Drug Crazy

How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out

by Mike Gray (more about this book and author)

Chapter 2: May It Please the Court
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It was late afternoon when Frank Goff and Scotty Freeman cleared the courtroom and descended to the marble lobby of the old Cook County Criminal Courts building. As they passed through the line of guards and metal detectors and stepped out into the icy December blast, they witnessed yet another court phenomenon unique to our time: the arrival of the night shift.

Cook County runs the largest court system in the world[1] and these days it's practically spilling into the streets. Over the past two decades the case load has doubled, and then doubled again. But it would be political suicide to tap the voters for enough cash to quadruple the court system, so the County Board solved the problem by telling the judges, clerks, and lawyers to pitch in and work a little harder.

In a desperate effort to ease the docket, presiding judge Thomas Fitzgerald set up the first judicial night shift in the history of Cook County.[2] In October of 1989, five associate judges were yanked out of traffic court and sent to 26th &
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Cal where they began hearing felony cases from 4:00 in the afternoon to midnight. Since the overload was driven mainly by the war on drugs—and since the regular roster of judges was fed up with drug cases—these courts would hear drug cases exclusively. Over the next 18 months, the night shift ate through 14,000 cases and simply slipped further and further behind. In 1991 any pretense that this was a temporary solution was set aside when Fitzpatrick added three more courtrooms.[3]

To a lot of people, the unsettling thing about the change of shift at 4:00 p.m. is the sudden change in racial complexion. During the day, traffic in and out of the building more or less reflects the city's multi-ethnic nature. But when night falls the white faces seem to melt into the shadows and the corridors fill with blacks and Hispanics. There is an occasional white face among the accused, but it's always some luckless minor trader copping a plea. There will be no kingpins tried in night drug court.  Black or white, if you can afford a La Salle Street lawyer you will not be subjected to this cut-rate jurisprudence. This is strictly for those caught-in-the-act low-end traffickers who, by the sheer weight of their numbers, are threatening to grind the American criminal justice system to a halt.

The defense for these arrestees will be mounted by somebody like Tim Lohraff, a young idealist paid by the state to represent the indigent. Lohraff grew up on the far side of the Lake at Buchanan, Michigan, and when he went off to college he had every intention of becoming a teacher.  He was studying English literature at the University of Michigan when a summer job as a researcher exposed him to the romance of defending the defenseless. So he got a law degree from Illinois and he's been working for the Cook County public defender's office ever since.[4]

Lohraff, a white man of German and Irish extraction, is one of those people concerned about the perception of justice in night drug court. “I've been here a year,” he says. “I've probably handled a thousand drug cases. I've had maybe fifteen or twenty
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 white clients. I constantly ask the state's attorneys—‘No white people sell or use drugs?’  I mean I'm not trying to go into statistics, but how does that play out night after night after night?”

At the cluttered defense table in Room 302, Lohraff sifts through a mountain of folders and finds the next case. “This guy is kind of a quintessential example of what goes on in here every night,” says Lohraff.  “In this city most of the drugs are controlled through street gangs. They're organized in these military hierarchies, and the actual dudes who are on the corner hawking the stuff are the lowest of the low.  They're the disposable throwaway soldiers, the foot soldiers, and that's who this guy is.”

Dwayne Thomas[5] is an 18-year-old black male who was already on probation for a drug offense when a couple of officers in a squad car saw him walking south on Ashland carrying a paper bag. When he spotted the cops he took off and ducked into the alley. They caught him, checked the alley, found the paper bag, and inside was a handgun. A felon with a gun is a violation of probation.  “He wanted to go to trial,” says Lohraff, “but you're really screwed when it comes to violations of probation. Winning one is next to impossible.” So Lohraff quickly cut a deal. Tonight will be the final act in a script written last week by Lohraff and the state's attorney. If the judge agrees to the terms, the whole show will be wrapped up in about fifteen minutes.

Lohraff looks over the probation officer's pre-sentencing report. It says when Dwayne Thomas was asked if he was a gang member, he answered, “I been in the G.D.s all my life.”

“That's an interesting quote,” says Lohraff. “It wasn't, ‘I been in the gang since I was 11 or 12,’ but, ‘I been in the G.D.s all  my life.’ His mother was an alcoholic, his father had left. The G.D.s were—his family, you know?  I mean the day he walks out of the joint, you know he's gonna be back on the same street doing the exact same thing he's doin' now.”

Dwayne Thomas is led in from the holding cell, and in his sagging Cook County jumpsuit, it’s hard to picture him as a member of the fearsome Gangster Disciples. Short, slightly built,
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downcast eyes, he looks far too young to be standing at the open maw of the state’s awesome judicial engine.  Tim Lohraff  has done the best he could but it wasn’t much. Dwayne Thomas, after all, is only one of 120 clients Lohraff is currently representing. “What we do in night drug court is triage.  Every file I get I write on the outside of the file what the charge is—kind of like a doctor would, you know—cancer, heart attack, stubbed toe.  If it's a Class X and the guy's never been arrested before and he’s lookin' at six years, I’m gonna fight that one harder than the Class 4 where the guy can get probation.  The people who are not looking at as much time basically get the shaft.”

Dwayne Thomas glances up at Judge Dennis Porter. Black robed, sharp eyed, efficient, Porter is leafing through the paperwork trying to grasp the essence of the story as quickly as possible, because this is one of some 650 cases now pending on his call. But Porter has a reputation as one of the best judges in night court—the smartest, the most fair.  “He knows the law cold,” says Lohraff.  “When Porter rules against us, we're pretty well screwed.”

Judge Porter glances up from the paperwork to inspect the subject of all this legal effort. He nods to Lohraff.

“Judge, Mr. Thomas is standing before you, he is 18 years old and comes from a home where his father left. His mother is an alcoholic who, according to Mr. Thomas, is the one that started him drinking.  He stated that he has a problem with alcohol, he uses it almost every day. He’s 18, Judge. We would ask the court to consider that he still has potential to reform his life. The state has agreed to three years in exchange for the defendant’s plea of guilty, and in light of that recommendation the defendant would enter a plea of guilty.”

The judge looks up. “All right, Mr. Thomas, by pleading guilty you are giving up certain rights, among them, you are giving up your right to a jury trial, a jury trial would be with twelve people who are registered voters, these twelve people come into the courtroom, listen to the trial, and they decide if the state has
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proven you guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  Any questions about what a jury trial is? All right, if you wish to plead guilty you will not have a jury trial, you can sign on that piece of paper your lawyer’s giving you...”

The words flow in a high pressure torrent like the legal disclaimers at the end of a car commercial as Judge Porter races to fulfill the requirements of the Constitution. Each staccato burst of legalese is punctuated by, "You understand?" Then finally, “Anything you want to tell me, Mr. Thomas, before I sentence you? All right, sentence of three years in the Illinois Department of Corrections...” He checks the documents. “You’ve been locked up since April 29th?  The defendant is credited with 197 days in custody. All right, good luck, Mr. Thomas.”

Eleven minutes, thirty-nine seconds. Not a record by any means but right in there.

The success of Cook County’s night drug courts immediately attracted the attention of the federal government, and the Justice Department looked into it in 1994 and issued a highly favorable report. But buried in the accolades were some troubling footnotes. The researchers noticed that defendants often got probation but almost never got treatment: “This is a quick way to get rid of cases, but not necessarily in the best interest of defendants who have serious drug problems...” In other words, addicts who are given a pass on Monday will go back to the streets and get busted again on Tuesday, this time for violation of probation. Which, as Dwayne Thomas just discovered, is a cinch for three-to-five in Joliet. Thus probation, instead of an act of compassion, becomes a trap door that guarantees a trip to the pen. “They give them just enough rope to hang themselves,” says Lohraff.

The other unsettling note in the government report was the commentary from the people who work there, the lawyers, probation officers, and judges: “Night court is a production line...” “... a cattle call...” “...a mill, not a court of law.” But these reservations were far outweighed by the practical

advantages of cranking out 14,000 verdicts a year without any new real estate. Several other cities are preparing to follow Cook County into the night.

The man who, more than anybody else, is responsible for the spectacular caseload at 26th & Cal is a decorated Vietnam vet who did a tour with the first helicopter unit sent into that ill-starred war. Still lean and hungry, Commander Mike Hoke is now the top narc in the Chicago Police Department. His operation is based in an old gymnasium southwest of the Loop. The reason the narcotics squad is headquartered in the departmental gym is an interesting sidebar in itself. The building needed a new roof and the narcotics squad had a barrel of cash from confiscated drug assets. In the unerring logic of the City That Works, these two facts fit together hand in glove.

Set in the shadow of the Sox Park grandstands, the aging brick building offers no hint of its contents, and the three bearded guys in plaid shirts stashing their bowling satchels in the trunk of the blue Pontiac would not tip you off unless you were familiar with the habits of undercover cops. Up the narrow stairway, past the battery of secretaries at computer terminals, Mike Hoke issues orders from a panelled office lined with the wall plaques, photographs, and awards that speak of a career still on the move. At 45, he commands a company of 190 troops with a budget of $8 million, an operation that by itself is larger than most of the police departments in the country.

“I send out anywhere between two to ten teams a day,” says Hoke, “and we ride up to a corner where we've got a complaint.  And an undercover police officer gets out of the car, buys a small amount of narcotics, he gives a signal to an enforcement team, they ride up and take the person off to court.  It's a felony to deliver narcotics. Our conviction rate's 94 percent.”

But while this impressive level of success plays well downtown, Hoke himself is uneasy. He knows that practically everybody his guys will bring in tonight will be black or Hispanic. Like
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Lohraff, he finds this disturbing but he says there’s not a lot he can do about it. He is essentially running a fire department.  “We respond to our clientele, which is the citizens of Chicago. Most of our complaints come from the black community—somebody who can't wash his car or let his kids go outside and play because of the gunfire.  We have no open air drug markets that are manned by white people and we have probably a hundred of them that are manned by blacks.”

In other words, white crack dealers don’t stand on street corners. They deal behind closed doors over the kitchen table, or the bar, or the office, or the conference table. As one young sorority girl-turned-dealer said, “You wouldn’t believe the customers I had. Doctors, lawyers, business executives—all of them were white.”[6] But since this kind of terrain is inaccessible to guys in squad cars, the practical effect is for white middle- and upper-class crack users to pursue their habit unmolested while the inner-city dealers are harvested like wheat through a combine.

It would be nice to think that this racial tilt in drug enforcement was unique to the Windy City, but a glance at the headlines anywhere reveals that the Chicago experience permeates the criminal justice system. The overall U.S. numbers are astounding. While the National Institute on Drug Abuse says that far and away the vast majority of crack users are white—96 percent of the crack defendants in federal court are black or Hispanic. The U.S. District Court for Southern California has not prosecuted a single white person for crack in over five years. In 1992 there were no Federal prosecutions of whites for crack dealing in Chicago, or in Denver, Miami, Dallas or Boston. The states prosecute an occasional white crack dealer but the record there is better by only a point or two. California’s numbers for this period were identical to the federal docket—only 4 percent of the defendants were white.[7]

Mike Hoke was born and raised down on Chicago’s South Shore and he doesn’t need a University of Chicago economist to tell him what’s going on here. “When I grew up we had all these
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factories on the West Side that people, when you got out of school, could go work at, or the steel mills, or the army would take you.  Now all these factories are closed. The army is gonna quit recruiting inside Chicago come this year.  Dope dealing is probably the only growth industry inside Chicago.”

There is another insidious fault line in the rules that works against African Americans, and that is the legal distinction between crack and powdered cocaine.  Chemically, the two compounds are identical except that crack has been mixed with sodium bicarbonate. The process is so simple that any fifth-grader with a little cocaine and a can of baking soda can cook up a supply on the kitchen stove. But when the sodium and carbon atoms bond with the cocaine hydrochloride, the substance becomes infinitely more powerful, at least in the eyes of the law.

When the media discovered crack in 1985, it led to a feeding frenzy that whipped the country into a state of panic.[8]  Congress, with a proud history of draconian drug laws, pushed through some of the most draconian yet. Today, when the kitchen chemist mixes sodium bicarbonate with cocaine, he is simultaneously increasing his potential prison exposure by several orders of magnitude. Say you start with a fifth of an ounce of coke—the weight of  a couple of copper pennies. If you’re caught with that amount of powder (or even ten times that amount of powder) you’re probably risking a few weeks in jail. But the minute you combine that fifth of an ounce with two cents worth of baking soda, you’re looking at a mandatory minimum five years without parole.

The cocaine itself is no more powerful than it was before, but combining it with baking soda causes the end product to vaporize at a lower temperature, and that means you can smoke it. Inhaling these cocaine fumes gets you considerably higher than snorting the equivalent amount of powder. The impact on the brain is instantaneous—an immediate, maximum upper. The exact same effect used to be achieved by rock stars in the 1970s
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with a technique known as freebasing. The powdered cocaine was treated with ammonia to remove the acid, then dissolved in ether to produce pure crystals that could be smoked. But when you light matches in the presence of ether you run the risk of turning yourself into a human torch, as comedian Richard Pryor and countless others discovered. Crack, on the other hand, is non-explosive, easy to make, and cheap. An individual rock the size of a match head can go for as little as five bucks (roughly three times the value of the coke it contains) and it’s good for a instant trip to the cosmos. Unfortunately, easy come, easy go. The spectacular high is very, very brief. So if it happens to fill a void in your life, there is a tendency to spend every dime you can beg, borrow, or steal on the stuff.  The daughter of a West Coast oil company executive tried a hit in her college dorm one night and proceeded to run through a $200,000 trust fund in six months.[9]

But crack is the fast-food item on the drug menu, and it naturally appeals to the low end retail user who can’t afford to buy powder cocaine in the sanctity of the locker room. And while we have to assume that these new laws were not intentionally racist, the practical effect has been to focus our wrath on the poor and leave the suburban cocaine users to their own devices. Today—although most drug users in all categories are white—blacks run a 500 percent greater risk of being arrested for a drug offense.[10] 

Sitting behind his heavy oak desk on a fall day in 1993, Mike Hoke looks over the computer printout before sending it downtown. “For the first ten months of this year we've seized over 600 pounds of cocaine, 35 pounds of heroin, and two tons of marijuana.  We've locked up 3800 people now this year, and seized $3 million in cash.  Ten months. And we have put some of these places completely out of business.  But those are minor victories,” he shrugs.  “They're not major victories.” 

For an old combat hand like Hoke, this body count approach to the war on drugs conjures up unpleasant memories. It’s as if
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he senses a familiar aroma—the stench of the jungle. “This is a war that's not gonna be won on the streets of Chicago.”

In it’s heyday, the Aragon Ballroom was surrounded by Chicago’s upper-crust Jewish citizens—this is the North Shore, after all, only a couple of blocks in from the lake—but in the 1950s the Jewish community pulled up stakes and headed north to Skokie, leaving their magnificent old theaters and temples behind. Today, except for the wall of glittering highrises along Lake Shore Drive, the area is solidly African American and riddled with poverty. But the Aragon remains, and on a good weekend hundreds of white kids will stream in from the suburbs for bands like Nirvana and 2-Live-Crew.^ On these occasions the neighborhood—though rife with crime and crawling with thieves and junkies—is totally safe for these young suburban innocents. They have no need to worry about the danger lurking in the shadows. Their security is assured because the local drug lord, “Baby Doc,” has declared it so: “You don’t mess with the customers.” Alphonse Capone couldn’t have said it better.

The monumental Baby Doc is a former Notre Dame tackle who was on a fast track to the NFL when he banged up his knee and lost his scholarship. But he apparently did not leave South Bend empty-handed.  He has a sufficient grasp of business administration that he is now grossing $5,000 to $10,000 a day, tax-free.

His nemisis, Sgt. Joe Kosala, runs the 20th District gang squad out of Damen Avenue. In the ongoing battle between the these two primal forces, Kosala knows that nailing Baby Doc himself is out of the question. He touches neither the drugs nor the money. So the most the cops can hope to do is shut the operation down for a few hours, but even that’s not as easy as it looks. Though the al fresco drug bazaar in front of the housing project at 4846 North Winthrop is as wide open as a block party,
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it’s proven nearly impossible to cuff the sales force. These youngsters are fleet of foot, and while most of the guys in the tac squad are young and lean, you can’t outrun a desperate kid on his home turf. He knows where the pitfalls and loose boards are and you don’t.  But over time, Kosala has noticed that one of their favorite escape routes is through the abandoned townhouse across the street at 4847. Tonight he plans to cut them off at the pass.[11]

But just as the last of his guys are getting in position, one of the squads is spotted and they have to jump the gun. In the blackness, men leap from their cars and dash headlong into the unknown. This is the moment of maximum danger, with cops racing in from all sides, dim silhouettes stumbling through terra incognita, potential targets for a shotgun blast from any nook or cranny. Kosala, like Mike Hoke, is a Vietnam vet and he experienced his share of heart-pounding terror on a Mekong River gunboat. Fear is nothing new to him. But the rest of these guys are too young to have witnessed any of that carnage. They think they’re immortal. One crew dashes into the shadowy gangway alongside the building and another goes for the basement as Kosala lunges through the back door and leads two men pounding up the stairs shouting “Police!”

If there can be anything more terrifying than a night landing on an aircraft carrier, this must be it. A scared kid will cut you down in a second because he doesn’t know any better. Rushing into a black room with a gun in your hand not knowing which door may suddenly kick open and spit fire or which floorboards are sawed through and ready to drop you into the basement—that requires more than just discipline. This is not TV.

The men fan out through the first floor, yanking doors open, poking around the sagging sofas and crates that serve as furniture in this clubhouse of the damned. The streetlight streaming in through the broken front windows casts an eerie camouflage of light and shadow over the cluttered rooms, but in seconds they’ve combed the first floor and they’re moving to the stairway
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looking up. Kosala is a beefy Polish guy, over six foot and 220 pounds, but at moments like this he’s positively light on his feet. Up he goes, ready to grab the rail if a step is booby trapped, moving like lightning. He spins—there’s a figure silhouetted against the window— 

It’s a dummy. Old clothes stuffed with pillows and propped up on a chair. It’s a final little flip of the finger from Baby Doc’s runners.

Down in the alley, the defeated team regroups, and Kosala drags out the dummy. He throws it on the ground and the squad proceeds to stomp it to death, pounding and kicking it until the stuffing is floating in the wind. For good measure, Kosala pulls out his .357 and puts a hole in the thing.

A few minutes later the squad is on the way back to the station heading west on Foster Avenue when the guys in the lead car spot something. They sweep across the left lane and screech to a halt. There, pinned in the headlights, half a dozen black teenagers are frozen in their tracks. The other cars slam on the brakes and suddenly the street is crawling with cops. In a flash the kids—four boys, two girls, the oldest maybe 17—are spread-eagled and braced against the wall. One of the cops recognizes the 15-year-old with the backwards cap. He pulls him out of the lineup and tells him to empty his shoes. Sitting on the curb, the kid pulls off his sneakers, and the cop says, “Dump ‘em!” Nothing there.  “Take off your socks!”

These teenagers fit the profile so perfectly that it’s impossible to believe they’re not carrying anything. For ten minutes the cops pepper them with questions and pat them down, empty their pockets, and rain a constant stream of insults. “What’s a girl like you doing with a piece of shit like this?” “Listen, stupid, I told you, dump your fucking socks.” But the search turns up only an unused plastic baggie. Disgusted, they let everybody go but the barefoot 15-year old sitting on the curb. They search him again.

It would be easy to chalk off this kind of abuse to racism, but the team happens to include an Oriental, a Mexican, and a
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Puerto Rican. This is simply an explosion of frustration from otherwise professional cops who are fed up with the pursuit of Mission Impossible. As one team member put it, “We beat people without prejudice. We hate everybody equally.”

The truth is, this time they didn’t beat anybody. They just messed with a few heads for a little while. Finally, with a last needling insult and a couple of ominous threats about “next time,” they tell the 15-year-old to take off. In an eyeblink the kid is into his shoes and on his feet. His friends are long gone now, out of sight. He heads west on Foster without glancing back and disappears into the night. With chilling insight, the cop at the wheel of one of the squad cars leans to the reporter in the back seat. “So what do you think the long-term sociological implications of this shit will be?”

  The last time this country got a vivid reminder of why we have the Fourth Amendment was twenty years ago when Richard Nixon and his associates decided to use the awesome power of the White House to get even with a handful of people they didn’t like. They rifled confidential medical files digging up dirt for a smear campaign, they bugged phones and offices, invaded private lives, and launched campaigns of fear and intimidation under color of authority. It was, in fact, a textbook example of the very thing Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were thinking about when they wrote these unequivocal words two hundred years earlier: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause...”[12]

President Nixon learned, to his utter astonishment, that on those rare occasions when the American people are willing to invoke the absolute terms of their amazing charter, the results are swift and terrible indeed. One television image summarized the collision in the late summer of 1973 as the wave of evidence began to crest against the President. Sam Ervin, the jowly,
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cracker-barrel Senator from North Carolina who was running the Watergate hearings, paused in his questioning to give us a history lesson. He quoted William Pitt, the British parliamentarian, speaking on behalf of the American Colonials at a time when their doors were being broken down by the King’s soldiers. The King felt he could set aside English law in the Colonies because so many Americans were engaged in smuggling, and the best way to catch a smuggler is to take him by surprise. Senator Sam, his rolling corn-pone accent barely concealing his rage, reminded us of our heritage.

"The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the crown.  It may be frail—its roof may shake—the wind may blow through it—the storms may enter—the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter. All his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!"[13] 

It may be hard for the current generation to imagine, but in the fall of 1973 kids went back to college wearing T-shirts that displayed the picture of a U.S. Senator, and the Constitution, with inexorable certainty, functioned exactly as its authors said it would.

Unfortunately a price has to be paid to support these principals and it’s a price we’re not always willing to pay. In the drug war in particular, we have discovered what King George understood so clearly in the 1770s: It’s practically impossible to catch buyers and sellers of contraband if you stick to the rules. The illegal transfer of goods between two people who are in agreement is a tough act to interrupt. With a murder, the victim’s family demands justice; with a robbery, the victims themselves demand justice; the rapist, the embezzler, the con artist, all have people chasing them. But when somebody buys contraband from a willing seller, there’s nobody to call the cops.

Likewise with six black teenagers walking west on Foster in the middle of the night. The only way you can really find out if they’re dealing drugs is to throw them up against the wall and go through their pockets. This happens to be a blatant violation of their constitutional rights (try to imagine this happening to a
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white businessman on Michigan Avenue) but it’s absolutely essential to the work of catching drug dealers. Consider the problem from Sergeant Kosala’s viewpoint. Even if his men had found a bag of crack on one of the teenagers, they can’t go into court and say, “Judge, the kid looked suspicious so we braced him and found this in his pocket.” The judge would bounce the case in an eyeblink. So the facts are going to have to be altered to fit the Constitution. As Kosala says, “They lie, so we lie.”

The night shift is in session again at 26th & Cal, and once more lawyer Tim Lohraff is at the defense table trying to salvage what he can from a hopeless situation. Tonight two of his clients have already gone down in separate trials, both convicted on evidence that was almost certainly seized illegally. “A cop watching your average drug deal is hard put to make a righteous bust,” says Lohraff.  “All he can see is some guy giving another guy money, and a minute later a third person comes over giving the first guy something you can't see.  Well that isn't gonna work in court.  So the script is: ‘The suspect dropped a glascine bag to the pavement.  The arresting officer recovered glascine bag and saw it contained a controlled substance’  And of course we all know what happened. Everybody in the building knows that the cop threw the guy up against the wall and found the shit in his pocket or his shoe.”

But for Lohraff, there is something even more ominous here than the routine violation of his clients’ Constitutional rights. “There's a curious thing about these drop cases.  They're usually the lowest level felony—straight possession. Yet the cop will testify in court and lie—which is perjury. So you have a cop committing a greater felony to convict a lesser felony. It's gotta have an impact on a cop to stand up and lie on a regular basis and think nothing of it.”

Lohraff’s adversary tonight is an able and aggressive young prosecutor from downstate named Ed Ronkowski and he’s about as happy to be here as the rest of these people.  Ronkowski, a
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square-jawed hard charger with his eye on a political career, literally wrote the book on drug prosecution for Cook County. His manual is used to train new state’s attorneys in narcotics law. But like everybody here, he had to be dragooned into night court. In fact, this is his second tour of duty.

The defendant, not surprisingly, is a male black 18-year-old, and if the court is willing to believe the arresting officer, State’s Attorney Ronkowski will have the kid’s head on a pike. But there’s no sense of triumph. Like Commander Hoke, Ronkowski thinks he may have seen all this somewhere before. “If you want to use Vietnam as a metaphor,” he says, “we're at the point where the helicopters are leaving the embassy roof.”

But it is on the other side of the bullet-proof glass where the friends and family watch and wait that one gets the real sense of what this process is inflicting on us. Here are the brothers, fathers, mothers, cousins, mates and children of the accused. They watch silently, expressionless, as the prosecutor’s words fall from the loudspeakers in the ceiling.

“As you approached, what did you observe?”

“I saw the defendant drop from his right hand a packet of white powder.”

“What was the lighting conditions at that time?”

“It was brightly lit from street lights, the nearest one being twenty feet from the defendant.”

“What did you do?”

“I walked over and picked up the packet.”

And as the gavel falls, there is a murmur through the crowd. And through the evening, each verdict is followed by a ripple of sound. In this courtroom tonight you can close your eyes and imagine what it must have been like a couple of thousand years ago standing on the afterdeck of a Roman Galley, listening to the crack of the whip and the murmur of the men at the oars.

"We're not producing justice here," says Tim Lohraff. "We're manufacturing revolutionaries."

 

CHAPTER TWO—ENDNOTES

[1] Randolph N. Stone, Cook County Public Defender, Statement to the Congressional Black Caucus, Longworth House Office Building, Sept. 15, 1989, “The War on Drugs:The Wrong Enemy and the Wrong Battlefield.”

[2]Ibid.

[3]U.S. Dept. of Justice monograph, Drug Night Courts: The Cook County Experience, NCJ 14185, Aug 94.

[4] Tim Lohraff, Cook County Public Defender, Interview,  Nov 11, 93; Criminal Court appearance, Nov 10, 93.

[5] “Dwayne Thomas” is not his real name.

[6] Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1995 “War on Crack Targets Minorities Over Whites.”

[7] Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1995 “War on Crack Targets Minorities Over Whites.”Although the percentage of crack smokers is higher among blacks than whites, the government numbers show 2.19 million whites versus .9 million blacks. The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse: Main Findings 1990, National Institute on Drug Abuse (ADM)91-1788, 1991, p59.

[8] Jimmie L. Reeves & Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: TV News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 94, p162-183; James Inciardi, Dorothy Lockwood & Anne E. Pottieger, Women and Crack Cocaine, Macmillan, NY, 93, p8

[9] Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1995 “War on Crack Targets Minorities Over Whites.”

[10]U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics—1993, NCJ 148211, p457

[11] Sgt. Joe Kosala, Chicago Police Dept., Nov 10-13, 1993, ride-along.

[12] U.S. Constitution, Amendment IV; Though Jefferson was in Paris at the time, he lobbied mightily for the Bill of Rights.

[13] William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, Speech to Parliament on the Excise Bill, 1777.

 

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