26th and Cal: Snapshots from the Criminal Courts Building

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An assistant state’s attorney tells the judge that the defendant’s criminal background includes six felonies and five failures to appear.

And, in a tone that resembles a game-show host introducing the next contestant, an assistant public defender offers information gathered before the court call from arrestees held in bullpens beneath the courtroom.

”He’s 34 years of age, he lives with family members, he has a high school diploma, he’s unemployed, but he’s a life-long resident,” he said.

The judge sets a bond amount and calls out the name of the next arrestee, who appears by closed-circuit television feeds from the courtroom to the holding area.

”It’s just continuous,” said Jean O’Malley, a court reporter who sometimes works in Central Bond Court. ”It’s a tiring call. After I’m done with bond court I’m exhausted. It’s constant; there’s just no break. It’s fast, it’s definitely quick. It’s a little different than most other courtrooms.”

A grand secret

The room tucked away in a corner of the fourth floor of the courthouse is off-limits to defendants and their attorneys.

Since 1929, the octagonal grand jury room — with its original glass and ornamental metal ceiling — has been used for the same purpose, said James Tansey, who serves as a supervisor of the state’s attorney’s grand jury unit.

Tansey, a former Catholic priest who has spent 22 years of his career as a prosecutor in the grand jury unit, said he has been in front of 265 grand juries.

”I probably have indicted about 50,000 cases in 22 years,” he said. On this first Monday in October, some 27 Cook County residents took their places at thick oak desks with tiered seating, where the 16 grand jurors and 11 alternates would spend the next five weeks.

”You are guests of Judge Biebel,” Tansey said. ”He expects all of us to treat you with dignity, and to appreciate the service you’re about to render to the County of Cook.”

The grand jurors, who had been sworn in by Biebel that morning, after prosecutors had interviewed the venire, replaced the panel that served during September, when they returned 783 indictments.

Tansey, in a sermon-like fashion, delivered an overview of the criminal justice system, the various powers and functions of the grand jury, and the sorts of crimes they might hear about.

”It’s the grand jury alone that deliberates whether or not there is probable cause for cases to go to the trial court,” Tansey told the jurors. When prosecutors write an indictment, and the grand jury foreperson signs a true bill, he added, ”that doesn’t mean John Doe is guilty. It means John Doe goes to court.”

The grand jury that begins its service with the first Monday of each month hears non-drug felony cases from throughout the city. In a room of the administration building’s 10th floor, a separate grand jury convenes a week later, hearing Cook County drug cases as well as non-drug related felony cases from the suburbs.

With one more week of service remaining, that separate ‘’special” grand jury had returned 619 indictments, Tansey said.

Usually, Tansey said, the number of indictments returned by the county’s two grand juries total about 1,700 per month.

At the start of his third day of service, one grand juror who had arrived early, a 54-year-old construction manager for a design company, marveled at the intricate detail in the architecture of the old room, where even a wall fan is believed to date back to the room’s original construction.

”Once you’re in here, it gives you a feeling of justice. This tells you, ‘Please, pay attention and listen,”’ he said. ”You walk in here and that’s it. The room itself directs you into the right frame of mind.”

Branch 66

Shortly before the noon Branch 66 call was heard in a lobby-level courtroom, where prosecutors offer daily narratives in some of the city’s more brutal crimes, George Grzeca put on his necktie in a hallway between the courtroom and a dimly lit lockup area, where he and another assistant public defender would find their newest clients.

”I’m out,” one assistant public defender shouted to the sheriff’s deputies waiting at a nearby desk, as she left the pale yellow chamber with cinder-block walls and metal benches bolted to the floor. She had been interviewing four men arrested on sex-related charges. ”We got a few live wires in there,” she said.

For Grzeca, a member of the public defender’s homicide task force for the past 20 of his 25 years at 26th Street, there would be only one new client from Branch 66 that day.

”Usually we have five or six and it’s like a madhouse down here,” said Grzeca, as he waited for a Spanish interpreter, to talk with his client before his bond hearing. From what he could determine, the client was a 64-year-old man who had been arrested recently in Fresno, Calif., on a charge of first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of a bartender almost 30 years ago on the West Side.

Branch 66 is the preliminary hearing courtroom for murders and sex crimes, but sees few preliminary hearings, lawyers said. Rather, it is the place where bail is set and where prosecutors often announce indictments.

One-by-one, defendants are called from the hallway near the lockup and approach the judge’s bench, where a prosecutor reads the facts of the cases against them. In the case of a 44-year-old man charged with failing to register as a sex offender, the assistant state’s attorney recited the facts from his 1989 conviction for aggravated criminal sexual assault, burglary and attempted murder, over the objection of the assistant public defender.

The defendant, the prosecutor said, had entered his landlord’s apartment under the premise of buying her television when he grabbed a steak knife, stabbed the 60-year-old woman repeatedly in the stomach, tied her to a bed, ransacked her apartment and returned to the bedroom, where he raped her.

After two decades of defending accused murderers and rapists, Grzeca said, ”nothing fazes me now.”

”Bad baby cases are really difficult,” he acknowledged. ”What you think today is a bad case, tomorrow is a worse one.”

The 33 lawyers on the public defender’s homicide task force typically handle between 15 and 20 pending murder cases at a time, with a third of them potential capital cases, said Michael J. Morrissey, director of Chicago operations for the public defender.

”We get all the bad ones,” Grzeca said. ”Usually, with our cases, there are videotaped statements, eyewitnesses — we’re always fighting from the gutter up.”

Back at his cluttered office, nicknamed ”The Swamp,” where Rolling Stones posters adorn the walls and a morgue photo of a dead man’s face had fallen out of a folder on the floor near his desk, Grzeca, 54, recalled some of the cases set to come up in court in the next week. There is the woman charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of her 2-year-old daughter who ingested a bottle of methadone the mother had been taking as part of her drug rehabilitation.

Another case involves a rash of shootings in Englewood.

And in another, Grzeca said, he planned to have a talk with an official on the administration building’s 10th floor, where psychologists had determined that one of his clients was mentally fit for trial.

”The guy goes out into bizarro world when I talk to him,” Grzeca said.

To the Fishbowls

From the lobby at 26th Street, dozens of prospective jurors in two single-file lines walked toward one of the felony trial courtrooms.

They passed the wall where a computerized printout of the names of the defendants scheduled to appear in the courthouse each day are posted.

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