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By Root 208 0

from the first row of spectator benches. You have to lean forward and listen hard to hear the exchanges between the judge and lawyers. The newer courts are smaller, and have a floor-to-ceiling bulletproof glass wall separating the spectators from the proceedings, which are piped in by an audio system. It’s like being in a glass bubble. These rooms are so small that it’s difficult for lawyers to have a conversation among themselves or with their clients without being overheard by the jury. Once, in a robbery case, a frustrated defense attorney put his head down on the table during a cross-examination of a witness. “Wake up, wake up, you got to do something,” his client whispered into his ear. The jury could hear every word. We’re in one of these newer courtrooms, and the court clerk permits me to sit in the jury box along with three uniformed police officers waiting to testify in another case. When the judge arrives, he asks me who I am. I tell him, and assure him that his clerk had okayed my presence. “This is my courtroom,” he scolds. “Not my clerk’s.” Later, during a break, I tell the clerk that perhaps I should go back to the judge’s chambers to apologize. “Apologize?” she laughs. “He’s just got his underpants on too tight this morning.”

Lyon’s client, Oily Thomas, has been sentenced to seventy years for shooting a rival drug dealer on the city’s South Side. Thomas was identified by four witnesses, and a baseball cap similar to the one worn by Thomas was found at the scene. But two of the witnesses have recanted, and one of them has testified that he was paid cocaine by the victim’s family so that they could pin the murder on Thomas and get him off their turf. Lyon tells me she also has an eyewitness who is willing to testify that she saw the crime, and that she had told the police they had the wrong man. Lyon is trying to get Thomas a new trial; this morning, she asks for a little extra time to respond to the prosecution’s opposition to dismiss the appeal, and her request is granted. Lyon’s cases are procedural today, and so her usual theatrics are absent. She once handcuffed one of her wrists to a pipe along the courtroom wall to demonstrate to a jury how her client had to sit for three days while awaiting an interrogation. Another time, she placed her client in the center of the courtroom, and with masking tape measured off the size of the small room he’d been placed in by the police; then she had all five of the officers who’d been present for the interrogation enter the space. She wanted to demonstrate to the jury the intimidating nature of the setup, but her demonstration proved more effective than she had bargained for when her client started shaking involuntarily.

On the day I joined her, her other client was facing charges of shooting and killing a liquor store proprietor. It seemed like a straightforward case. Glen Jones had been accused of entering the store with two friends intending to rob it. The store owner grabbed for his pistol, which he was wearing on a holster. Shooting ensued, and as Jones fled, he allegedly fired his gun, killing the owner. It was all caught on videotape. “At first blush, it looks like there’s nowhere to go, that it’s a dead-bang loser,” Lyon tells me. “But things aren’t necessarily as they seem.” Lyon, with the help of a private investigator, is working on the theory that the store owner was dealing in guns, and that Jones and his cohorts had come back to the store to return a defective weapon. An argument ensued, Lyon believes, and the store owner began shooting first. Lyon thinks she can make the case that her client acted in self-defense.

This is, indeed, a place where the world can seem topsy-turvy. Once, a man accused of double murder chose to represent himself and told the jury that he turned himself in after hearing he was wanted on the TV news. Only problem was he had also argued that he had been in custody at the time of the murder. Nonetheless, the jury acquitted him.

Of course what you see in this building is a rather small but influential corner of the city; and,