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Courtroom 302
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Chapters 15-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary: “What Really Happened”
Prosecutor Michael Nolan encouraged the jury not to be fooled by the innocent appearance of 18-year-old Leslie McGee, who he insisted was the cold-blooded killer of 36-year-old cab driver and married father of three Jean François. McGee claimed that François had offered her a free cab ride in exchange for sex. Before shooting him, she had given him a blessing and a kiss. Nolan agreed that François had done something wrong, but argued that he didn’t deserve to be killed. McGee claimed that when she refused François’s offer, he slapped her and ordered her out of the cab. That, according to McGee, was when she shot François. Nolan didn’t believe this story. To him, it seemed especially odd that, after killing François, McGee went to a lounge where she drank and played pool for several hours.
McGee was represented in the case by the flamboyant public defender from the Homicide Task Force, Marijane Placek. Placek hated to lose and didn’t mind defending the most unsavory people. Placek used McGee’s previous experience of sexual assault to claim that the young woman had PTSD, which can cause memory problems. This, in Placek’s view, explained why McGee went to the lounge after the shooting: She had already forgotten what had happened.
When officers found François, he was inside “a crumpled Chevy on the sidewalk” and was pronounced dead at the hospital (239). He had been shot in the cheek. A business card in François’s pocket “led detectives to his employer, a livery service at 79th and Colfax” (239). Another driver, a friend of the dead cabbie’s, said he had seen François on the night he was killed, “parked near the livery office, with a woman in the front seat” (239). He lent François $10 so he could “take the woman to a nearby motel, the Skyview” (239). At the Skyview, detectives found out that François had registered alone for a room. Two days after François was killed, the police had no suspects until, “in the predawn hours,” they “got a call reporting a girl with a gun to her head on East 75th Street” (239). The girl was Leslie McGee, who had been pacing and holding a .357 revolver “in her mouth and against her temple” (239). When officers arrived, she announced that she had shot her boyfriend in the face because he was beating her. The police took her to Jackson Park Hospital “for psychiatric evaluation” (239). McGee claimed she had gotten the gun from her father. Police removed McGee from the hospital and took her to their headquarters, where they got her confession. McGee claimed she had intended to shoot a boyfriend named “Melvin,” but ended up killing François due to his harassment. The police doubted her story.
McGee then claimed she dropped the gun in a garbage can and ran to a busy street three blocks away. Another stranger driving by offered her a ride, which she accepted. She claimed his name was “Mike” and she went with him to the lounge. After several hours there, she began to worry about her fingerprints on the gun and told Mike she needed to drive back to get it. He drove her eight miles back near the crime scene so McGee could retrieve the gun, which she took back to the lounge. “Melvin” happened to walk into the lounge, wanting to reconcile with McGee. She left and spent the night with him. McGee signed her confession. No one questioned the holes in her story, including whether she knew Melvin’s last name so he could be questioned. The prosecutor’s office approved a first-degree murder charge.
The rumor mill in the Haitian American community on the Southside reported that McGee and François “had been involved for months” (241). According to François’s common-law wife, Elizabeth August, her husband frequently committed infidelity and was a batterer. Placek, however, wanted to avoid “the battered-woman defense” (242), knowing that it didn’t usually work.
McGee wasn’t an adult at the time she shot François, but the charge of murder made her eligible to be tried as an adult. The Juvenile Court of Cook County had opened in Chicago in 1899 and was the first of its kind in the world. Initially, the court had been geared toward rehabilitation: It aimed to determine why the young person had committed the crime and how to ensure no other crimes would be committed.
Nolan was concerned that François’s sexually predatory behavior could have convinced the jury to sympathize with McGee. He wanted them to know McGee had a tattoo on her calf of a hand holding a penis—which he believed would suggest to the jury that she wasn’t as innocent as the defense claimed. Placek wanted to withhold the detail for a different reason: The jury might have convicted McGee to demonstrate that they were morally superior to her.
Placek was going to go for a second-degree murder conviction—“formerly known as manslaughter” (248), which McGee’s older half-brother had been convicted of not long before her trial. If convicted of second-degree murder, McGee would have been sentenced to only four years, and a judge could have reduced this to probation. Her case might also have been sent back to juvenile court for sentencing, which would have ensured her release by her 21st birthday. Placek, however, had to rely on the PTSD defense to convince the jury to render this verdict. McGee, though, didn’t want to testify about her history of sexual abuse, which Placek understood, given how difficult it is to talk about such experiences. Still, Placek was going to claim PTSD based on McGee’s supposed abduction experience—not her childhood sexual abuse. McGee was willing to testify about the abduction.
On the trial’s second day, McGee was “dressed like a private school student” (250). McGee took the stand and claimed that a man in North Chicago had kidnapped her after “[walking] to a neighborhood pay phone to call her mother” (251). She claimed her attacker was a West Indian man who “started smoking cocaine” while holding her at both knife and gunpoint (251). He threatened to set McGee on fire; while recalling this last detail, McGee began to cry. She continued narrating the account, but almost inaudibly, and in a flat voice. What Placek’s second chair, Camille Calabrese, didn’t ask McGee was how she could have pled with her attacker—as she claimed she did—if he had gagged her, which she also claimed. Calabrese also didn’t ask how McGee could have seen the man with a lighter if she was blindfolded, as she had previously stated.
The North Chicago police, however, did report a 911 call from a woman who hysterically told the operator that she “had been abducted at gunpoint by a Black man with a Jamaican accent, who forced her into the basement of an apartment building” (251). She claimed he had raped her “twice. Or three times” (251). When police arrived at the scene, they found masking tape and other materials that one would use during a kidnapping. They also found rock cocaine. A neighbor reported hearing a woman “yelling during the night” but was unsure “whether she was laughing or crying” (252).
A psychiatrist who interviewed McGee in jail said McGee did show signs of PTSD, particularly in her demonstrations of feeling the need to be “on her guard around men” (253). Aside from this affliction, the psychiatrist noted that McGee also had bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. When McGee recounted her abduction to the doctor, she neglected to mention that she had been raped. The prosecutor’s psychiatrist testified that drug use was McGee’s true problem. Placek had a second psychiatrist take the stand, who reasserted the diagnosis of the defense’s first witness psychiatrist—although he only reviewed the records and reports from the case and never spoke with McGee.
The attorneys gave their closing arguments, in which Placek asserted that McGee had acted in self-defense. Placek didn’t mention the North Chicago abduction story, recognizing the holes in it. The jury deliberated and found McGee guilty of first-degree murder. McGee yawned as Deputy Rhodes escorted her out of the courtroom. Judge Locallo sentenced McGee to 20 years because she had no previous criminal record and he believed she could have been rehabilitated. He concluded that the murder had resulted from “an unfortunate set of circumstances” (257).
McGee was allowed a visit with her father, and the two held each other for nearly 10 minutes. James McGee expressed concern about what prison would do to his still impressionable daughter. He also wondered whether he had disciplined her “too harshly,” claiming that, while he had been “tough on both his kids” (257), he was especially tough on Leslie due to her tendency to run away from home. McGee insisted she would use her time in prison wisely.
Judge Locallo later admitted that he didn’t know what the truth was in the McGee case, but he asserted that no matter what the details of the story were, McGee had still killed François. The jury didn’t believe McGee’s abduction story. Instead, they suspected McGee had been staying at a drug house. Still, they felt sorry for her, figuring that she “was a street kid who’d probably been selling her body for drugs since she was twelve or thirteen” (258). They didn’t think that François was a good person, but according to the law, they had to convict McGee of first-degree murder because she could have exited the car without causing any harm to herself or to François. The foreman who reported the jury’s deliberation added that the jury wished they had some say regarding what happened to a defendant after conviction because all of them would’ve preferred sending McGee to a psychiatric facility.
McGee was assigned to a maximum-security facility, where all those sentenced to 16 years or more went.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Prejudice”
In Courtroom 500, Judge Locallo and the case’s attorneys were “interviewing potential jurors for the Frank Caruso trial” (260). Locallo was hoping the trial would exemplify “color-blind justice” (260). Attorneys, however, often believe jurors are more likely to sympathize with a defendant of their own race. Therefore, when lawyers strike potential jurors, they often do so on a racial basis. They do this despite a 1986 Supreme Court decision, in Batson v. Kentucky, that attorneys have to give “a race-neutral reason for dismissing a juror” (260). In his dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall accurately predicted that the decision would only prompt attorneys to adopt phony reasons for striking jurors, which was precisely what happened. Very often, prosecutors strike Black jurors from jury selection, using reasons ranging from their being “too young, too old, unemployed, [or] overeducated” (260).
In the Caruso case, it was white people who the prosecutors Robert Berlin and Ellen Mandeltort struck as potential jurors. Ed Genson, Caruso’s defense attorney, struck only Black people from the jury. He admittedly wanted “as many white men as he could get” (261), believing that they were most likely to be objective. The final selections led to a jury with three white men and five people of color, but only two Black women. The other jurors of color were Latinx and Pakistani American.
Lenard Clark didn’t testify at the trial because he had no memory of his attack. Berlin was on vacation when he learned of his assignment to the case. The photos he had seen of Clark’s attack disgusted him, but he knew the photos would be helpful in winning his case. Genson acknowledged that there should be “sympathy and justice for Lenard,” though Genson also wanted “sympathy and justice for someone who was charged with a crime he did not commit” (263).
Clevan Nicholson took the witness stand and recounted meeting William Jaramillo and “playing football with him and his cousins” (264). Just then, he, Jaramillo, and Lenard Clark were confronted by a young white guy on a nearby street. When Mandeltort asked Nicholson to descend from the witness stand and identify the young man, Nicholson walked over to Caruso and stopped in front of him. Caruso could not bring himself to look at Nicholson. The witness said Caruso “hit him behind his ear” and demanded that Clark get off his bike. He next recalled seeing Caruso “hit Lenard in the head,” causing the boy’s head to “snap backward into the wall behind him” (265).
William Jaramillo next took the witness stand. He corroborated the details of Nicholson’s story and added that Caruso walked up to him and asked him what he was looking at. Both Nicholson and Jaramillo initially misidentified Victor Jasas as the primary attacker.
Genson didn’t learn until later that Jaramillo had been arrested two weeks before his testimony for committing vandalism with two other young men in August 1998. The prosecutors claimed that they didn’t know about Jaramillo’s arrest during Caruso’s trial. Genson didn’t believe this.
During the trial, Frank Caruso Sr. stood in the hallway, clutching a Bible. His hair had quickly greyed, which some people cynically attributed to hair dye—not stress. His wife, Sherry, lingered nearby with “a rosary in one hand [and] a bottle of nitroglycerin pills in the other” (269).
Rocco LaMantia, a codefendant in the elder Frank Caruso’s 1982 extortion case, claimed he saw the beating of Clark and that Frank Jr. didn’t participate. He attributed the beating to “some other Bridgeport kids” he hoped would be “caught and punished one day” (269). Conversely, LaMantia defended “most of the assaults on blacks in Bridgeport,” which he claimed to witness (269). According to LaMantia, these beatings were only “attempts to keep the neighborhood safe” (269). He refused to believe white Bridgeport residents were racist for wanting to protect “[their] own” (269). He went on to characterize Black men as irresponsible, murderous, and guilty of raping women and neglecting children. LaMantia, however, had his own criminal history, including being charged with murdering his girlfriend 17 years earlier.
Thomas Simpson, another friend of Caruso’s, testified that he recalled nothing about the beating of Lenard Clark. Simpson was only 25 but had already been convicted of various crimes. Judge Locallo kept Simpson under guard due to worries over Richard DeSantis’s disappearance and Mike Cutler’s murder. Simpson’s refusal to testify worried Genson, who brought him to the witness stand due to an interview in which Simpson had said that he was around at the time of the attack but didn’t see anyone get hit and didn’t recall hearing Caruso say that he wanted to beat up any Black people. He only incriminated Caruso in his grand jury testimony because the police threatened to send Simpson back to prison.
Simpson’s smug refusal to testify annoyed the jury. Detective Stanley Turner, the primary detective on the case, testified to deny “Simpson’s accusations of coercion, many of which were aimed at him” (273). Turner was an African American man who had joined the police department after high school. He had a life-long aversion to bullies, which was the thing that annoyed him the most about the Caruso case—the way Caruso Jr. picked on Lenard Clark and his friends. Turner insisted that he “didn’t threaten to charge Simpson with the beating” and “didn’t feed him a story” (273). In addition, he had not ignored Simpson’s requests for a lawyer; the young man never asked for a lawyer. Also, “suspects are allowed to pick their position in lineups” and Jasas and Caruso had chosen to stand in the same spot (273). He believed several Bridgeport youths had been involved in the beatings of Clark and Nicholson. If Turner was right, this meant that Nicholson and Jaramillo had lied by saying only Caruso was responsible. Turner did think Caruso was the ringleader in the group. Turner stated Caruso had a reputation for bullying behavior.
The next person to testify was 38-year-old Jeffrey Gordon, the computer consultant who had called the police during the beating. He claimed that he had seen Lenard Clark getting beaten up and had then seen the boy fall to the ground. He said he had screamed for the young men to leave Clark alone and threatened to call the police. Someone in the crowd tried to intimidate him into not talking to the police about what he witnessed.
Later, two young Black men testified that Caruso had “used racial epithets against them in 1995” (276). The prosecutors presented Judge Locallo with a number of other alleged “assaults and batteries” that Caruso may have committed in Bridgeport, though he had never been charged. Caruso Sr. acknowledged that his son had “a little Bridgeport attitude,” but argued that this attitude didn’t mean he was guilty of the beating (277). Caruso Sr. was particularly irritated with Mandeltort, whom he nicknamed “Little Miss Auschwitz” (278). Mandeltort was bothered by how the Carusos seemed to be trying to manipulate Wanda McMurray, Lenard’s mother, and asked Judge Locallo to order them to stay away from her. Bruno Caruso—Frank, Jr’s paternal uncle—worried that his nephew would be killed by the prison’s Black residents if found guilty. Supposedly, Bruno was funding his nephew’s defense.
The lawyers gave their closing arguments, with the prosecution doing as much as it could to remind the jury of Lenard Clark’s brutal beating and to characterize Caruso as a violent thug. Genson attempted to convince the jury that beating someone “isn’t attempted murder unless you intend to kill him” (279). In the end, Frank Caruso was found “guilty of aggravated battery” (282). Judge Locallo set his sentencing for the following month. He revoked Caruso’s bond and ordered him into custody. For the media, Locallo emphasized the conviction to help ensure that there wouldn’t be public unrest.
One of the jurors, a white man, admitted that he and the other jurors were upset there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Caruso on the attempted murder charge. The Pakistani American juror, Atif Sheikh, was bothered by the acquittal, even though he had agreed to it. He imagined what things would have been like if a Black kid had beaten up Caruso. In the reverse scenario, he was certain that there would have been a conviction for attempted murder. Ironically, both the prosecution and defense claimed their respective victories, feeling they had each had won something—Caruso was convicted, but not on the most serious charge.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Blame the Po-lice”
Eleven days after the Caruso trial ended, Judge Locallo rejected Leroy Orange’s petition “for a hearing on his torture allegations” (285). He made this choice on the basis of Orange’s filing “inconsistent affidavits” (285). Also, in his formal confession, Orange claimed he had been treated well at the police station. The fact that other suspects had made similar claims of torture at Area 2 did nothing to convince Locallo that Orange’s charges were valid. He found it hard to believe that Orange hadn’t acknowledged that he had been abused as soon as he came into contact with a judge. The author reminded Locallo that Orange had, in fact, spoken up about the torture; Locallo then noted that there was no physical evidence of torture. Furthermore, he was unconvinced that former Commander Burge had ever tortured anyone at Area 2, believing that the city’s admission of torture was merely “political” and that Burge was fired to deter lawsuits. Burge, Locallo insisted, “was a sacrificial lamb” (287).
Chapters 15-17 Analysis
In narrating Leslie McGee’s murder case, Bogira explores the impacts of gender bias on the criminal justice system. What initially reads as a tale of a bad romance that became lethal becomes a tale of an underaged girl’s sexual assault by François and many other men in her community—including the lounge owner who hired McGee to work as a cocktail waitress and the strangers who routinely offered her car rides. The specter looming over the McGee case, which Deputy Rhodes mentioned, was McGee’s secret of past sexual trauma. The jury may have been more sympathetic to McGee if she chose this defense, given that it signaled the start of all her subsequent troubles, but to use this defense would have required McGee to relive her traumatic experiences, risking further trauma. Meanwhile, McGee’s lawyers were aware of how easily women like McGee could be disbelieved or blamed for their own abuse.
Nolan’s effort to convince the jury that McGee was a cold-blooded criminal and possible sex worker, as indicated by her pornographic tattoo, reveals that he and other Chicago officials working in criminal justice were less interested in understanding the factors that lead minors to commit crimes than they were in securing convictions, further evidence of The Influences of Corruption and Politics on Criminal Courts. Marijane Placek’s open disregard for McGee’s mental illness, contrasted with the jury’s sympathy but inability to get McGee the help she clearly needed, was further evidence of this systemic apathy.
Bogira uses McGee’s case to illustrate the damage that sexual abuse can cause to a teenage girl’s psyche, while also showing how sexism can impact how juries decide cases and how judges may sentence defendants. Her claims became less credible when she was 18, which was likely why the defense had dressed her to seem younger.
In the McGee case, both the prosecution and defense were correct: McGee’s drug use, mental disorders, and past traumas coalesced in creating an individual with severe mental health challenges. McGee’s seemingly unemotional reaction to her sentence—as if she was resigned to it—suggested a woman who had long ago failed to summon up any emotional reaction to her circumstances.
Similarly, during Frank Caruso Jr.’s case, his parents attempted to present themselves as good Catholics and good parents distressed by their son standing trial. Defense attorney Ed Genson, too, tried to suggest the possibility of Caruso not being dealt with fairly. In jury selection, he made the suggestion that Black jurors could not be objective in cases involving racism—a racist statement in itself, and an attitude that has long contributed to The Injustices of the Criminal Justice System.
Rocco LaMantia, a witness for the defense, emblematizes the racism present in Chicago's white working-class neighborhoods. LaMantia demonized Black men while disregarding his own history of misogyny and domestic violence. LaMantia was emblematic of many of the residents of Bridgeport, complicit with the hate crimes committed in the community’s name. De facto segregation had broken the city up into enclaves defined by race, and white residents often looked at nearby Black neighborhoods with fear and hostility. Feeling threatened by the prospect of the Black people just across the Dan Ryan Expressway encroaching upon their neighborhood, the residents of the neighborhood protected Caruso, as they believed he had protected them. Frank Caruso Sr.’s attempts to deny that he had ever imparted stereotypical views on his son were undermined by his having nicknamed Ellen Mandeltort “Little Miss Auschwitz”—an antisemitic moniker that unfairly took aim at her for doing her job.
Locallo’s attempts to ensure sensitivity and the proper meting out of justice during the Bridgeport case were somewhat upended by his framing of Officer Burge as an innocent cop harmed by persistent allegations of torture against Black suspects. Locallo’s fierce aversion to acknowledging torture indicates that his unwavering faith in the justice system wouldn’t permit him to engage with its flaws.
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