Courtroom 302 (eBook)

Steve Bogira (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2011 | 1. Auflage
416 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-81419-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Steve Bogira's riveting book takes us into the heart of America's criminal justice system. Courtroom 302 is the story of one year in one courtroom in Chicago's Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the busiest felony courthouse in the country.

We see the system through the eyes of the men and women who experience it, not only in the courtroom but in the lockup, the jury room, the judge's chambers, the spectators' gallery. When the judge and his staff go to the scene of the crime during a burglary trial, we go with them on the sheriff's bus. We witness from behind the scenes the highest-profile case of the year: three young white men, one of them the son of a reputed mobster, charged with the racially motivated beating of a thirteen-year-old black boy. And we follow the cases that are the daily grind of the court, like that of the middle-aged man whose crack addiction brings him repeatedly back before the judge.
Bogira shows us how the war on drugs is choking the system, and how in most instances justice is dispensed--as, under the circumstances, it must be--rapidly and mindlessly. The stories that unfold in the courtroom are often tragic, but they no longer seem so to the people who work there. Says a deputy in 302: 'You hear this stuff every day, and you're like, 'Let's go, let's go, let's get this over with and move on to the next thing.''

Steve Bogira is, as Robert Caro says, 'a masterful reporter.' His special gift is his understanding of people--and his ability to make us see and understand them. Fast-paced, gripping, and bursting with character and incident, Courtroom 302 is a unique illumination of our criminal court system that raises fundamental issues of race, civil rights, and justice.

From the Hardcover edition.

Textauszug

Every day, Chicago police wagons swing onto the grounds of the Cook County Criminal Courthouse and deposit their cargo at a rear door.The prisoners being unloaded on this particular evening--January 20, 1998--are here for the usual reasons. They sold cocaine rocks on a corner, until an unmarked car screeched up out of nowhere. They tried to buy heroin from an undercover cop. They pocketed a fifth of booze at a grocery and failed to outrun the security guard. They relieved a pickup truck of its tools and a nosy neighbor called 911. At the district station, they pulled off their belts and pulled out their laces. They emptied their pockets of combs, cigarettes, matchbooks. They pressed their fingers onto the ink pad, frowned for the camera, and joined the rest of the day's catch in a frigid lockup. They curled up on a metal bench or a concrete floor and waited--midnight, four in the morning, noon--while computers checked their prints for outstanding warrants. They were treated to a baloney-on-white and coffee in a Styrofoam cup. Those with misdemeanor charges and no warrants were given a court date and released. The others were cuffed wrist to wrist and loaded into the large police wagon that swung by the station. The chain of prisoners in the wagon lengthened as the driver made pickups at other stations. The wagon bumped along toward the courthouse at 26th and California. The Cook County Criminal Courthouse--the biggest and busiest felony courthouse in the nation--sits in a Mexican neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side. It's a boxy limestone structure, seven stories high and seven decades old, with Doric columns, Latin phrases carved into the limestone, and eight sculpted figures above the columns, representing law, justice, liberty, truth, might, love, wisdom, and peace. None of them is visible from the back of a police wagon. A paunchy, balding white officer is behind the wheel of the first wagon to dip down a ramp and dock at the rear door this evening. He opens the wagon's tail, and a chain of fifteen men, a dozen black and three white, winds its way out. The prisoners are rumpled and rank--the wagon-tossed, wretched refuse of a major American city, arrested on Martin Luther King Day. The driver follows the prisoners to the door, balancing over one shoulder a clear bag holding fifteen smaller clear bags that contain keys, combs, lip salve, cigarettes, lighters, beepers, eyeglasses, belts, shoelaces. In his other hand is a sheaf of arrest reports and rap sheets. A navy-shirted sheriff 's deputy slides open the barred door, and the prisoners file into the courthouse basement. About fifteen hundred prisoners pass through this doorway weekly on their way to a bond hearing--78,000 men and women a year accused of violating the peace and dignity of the State of Illinois. In thirty courtrooms on floors two through seven, plea deals are fashioned and hearings and trials conducted every weekday. But for most defendants, the first glimpse of the interior of the courthouse is of this cellar. The cellar holds several dank chambers with cinder-block walls and metal benches bolted to concrete floors. The grimy walls have been decorated here and there by deputies who had a black marker or a tube of Preparation H and time on their hands. WELCOME TO COUNTY--GET SERVED WITH A SMILE reads the script next to a horned and goateed grinning devil on a wall near the entrance. Other greetings: THIS WAY TO THE DANCE, and HEAD FIRST--HIT HERE, and YOU WON'T BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS. Later tonight the prisoners will be escorted through a tunnel to the quivering elevator that will carry them up to Courtroom 100 for their bond hearings. At evening's end...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.12.2011
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Kriminologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften
• ISBN-10: 0-307-81419-X / 030781419X
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-81419-7 / 9780307814197