Book Review: Bogira, S. (2005). Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse. New York: Knopf. 404 pp

Date01 September 2007
AuthorMel Gutterman
Published date01 September 2007
DOI10.1177/0734016807304862
Subject MatterArticles
Bogira, S. (2005). Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the
Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse. New York:
Knopf. 404 pp.
DOI: 10.1177/0734016807304862
Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse is an
enormously significant book that shows how our criminal justice system actually operates.
Steve Bogira, a reporter for the Chicago Reader, spent a year in this courtroom trying to
comprehend how justice is meted out in a large city. Bogira’s report of the goings-on in
Courtroom 302 conveys a captivating informative educational experience for everyone
concerned about criminal justice in the United States. Courtroom 302 is distinctive in that
Bogira brilliantly captures the mindset not merely of the defendant, the victim, and their
families, but also splendidly gets across the attitude of the jurors, deputies, and attorneys
involved in the criminal process. The book is full of human tragedy, concentrating on how
people (victims, defendants, and their relatives) are treated once ensnared in the criminal
system. In the process, the author exposes essential concerns about race, constitutional
rights, and justice. Although set in Chicago’s Cook County, Bogira’s spellbinding stories
and his razor-sharp assessments of prosecutors and the public defenders apply, as one might
expect, to every large metropolitan criminal court system in our country. The portrait that
comes to light is disgraceful and disheartening.
Judge Daniel Locallo, a former prosecutor and a policeman’s son, presides over
Courtroom 302. It is the activities in his courtroom that are the epicenter of the book. Judge
Locallo, on first appearance, looks like a marvelous judge (garnering affirmative marks
from the legal community) and seems diligent, industrious, outspoken, and honest. He is
empathetic and very agreeable in permitting family contact visits after court appearances.
At bench trials, Locallo appears to show a “greater willingness to follow the law of rea-
sonable doubt than many of his colleagues” (p. 126). He shows a readiness to suppress ille-
gally seized evidence in drug cases. Nevertheless, as a product of the system, the portrait
that emerges is from time to time very disparaging. Locallo is reluctant to suppress con-
fessions and has never ruled, in at least 100 cases, that the defendant confessed involuntar-
ily. Despite formidable evidence, he is shown to be exceedingly condescending and
dismissive of claims by a death row prisoner of police torture to secure his confession. But
most astonishingly, Locallo refuses to concede that racism is a troublesome concern for the
system, although African Americans are enormously overrepresented among the defen-
dants who appear in his courtroom.
New cases are allocated by a computer program tagged the Randomizer. The proceedings
in the different courtrooms in the courthouse are poles apart from each other. As destiny
would have it, the Randomizer can send a defendant to a courtroom with a level-headed
prosecutor and a compassionate judge like Locallo or to a ruthless district attorney and a cal-
lous judge. A person’s life is often summed up by the public defender in 30 seconds; his or
her fate is often not linked to the seriousness of the crime, or even to a past criminal record.
Sentences vary so markedly that a defendant may be given probation and go home that day
or spend years in jail, depending on which courtroom is assigned by the Randomizer.
286 Criminal Justice Review

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