26th and Cal: Snapshots from the Criminal Courts Building

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Additional groups of men and women on weekdays and on weekends land there from Chicago police squad wagons that drive into a loading area behind the courthouse. There, the new arrestees in street clothes are led to separate underground chambers, where they wait for a bond hearing.

From as early as 5 a.m., Dulaney said, most jail detainees with cases up in court are awakened, and led underground to the receiving dock of the jail’s Division Five. In the hours that follow, Dulaney said, sheriff’s deputies working the bridge take on the ”monumental” task of sorting and transporting the defendants to their courtrooms, then ”transferring possession of the bodies” back to the jail.

”I look at it number-wise,” Matek said. ”All my bodies have to match up with all my paperwork at the end of the day.”

Round-the-clock

On a clear day from the 14th floor of the administration building, prosecutors in the felony review unit can see north all the way to Evanston.

Their ”corner office” view from the top floor of the late-1970s building connected to the old courthouse offers a unique perspective of the city’s skyline. The view, one prosecutor pointed out, sometimes offers a glimpse of the steel mills of Indiana.

”On a clear day, this is the best view,” said Assistant State’s Attorney Michael Crowe. ”Sunrises and sunsets are excellent.”

Crowe should know. As a trial supervisor, he has worked the shifts of the felony review unit, which operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is the home base for teams of prosecutors who work 12-hour shifts to respond to round-the-clock calls of arrests from police throughout the city.

With the exception of some narcotics cases, police seeking to file felony charges against suspects are required to obtain the approval of a felony review attorney, said Robert Heilingoetter, one of the unit’s deputy supervisors.

”This is where everything begins,” Heilingoetter said.

A primary goal of the operation, he said, is to be aware of the amount of evidence on cases coming into the system.

For police, ”certainly, at least by their statistics, their goal is to have as many arrests as possible — to show they’re responding to crime in the city,” he said. ”Our goals are not just that we have evidence that someone committed a crime, but evidence we can present in court.

”We have to be prepared to respond. The 48 hours [from the time of an arrest] is running against us. Some witnesses have escaped into the darkness of night,” Heilingoetter said. ”We start assisting. We’re trying to ascertain whether we have enough evidence to charge somebody.”

Often, he said, the work doesn’t end when prosecutors make a determination that felony charges are appropriate, especially in the more serious murder cases.

”If we have another 24 hours before we have to charge, we’re trying to always gather as much evidence as possible,” Heilingoetter said. ”You can never have too much evidence.”

On a Thursday night, Crowe was among the assistant state’s attorneys working the felony review unit’s night shift. He was among those assigned to go to a police station on a moment’s notice, where he would conduct interviews with suspects, witnesses, and detectives.

”It can happen at 3 o’clock in the morning or 8 in the evening. It varies. There’s no predictability about this at all,” Crowe said.

In the 14th-floor wing, the unit keeps the original handwritten statements obtained from witnesses in pending cases, each one accompanied by a photo.

”We anticipate the potential for witnesses being uncooperative at trial,” said Michael J. Falagario, another deputy supervisor. ”People get intimidated; maybe they belong to the same gang as the defendant.”

Felony charges in less serious cases — such as car burglaries, residential burglaries, retail thefts, robberies, or gun cases — are approved or rejected by phone.

A dispatcher fielding calls to the unit asks a detective’s name, what police area he’s calling from, and what felony charges he’s seeking. Police reports are faxed to the unit, and a prosecutor returns the call.

On a retail theft case, for example, it could take 15 minutes to approve a felony charge, Heilingoetter said. On the other hand, he said, it can sometimes take months to file charges against a suspect in certain murder cases.

On that Thursday night, Assistant State’s Attorney Jesse Opdycke hangs up the phone, and shouts, ”Robbery approved.”

”Some of them are pretty simple. If you have a prior conviction for theft and you get caught shoplifting at Jewel, that’s a felony,” Opdycke said. ”Other cases become more complicated, when you have multiple defendants or witnesses or victims.”

Opdycke was assigned to phone cases for the night, after he had been paged to the office earlier that day to continue an investigation into whether felony child endangerment charges should be filed against a man who allegedly left a loaded gun in a bedroom where a 5-year-old boy accidentally shot himself in the face.

He had been handling that case the night before from Area 5 police headquarters, while the boy remained in critical condition with a gunshot wound above his eye and a bullet lodged in his head.

Since prosecutors eventually learned that the boy was expected to survive, felony charges were rejected.

”For child endangerment to be a felony, there has to be a death,” said Falagario, the supervisor who had guided Opdycke through the investigation.

Prosecutors like Crowe, who have worked the various shifts of the round-the-clock felony review unit from 26th Street, can get a fuller sense of the Criminal Courts Building’s ever-changing pulse.

”Within two months, we’ll have been here 16 full days. We’ll have seen the entire 24-hour cycle,” Crowe said.

”If you come here at 9:30 in the morning, this place is jam-packed with every type of humanity you can imagine. There’s lawyers, police, defendants, victims — some people not at their best. It’s just a swarming of humanity,” he said. ”But if you’re here after 3 o’clock in the morning it’s entirely different.

”At night, it seems there are people who exist only at night: the sheriff’s deputies at the gate for the parking lot; custodians coming through. It gets quiet sometimes. It’s a little eerie,” Crowe said. ”It’s actually not as intimidating at 9:30 at night as it is at 9:30 in the morning. It’s almost softer.”

Central Bond Court

The older brother of a scrawny 17-year-old slammed his fist into the palm of his hand as he saw the young man’s image appear on a television screen and listened for the details of a bond hearing that zipped by in less than 30 seconds.

Visibly frustrated, he left the courtroom gallery and walked into the lobby-level hallway with his mother, who reached out her hands to a man who had been working inside the courtroom and said, ”Please — can you help us?”

Eventually, the woman learned what had transpired in those seconds of Central Bond Court. Her son had been arrested the night before, she was told, on charges of breaking into a home. She would need to come up with $7,000 to get him out of jail.

In the same courtroom where Judge Biebel assigns new cases to the felony trial courtrooms each morning — a process done randomly by computer — and where people accused of rapes and murders make their first court appearance — judges assigned to the First Municipal District set bonds for an estimated 100 to 150 arrestees each day.

Relatives and friends of the newly arrested gather for Central Bond Court on long wooden benches behind a glass partition that separates the spectators’ gallery from the well of the stark courtroom, where the proceedings take on a rapid-fire pace from the start.

Like an auctioneer, Judge Laura Sullivan maintained the bond court beat: ”Finding of probable cause, possession of a controlled substance, Class 4, 2.8 grams, Oct. 24, Branch 42, defendant demands trial. Background?”

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