• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 206 0

up knives disguised as various items, including a lipstick container, a lighter, and a house key), you may spot a jacketless gentleman in white shirt and tie chatting with passersby. He’s the chief judge, Paul Biebel, who makes a point every morning to position himself at the building’s entrance so that he can talk with public defenders, prosecutors, police officers, and sheriff’s deputies. On this particular day, a court administrator pauses to alert Judge Biebel to the rumor that there’s a man in the building practicing law without a license. The judge’s brother, a defense attorney, stops to say hello. (His other siblings—three brothers and a sister—are all in law enforcement.) Two women pass by in T-shirts that have wedding pictures of Tina Ball on them. Ball was the mother of seven and a flagger at a highway construction site; she had been hit and killed by a drunk driver, Thomas Harris, who had four previous DUI convictions. These two women had been friends of Ball, and the message on the back of their T-shirts urged Harris’s conviction for murder. “There’s a passion in this place,” says Biebel.

Two things are immediately apparent to newcomers here. All the defendants, if they’re not coming directly from the jail and thus appearing in their olive-colored jail garb, are dressed in casual attire. In the summer, men appear in shorts, women in miniskirts. Usually the men arrive in T-shirts, oversized jeans, and basketball shoes. Once, a defendant accused of rape appeared in a black leather jacket with PIMPING AIN’T EASY embroidered on the back. A private investigator who spends much of his time at 26th Street told me, “They’re making a statement: ‘I don’t respect this setting enough to pull out my best outfit.’ ” (The police department’s tactical officers, for their part, are immediately recognizable by their dress as well: usually, shirts and jackets bearing the logos of sports teams.) The other notable quality about the defendants here is that they are overwhelmingly African-American and Hispanic. As one attorney told me, “26th Street makes it look like Chicago’s an entirely minority town.” Roughly eighty-eight percent of the eleven thousand awaiting trial in the neighboring county jail are black and Hispanic. There are those who argue, “Well, that’s who’s committing all the crimes,” but given that an estimated seventy percent of the cases are for possession or selling of narcotics, the racial makeup of the defendants seems rather lopsided. Blacks or Hispanics, after all, are no more or less likely to use drugs than whites. Judge Michael Toomin, who has served twenty-three years on the bench, and who displays a copy of the Magna Carta in his courtroom (along with his high school equivalency certificate), complains that the drug cases “are nickel-and-dime stuff.” What’s more, he says, only forty-five slots are available in rehab programs for defendants with drug problems. “That’s abysmal,” he sighs.

I wait for Lyon in a third-floor courtroom where the judge has yet to arrive. Two young men lean over the back of their bench and listen intently to another man, who looks to be in his forties. His head is shaved and he has a significant paunch. He’s on trial for heroin possession. “I haven’t been in trouble in five years, but you can’t beat the system,” he lectures, his audience nodding their heads in affirmation. “They give me two years, I’ll take it.” (“Sometimes the prosecution is right,” Lyon says, “which is why God made guilty pleas.”) A woman across the aisle twirls a cigar in her fingers. “Let’s smoke this blunt,” she jokes. The courtroom erupts in laughter.

Lyon arrives, dressed smartly in a navy blue suit and sensible shoes. When she wants to soften her appearance, she’ll wear pink or baby blue. So that her size doesn’t appear intimidating, she’ll kneel by the side of witnesses or joke about her height with jurors. “Nobody would think twice about a big guy,” she says.

There are two kinds of courtrooms in the building: old and new. The old courts are deep, cavernous spaces in which the judge’s bench is thirty feet