what looked like the back of the victim’s neck. Eben questioned Jackson, referring to the barbershop’s log that day. There were 14 incarcerated men present in the shop at the time—a chaotic environment that would have made it less likely that Jackson would have been focused on Carter and Betts. Junior public defender Campanelli questioned Officer Debergh, the officer at “the security post down the hall” whom Jackson phoned after the attack (96), about a second shank—or makeshift knife—found later. Debergh recalled putting the weapon into a “brown envelope” and then giving it to an investigator. He didn’t know what happened to it after that. 

Carter’s mother Catherine died of cancer two months before her son was killed. Betts’s mother and other family members lived in Chicago, but none of them were present for his trial. His older brother Shawn was also in prison. Both he and Kevin had been in trouble with the law since they were juveniles. Betts recalled that his mother “had a fierce temper” and was physically abusive (98). 

All the witnesses in the Betts case were serving life terms in prison. An incarcerated man serving 20 years testified that he “was sweeping and mopping the hallway outside the barbershop” when he saw Betts and Angelo Roberts leave (99). Roberts, the man recalled, stuck something behind a radiator. Roberts, a former gang member, died seven months after he was freed from prison. His body was found in the trunk of car, “riddled with bullet holes and stab wounds” (99). He was 24. His murder remained unsolved by the time of Betts’s trial.

Betts began to feel with increasing certainty that he’d be convicted for killing Carter. Betts had wanted to testify before the jury, but his defenders persuaded him not to. His frustration with his inability to alter his situation led to an outburst in the courtroom. The prosecutor was pleased to get the reaction, which would have validated the jury’s sense of his being unstable. 

When the time came for the jury to deliberate, one of them, 67-year-old John Hillebrand, a “semiretired school administrator from the suburbs” was selected to be foreperson (101-02). Five of the jurors were undecided on the case and four declared Betts not guilty. All the jurors agreed that the investigation was poorly handled. Unable to come to a decision, the jury was sequestered for the night. By morning, 10 jurors had come around to finding Betts guilty. By lunchtime, the lone Black juror joined her peers in a guilty vote. Only 63-year-old Bill Massey, a white mailroom clerk, held out. Massey didn’t believe the defense witnesses. Other details, including the missing shank and “the dubious identification at the hospital” (103), also bothered him. Ironically, one of Massey’s favorite films was 12 Angry Men. He noted how the other jurors expressed impatience with him and attempted to manipulate him, as they had Henry Fonda’s character in the film. Betts heard about the “lone dissenter” and assumed that the juror would soon give in. In the morning, the jurors told Judge Locallo that they couldn’t reach a verdict. Locallo declared a mistrial. 

Betts was relieved to know that he would get a second chance and was surprised when he heard that it “was a white guy that held out for [him]” (105). On the other hand, the prosecutor—as well as the other jurors—were annoyed by what they deemed Massey’s stubbornness. Locallo was undeterred and hoped to retry the case in the spring.