Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime.
Speaker 3: Bill Thomas.
Speaker 5: Welcome to Mind of a Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly and
I'm Bill Thomas. We're joined today by prosecutor and author
Randy Barnett here to talk to us about his book
sell Any Review, Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago.
Speaker 3: Randy, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 6: Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 7: I know it's an very interesting podcast and I can't
wait to talk to you about the book.
Speaker 2: Oh fantastic, It's funny who knew that there was corruption
in Chicago.
Speaker 6: I went into the system.
Speaker 7: Actually i'll tell you more about how I got there,
But I went into the system fully expecting there to
be corruption. Had my dad was a businessman in Chicago
and was very realistic about what was going on. I
went in with my eyes wide open. If anything, it
was slightly cleaner than I expected, because the prosecutor's office
was not corrupt, and I would have expected everything to
be corrupt. So I would have to say it was
a little bit pleasantly surprised that my office wasn't corrupt too.
But maybe I should start off by introducing myself a
bit and who I am and what I do now. Now,
I'm a law professor at Georgetown and my specialty for
the last twenty years or so has been constitutional law.
I argued the medical marijuana case out of California in
the US Supreme Court, my one and only an argument.
But it was a big case and it was very
instructive to do that. We lost six to three, but
we beat the spread. We got more justices on our
side than anybody expected. But before that, I was a
contracts professor, and then before that I was a criminal
prosecutor in Chicago. And the reason why that happened is
it was being criminal lawyer that made me want to
be a lawyer in the first place. A television show
came on when I was ten years old called The Defenders,
Oh Stay, g Marshall and Robert Reid. Not that many
people remember it because it didn't go into syndication and
you don't see it in reruns for reasons that remained mysterious.
Some people claim it's because there were so many guest
stars on there that they haven't cleared all the IP
rights to be able to redo it republish it. But
at any rate, I have some copies. You can buy
the first season on Amazon in DVD form. It really
made me want to be a lawyer. Now why would
that be. Perry Mason was on in the House on
Sunday Nights. That didn't make me want to be a lawyer,
because Perry Mason was about solving murders. The Defenders was
about practicing law. We had two father son criminal defense
team in New York, filmed on location in New York,
in gritty, black and white. It was very true to life.
Speaker 6: Then.
Speaker 7: I've watched it since then. It remains pretty true to life.
And it was about the thing, the issues that ethical
and other issues that arise when you defend people in
the criminal justice system. And many of them were guilty,
unlike Perry Mason, who had one guilty person in all
the seasons he was on TV. Yeah, and realistic. So
that made me want to be a criminal lawyer. When
I got to law school, I shaded over to want
to be a prosecutor. Partly that was because of my nature,
and that is, as opposed to being a critical guy,
I'm a constructive guy. I like to build things up,
not tear things down. A defense attorney's job is to
demolish and tear down the execution's case. The prosecution's job
is to build a case on the basis of evidence
that proves certain things. And that was one thing, so
I was dispositionally more inclined to be a prosecutor. But
also the defense attorney's job is to zealously defend the
interests of their client, and without defense attorneys doing that,
the adversary system simply does not work. A prosecutor's job
is to see that justice is done, whether that means
prosecuting or not prosecuting. Somebody who's accused, and I was
very much more comfortable with that role. And felony review,
the unit that is discussed in my book. Felony review
is all about ensuring that the guilty get charged and
the innocent go free.
Speaker 5: And I had never heard the term sell any review
in terms of a unit. So just run down for
everybody who may be as unfamiliar as I was, what
does the sele any review unit actually do? The name
clearly tells you a little bit about it, but I
think we're going to need to know a little bit more.
Speaker 7: Detail, absolutely, and you're to be forgiven for not knowing
because it's a peculiarly Chicago or Cook County system. It
was established in the seventies. An arrangement was made between
the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County State's Attorney's Office.
Now those are two different government agencies. They don't work
for each other. The Chicago Police Department works for the
City of Chicago. The State's Attorney's Office is an elected
office for county wide office. And they entered into an
agreement that no, oh chfelony charges can be placed against
a person by the Chicago Police Department without a prosecutor
an assistant state's attorney signing off on it. Now, that
required the creation of a full time unit of state's
attorneys who don't go to court, but have offices in
the police stations, have their own squad cars and respond
to the district police stations where to interview witnesses to crimes,
interview the police, find out what evidence is there, and
if possible, interview the people that are being accused of
the crime, and eventually taking a confession from those people
if there's something they have to confess. So our job
is to ensure that the evidence of guilt is there
and that we anticipate in the police station things that
might be used to tear the case down later on
in court. My job is there to think like a
defense attorney and think, well, if I were a defense
attorney approaching this case, what would I want to argue
and is there anything I can do at three am
in the morning in a Chicago police department, a district
police station to negate that argument in the future. So,
for example, in one of the cases I took a
confession on the issue was what happened to the murder
weapon the murder the defendant told us he threw it away.
He right onto an elevated railroad embankment next to the
housing projects in Chicago. And so I asked the police, saige,
you go look for it, and the police said, of
course not, because there was no way that thing would
still be there by the time we got there. I said,
I'm sure that's true, but you've got to be able
to say stand up in court and say you look
for it. So they said, if we're going to go
look for it, then you have to go with us.
I said, okay, I'll go with you. So we drove
out to where the railroad track embankment was, with the
accused telling us where to go and to get up
to this one story this is like an elevated track
that goes next to the was next to the Robert
Taylor Holmes isn't there anymore. And to get up onto
the elevated track, we had to climb to the top
of a police cruiser and then climb on top of
the tracks. And when I did, I was wearing these
jeans and I ripped the crotch open my jeans as
I climbed up. And I'm wearing white briefs, right, So
when I come back to the police station and take
the court reporter statement, I've got to cross my legs
because otherwise these white briefs are going to show through.
But we were able to say we went and looked
for the gun. It wasn't there, of course, but that
was My job is to anticipate what could be said
about a case later on by defense attorney.
Speaker 2: And is that different in Chicago with the Felony Review Team.
That sounds very different from what we've heard about from
other people that are prosecuted or investigated cases. Yeah.
Speaker 7: I'm unaware of any other jurisdiction that has anything like it.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 7: I'm not saying they don't, because it's not my job
to know what's going on across the country and criminal
law because I'm not a criminal law guy anymore. But
I'm not aware of this unit existing anywhere else. And
our approval this was a genuine way of protecting the innocent.
It was like the original Innocence Project. Our approval rate
for charges we were asked for was about sixty percent,
which means we're rejecting four out of ten requests that
were being made to us by the Chicago Police. And
our individual performance as felonary review assistants was monitored by
the office. We had to turn in our logbooks, which
recorded everything we did and of which I kept, which
is how I was able to reconstruct Oh wow, when
I wrote the book, and we turned them in once
a week, and they did a statistical analysis of what
we had done in order that we not be too
forgiving or too strict, and so it was meaningful review.
And in the book I tell stories about innocent people,
people I think were innocent, that we let go because
of what we learned in the police station.
Speaker 5: So I guess it does lead to my next question
despite this felony review process, which is that sounds like
something a lot more jurisdictions probably should adopt. But I'm
not sure to suggest wide ranging corrections to the criminal
justice system.
Speaker 3: But still I like it.
Speaker 5: Were there ever cases that you prosecuted that you felt
should not have made it to the courtroom, or cases
that you didn't feel great about prosecuting?
Speaker 7: The answer is no, but possibly yes. So know, when
I was a prosecutor, one of the things you feared
when you were a fellon of you review assistant, and
one of the things you lead just wanted to happen
is to get a phone call from a state's attorney
from a felony trial assistant, who said, why the hell
did you send me this case. We did not ever
want to because we hadn't got there yet and we
need to, we need to make it up there to
that rank, and we did not want that. That nevered.
When I was a felony trial assistant, which I was
for two years, I never had a case like that. However,
when I was a law student as a student intern
for the State's Attorney's office, that did happen. And I
tell a more elaborate version of the story in my
last book, A Life for Liberty, The Making of an
American Originalist. I tell a very detailed account of the story.
I give a summary version in this book. And it
was about a guy who was accused of shooting a
Chicago police officer, a sergeant, and who had been sitting
in custody for a year awaiting trial for a tempt murder,
having been indicted by the grand jury for in tap
murder the day we took a plea. I shouldn't say that.
So I was a third year student. The assistants who
were working in the courtroom gave me the file because
I was doing work. I was able to do work
as a student deloye or under their supervision. They gave
me the file. They said, work this file up, which
is what a third chair States attorney would normally be doing.
Order the reports, get it ready to go. But there
was a weird fact pattern that I couldn't explain. And
the fact pattern was that we know for a fact
that two shots were fired by somebody, and one shot
because because the police sergeant responded to shots fired man
with a gun, because the shot had been fired, the
neighbors called in the police and the police show up,
so one shots fired. Then in the scuffle that happens
between the defendant and his other guy, the father of
his girlfriend, who is which is what this was all about,
the domestic and the police officers trying to separate the
two guys, another shot rings out. That's two shots, and
the police sergeant says, which one of you guys shot me?
And eventually they put these guys in the back of
a squad car and then they started looking for the weapon,
which they couldn't find. Eventually, as the squad car got
moved from one side of the street to the other
side of the street. They find it on the grass
outside the window of where the defendant is sitting in
the backseat of the squad car. Ah, okay, that's fine.
We don't know how it got there. He was cuffed,
he had been searched, police missguns and searches all the time.
Somehow he must have gotten the gun out and thrown
it out the window. Who knows. But that was one problem.
But the biggest problem is this. It's a five cylinder
revolver and there's three unexpended rounds, one expended round, and
one empty chamber. So where's the How are we getting
two shots out of that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? The math is off there.
Speaker 7: For this to happen, we have to believe that after
he shot the first shot that caught and the police
gets called for some unknown reason, he opens up his revolver,
removes a spent shellcasing, throws it away, closes a revolver, and.
Speaker 6: Then the second shot happens. That made no sense.
Speaker 7: So I was caught task with working up this file,
and I took it home and my dad, who was
very sharp and who would make a better lawyer than
I ever made, and we opened up all the files
on the kitchen table and try.
Speaker 6: To figure out what the heck happened here. Now.
Speaker 7: The only thing that we could think of, which didn't
make any sense also, is that somehow the police sergeant
had drawn his weapon. But we knew that wasn't It
couldn't be one of his service He had a service
revolver and a forty five caliber automatic. The wound was
not consistent with that. It was consistent with the twenty
two caliber, which is what the defendant's gun or the
recovered gun was. He couldn't have drawn his own weapon
in the course of the melee and have it go
off because it's not consistent with the wound. But what
if he was carrying a drop gun? Now you ask,
what's a drop gun? I was cynical enough as a
law student with a father that I had to know
what a drop gun was. Later on you'd learn about
it on TV. And a drop gun is a gun
that a cop would carry so that if they should
have a shooting incident and they kill somebody, and they
shoot somebody who's unarmed. When they get there they find
out he's unarmed, they'll drop the gun and then will
be the arm. There's also drop knives. They carry drop
knives too, so I knew about this. So I thought,
if you carry a drop gun, it's going to be
a small caliber small gun. So maybe there's no reason
why if he's going to pull a weapon, he's going
to pull his drop gun. That makes no sense. That's
as far as we could take it. I go back
to the office the next day. I sit down with
the trial assistant who I work for, and tell him
the problem. And his response is this, I ain't going
to try this piece of shit. That was his response. Okay,
what do we do? His guy's been in custody for
a year. We offer him a plea deal, and we
offer him one year time served. He has to do
another couple of days and he has to plead guilty
to a misdemeanor of unlawful use of weapons, which would
be the discharge that we would drop the attempt murder
on a police officer charge. And so he takes the plea.
But the defense attorney, who's a good defense attorney, he said,
one of these kind of sketchy ones, but he actually
can try cases, unlike the other sketchy ones who can't
try cases. He said, look, my guy didn't do it.
I don't feel comfortable about him taking a plea, but
it's my duty to give him the offer, and it's
up to him. He comes back, he takes the offer,
he pleads guilty. Later that afternoon, after court is closed,
a phone rings in the court room. My partner picks up.
My partner wasn't literally my partner, he was my supervisor.
He picks up the call, and the guy on the
other end says, is this the courtroom where the cop
got shot? And my partner said yes, because earlier that
day there had been sentencing on a jury trial where
a cop had been murdered. And my partner thought, that's
what this guy's calling about. And so the next thing,
the guy on the phone says, the cop shot himself.
And my partner said, what that's crazy. Cop was murdered.
What are you talking about? But he was talking about
this guy and he goes, what are you talking about?
He goes, yeah, he was wearing a pen gun. And
everyone in the station and the district knew about it.
What the heck's a pen gun? I knew what a
pen gun was because they used to get advertised in
the back advertisements in men's magazines that my dad used
to subscribe for when I was a kid. So it
looks like a pen, but it carries one twenty two
caliber round and you can have it in emergencies. If
you get disarmed, you'll still have this one weapon remaining
to you. And the course of the struggle, the pen
gun goes off. Wow wow, wow is right.
Speaker 2: But this gun struck the officer who was getting carrying
in his pocket.
Speaker 6: He was pucket.
Speaker 7: The guy was rotund. So the wound was through and through.
It went up to the top and then came out
the bottom. Now we had the officer at the end
of the plea deal had said can I get my
shirt back? His shirt had been in evidence the whole time,
and so we said, wow, what a cheap state this
guy's been in. He's been this shirt's been in a
bag for a year, and he wants his shirt back.
Speaker 6: But we gave it back to him.
Speaker 7: And the other thing that we hadn't really focused on
is the fact that the crime lab, the request of
the crime lad to analyze the shirt had been canceled
by somebody.
Speaker 2: Oh that's interesting. Now it's starting to make sense why
the officer would want his shirt back.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so now we decide, so what are we going
to do about it? And in actually in my last book,
I tell more stories about I tell a greater detail
what happened after that. I don't know if we should
go through the whole story here. We're taking a long
time on this, but it's okay, okay, a little bit
more so we're give it a little bit. I don't
know why they let this third year law student in
the room. We go into the supervisor's office, is the
chief of the criminal division, my partner who's the first
chair in the courtroom, and me, and then there was
another guy in the room who I knew who I'll
tell you who he was in a minute. We tell
him what happened, and the chief of the criminal division says,
who else knows about this? And how do we know
this is true? How do we know? So maybe we
should just let it go. I'm just sitting there listening
to everything. And this guy who was sitting in the back,
and it was a very dark room and he was
sitting in the shadows. It's like a TV show. And
his name was Tommy Fitzgerald, and he was the head
of the first municipal was a supervisor head of the
first municipal District. He went on to be a justice
on the Illinois Supreme Court before his death. That's how
far up he went. And he said, one of these days,
the guy who called us, called that we talked to,
is going to be sitting on a bar stool next
to Mike Royko. And now Mike Royko was then the
legendary columnist for the Chicago Sun Times. Oh yeah, And
he said, one of these days he's going to be
sitting at the bar stool next to Mike Royko, and
he's going to say, Mike, have I got a story
for you? And then will be left holding the bag.
He didn't say, he didn't have to say that. I
didn't finish the thought. And at the moment he said that,
the entire direction of the room turned around, and it
was clear we had to do something. And so what
we had to do was rip the guy back over
from the jail so we could vacate his plea. Tell
Michael Green, the defense lawyer, that we were going to
write vacate his plea, and then we had to get
the shirt back. So my partner says to me, you
got to call the guy. You got to call the
cop and get the shirt back. Okay, So I go
call the cop, answers the phone, I said, the defendants
moving to vacatu his plea. We were going to have
to try this case, and we need the shirt back.
We had no idea if he was going to bring
it back. He did bring it back, held it, he
laundered it. He laundered it. But the laundry, the wash
did not remove all of the all of the gunpowder
residue that side of the pocket. The reason we didn't
see it is the bullet. The bullet came out of
the seam at the bottom of the pocket, and then
there was a hole below the sea, so you could
then see how the threads of the seam were also
broken because by the bullet. So he comes in and
so I go. We show up the next day to
vacate the plea. And who's sitting in the front row
but the least Strobel, who was then the who's gone
on to be an author, a Christian author, very prominent,
but he was then the police report the Chicago the
crime reporter of the Chicago Tribune. He's sitting in the
front row. So my partner says to me go over
and find out what that guy wants here. Go over
and I sit down next to him on the bench
in the front of the courtroom and I say, what's
so interesting, what's so interesting on the call today that
you would be here? And he said James Dixon, which
is the name of the guy. I go, oh, okay,
and I got up and I told him so what
they had said about Mike Royco had already happened. After
the guy and who I got to start a phone call,
it's going to be. What we found out is this guy,
this police sergeant, was a hard ass and he made
a lot of enemies amongst the patrol men, and they
did what we called drop the dime. They dropped the
dime on him. Back in the days when payphones took dimes,
they had this expression drop a dime. They dropped the
dime on the guy. And that's how we find out
about it. So that's the one case that I had
all the way up to a trial court and we
thought that where we thought the guy did it, but
I couldn't figure it out. Something was wrong with that case.
And we found out on what was wrong with that case.
Now that's better than TV or at least it's as
good as TV. Yeah, you couldn't make that one out.
The thing the theme of my book is being in
the criminal just system is better than what they can
show you on TV.
Speaker 2: And that's what a number of your reviews say too,
is that this reads as great as any fiction that
we'd see in a book or a television show or
a movie.
Speaker 7: Well, Alan Dershowitz wrote the wrote a short preface to it,
and that's what he said, this is like a reality
TV show.
Speaker 3: I liked that.
Speaker 5: One of the things that you closed out the book
with is these wonderfully, wonderfully critical but like politely critical
emails about I would like to write to the show
runners of Hill Street Blues to tell you, guys that
you're doing a great job, but you could be doing.
Speaker 3: A better shop and here's how.
Speaker 5: And I loved that because it was like, you know what,
I think that as you have every right to be
able to say, you guys aren't doing prosecutors justice. As
a prosecutor, I would like to.
Speaker 3: Tell you how. I thought that was fantastic.
Speaker 7: For I reproduced the whole letter for the reader as Yes,
I loved including I actually have a photoshop I hosh
at the image of the letter itself. So everybody knows
who actually have a letter of the replies themselves, they
know the replies are authentic.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was terrific, and obviously they were. You could
tell they were maybe a little bit amused by the
whole especially that's a perfect word. I think that they
were probably a little surprised. But I love the fact
that you actually took the initiative to write.
Speaker 7: It eight page, single space history of the depiction of
lawyers on television, which they said in tongue and somewhat
tommic cheap was impressive. H It was impressive that I
could do that anyway, Yeah, it was great. I thought
that I closed out the book with that.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at
mindover Murder.
Speaker 5: So for our listeners who haven't had a change to
read the book yet, what are some of the TV
shows and movies that you think have done good job
on portraying prosecutors and what are the some that didn't
meet the mark.
Speaker 7: You gave me a heads up that you were going
to ask me this question, so mean what I thought
the answer was. But then I went out and did
investigation of what the answer is, and that is and
that is the show that broke the mold on the
depiction of the criminal justice system. That is The Wire.
But here's one generality. I will say, lawyers are more active.
The criminal justice system are accurately depicted on cop shows
and on lawyer shows going to depict lawyers very well, but
cop shows tend to have a better depiction. And The
Wire was dead on. And so as a result of
you asked me this question, I've now watched. I've rewatched
the first four episodes of season one of The Wire.
Last not i've watched. I watched three episodes in a
row because it was so darn good. I felt like
I was back in Cook County, although I'm in Baltimore.
And the character is the character of Ronda Pearlman and
she and it was played by Adro what's her name?
Speaker 6: I got to get I looked this.
Speaker 3: I don't know, carey, and I've never watched The Wire.
Speaker 6: Unfortunately, you got to watch The Wire.
Speaker 7: You gotta watch The Wire because not only getting her
her name or the actress's name, it's brilliant But here's
the thing. What Groc was able to tell me was
all the episodes in which she has major scenes. So
I sampled five or six scenes of hers throughout the
five episodes. But I will say, not only her, but
everybody else in the criminal justice system is fairly portrayed
or accurately portrayed, including the judges, the other prosecutors, and
the defense attorneys, including the defensive attorney Levy, who was
the principal lawyer for the gang that were under questionnaire.
He was extremely accurate depiction of what a defense attorney
is like, and a lot it reminded me a lot
of Eddie Jensen, who was a character in my book,
a real life defense attorney who fixed a case out
from under me and who I prevented from doing it
a second time. Fool me one, Shame on you, fool
me twice, shame on me. I didn't let him fool
me the second time. I got around him the second time,
but I feature him and call him out by name
as one of these shyster lawyers, but good lawyers. And
these these were skillful lawyers, not all of them more,
but he was. And so this Leavy character is fantastic
so the whole show is fantastic. The Wire is as
close to real life as anything I've ever seen on television. Okay,
let me talk about Law and Order for a second,
because that's what everybody wants to ask me about. I
can't stand it, and so therefore I haven't watched very
much of it. But i'll tell you the reason why
it isn't because I think it's legally inaccurate. I don't
care much about that. And I'll tell you one reason
why it's kind of probably accurate in a second. It's
because people in the criminal justice system just don't talk
to each other the way they do on that show,
the giving speeches and pontificating this kind of stuff. They
don't talk to each other like that. They talk from
each other like they do on The Wire. It's all
very shorthand, it's all very annoying. NYPD Blue was a
lot more accurate a depiction of how cops talk to
each other and even how prosecutors work. That's another good show.
Not as good as The Wire, but pretty good. Now,
I'll give you an idea of why I think the
Law and Order might be accurate. I had the privilege
of portraying a prosecutor in a feature film two.
Speaker 6: Thousand and nine.
Speaker 7: I did notice that called it was a science fiction
Bizarrely enough, it was a science fiction movie called Inalienable,
and it was and it ultimately turned on the legal
status of an alien child that was born to a
human after having been impregnated by this alien creature.
Speaker 2: And the third of the movie happens. Of course, I know,
it's one of.
Speaker 7: Those things you have to they teach that in law school, right,
But the last third of the movie was a courtroom
drama about whether, because the Feds were holding on to him,
whether he should be freed from the because the father
is trying to get his alien son freed from custody.
So I played the assistant to the prosecutor. The prosecutor was,
by the ways, written by Walter Koenegg, who played Checkof
on the original Star Trek and All, and because Walter
was the moving force behind the movie, all of these
really pretty well known sci fi TV actors were in
the movie, including Marina Sertis, who played the prosecutor, and
she played Deanna Troy counselor Deanna Troy on Star Trek
Next Generation. So for four days I got to sit
on a courtroom set with Marina Sertis, and I had
tried earlier on It's a very long story that actually
is in my last book, A Life for Liberty, I
have a chapter about being in this movie. But I
had tried to correct the legal errors in the script.
They had asked me to look at the script, and
I tried to correct them, and then a lot of
them got uncorrected. But Marina knew enough about the law
to come to me, because once they found out that
I was a former prosecutor, I became like the technical
adviser on the set. So she came to me and
she said, would my character ever say this? And the
answer I said no, she would never say that. And
I tried to get that change, but it got changed back,
and then she had the She had the poll on
the set to get a change. I didn't but cheat it.
And where did she learn the law? She learned the
law because she was an avid Law and Order fan.
Speaker 2: Oh, and she learned it from the show.
Speaker 7: So therefore, I'm willing to grant that Law and Order
has a lot of accurate law, but what it doesn't
have is accurate the accurate culture of what it's like
to be in the criminal justice system, which I tried
to create in the book Felony Review.
Speaker 2: And Before I'm Sorry, Before We've get Deirdre Lovejoy played
the character of Ronda Pearlman on the wire.
Speaker 7: I had Deirdre. I couldn't figure. I couldn't remember the
rest of the name, but she's brilliant. But they were
all brilliant, and they were so natural, they were like
real people.
Speaker 5: It sounds like Law and Order isn't really about the
culture of the courtroom, just like the West Wing is
not about the culture of working in.
Speaker 3: The White House.
Speaker 7: It's a perfect analogy, and they both have a lot
of walk and talk scenes.
Speaker 6: The West Wing invented the walk and talk segne.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely, they made good use of that set,
going from point A to point B. Generally, I know
this is a hard question to answer, Randy, but the
police officers for the Chicago PD whose cases would go
under felony review generally, did they look at the Felony
Review team with skepticism because aren't they checking their work
almost in real time?
Speaker 7: It was complicated a lot I had to do with
the attitude of the felon interview assistant. I like cops,
and I grew up in a working class town. So
therefore I didn't grow up in an elite suburb somewhere
where I was immune.
Speaker 6: I grew up in a working.
Speaker 7: Class town, blue collar caliub At City, Illinois, which is
on the border of Indiana. It's a bedroom community for
the mills and refineries in each Chicago and Hammond and Gary,
and so culturally, I was very familiar with the people
that are also for my fellow prosecutors, to whom I
dedicate the book, along with two trial judges, I dedicate
the book to them.
Speaker 6: So a lot I had to do with the attitude
of the assistant.
Speaker 7: So if you come in as a know it all,
big shot hot shot, I'm I'm the guy, I think
they're going to react differently than if you come in
and you're respectful and you're there to do your job
and you're there to help them do their job. So
in terms of what their attitudes were, I'll tell you
one story in a second that's in the book. But
generally speaking, they thought of us as a resource. Sometimes
they would bring us in to do an interrogation because
all their interrogators had already done that had taken their
best shot, and they just wanted to bring in a
fresh face to entear gate a suspect yet again. And
sometimes they wanted us to weed out the case so
they didn't have to they didn't have to take the hit.
So they knew the case was not very good, but
they didn't want to be the guy to say to
the victim the case was not the purported victim that
the case was not very good. There was one case
I worked on the Deep South Side in the middle
of the night. It was an alleged rape, and I
ultimately decided the evidence wasn't there. Actually, I decided I
subjectively believed the defendant, which is very unusual because normally
I tried very hard not to go on the basis
of what I subjectively thought, because I can be fooled
as much as the next guy. Innocent people lie badly.
Guilty people can lie very skillfully, so you can't really
go by that. Nevertheless, between the lack of evidence and
the fact that I subjectively believed the guy, I didn't
approve charges and I have to fill out some paperwork.
And now the guys that did the arresting officers who
were Tactical Policemen, which is a plain, closed unit that
does arrest around the city, but they're not detectives. On
Hill Street Blues, the Andy Sippowitz character, I'm sorry, the
Andy Szippo, which is NYPD Blue, But the same actor,
Dennis Franz played a character on Hill Street Blues that
was very much like these tack cops. And they were
very hard driven, tough guys. Right, they disagreed, they thought
the case should go forward. The homicide sex investigators who
were there, they agreed with me, and so when I
disapproved it, they thought I made the right call. That's
what they call they would have made. So I'm doing
my paperwork at two am, and I didn't pay attention
to the fact that the homicide detectives who came from
area headquarters to this district, they were hanging around. I
didn't notice this. I was just doing my paperwork. I
get up to go to my squad car. They get
up to accompany me to the squad car, and at
that point I realized they were waiting for me. They
were waiting for me to leave so they could accompany
the car. Now, why were they doing that? There's one up,
two possibilities. One is they were afraid the Tack cops
were going to be abusive to me in some way,
they were protecting me. But the other possibility is that
they didn't want the Tack cops to talk me out
of it. It talked me out of the decision, so
they just waited till I I was leaving and then
they walked me to my car. So that's a good
example of the cops thought I was doing their job.
I was helping them do their job. The investigators and
the cops that thought I was impeding them from doing
their job, and those were the tack officers.
Speaker 2: A mixed review almost from those two different teams.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Chicago is a notoriously tough town for folks in
the business of law and order and justice. Would you
say that Chicago's reputation is deserved or has it been
inflated over the years, either by the media or by
pop culture portrayals like the movie Chicago or all of
the series in the Chicago TV franchise.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there is a Chicago.
Speaker 2: Wait.
Speaker 7: Sean Conry has the line about Chicago. Way you put
one of the guys in the hospital, we put you
in the morgue and we come with it, not whatever,
None would come.
Speaker 6: With a gun. I don't know about that.
Speaker 7: We have a lot of sayings in the criminal justice
system that wasn't any of them. But it's a tough town,
and I don't think it's unfairly portrayed. First of all,
it's extremely It was extremely corrupt. And the book is
called Tales of True Crime and Up in Chicago, and
I tell the story of the corruption that I confronted
when I was there, and it was pretty rampant. And
I'm able to name names of all the corrupt judges
that I'm talking about and the corupt lawyers I'm talking about.
Speaker 6: And there's a reason why I'm able to name them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wanted to get to that. Why can you
name them?
Speaker 7: Because they were all prosecuted eventually, because there, unbeknownst to
me when I was there, there was an undercover and
sting operation to investigate the Circuit corda Cook County, which
got revealed only two years after I left the office,
and I was a law professor. And all of the
people that I name were people that were prosecuted successfully
either pled guilty or found guilty after trial.
Speaker 6: And that's why I'm able to name them now.
Speaker 7: The other thing I'm not going to give away, which
is a bit of a surprise ending, is how that
undercover investigation affected me personally. Because it did, and you
don't find out till the end of the book about
why it affected me personally. But this was an amazing
time to be in the system, because I'll tell you when,
during the time I was there, the people who were
doing all the bad stuff, they felt they were complet
lely immune from anything ever happening to them. It always
had been this way, it was always going to be
this way. I myself didn't do anything. I couldn't do
anything to stop the system or change the system. All
I could do is try to neutralize their efforts. Whenever
I detected it was happening with this operation, all these
people went to jail. Everybody didn't go to jail, but
lots and lots of people went to jail, and I
do think that the system was And then there was
actually another sting operation happening simultaneously with the first one,
which caught up another judge that I talk about in
the case I talk about in the book, a judge
who I had a very high opinion of turned out
at the end of the day to be a corrupt
But I didn't know that. Most of the time we
did know who the corrupt one was. I had no
idea this guy was corrupt because cor up on a
whole different level than the other guys were. That was
a separate undercover operation that revealed his corruption. But I
do think as a result of that, the system was cleaner.
And many of my fellow prosecutors are our circuit court
judges or nearing retirement as circuit court judges. I don't
practice there anymore, and I don't live there anymore, so
I can't say I should probably call my buddies there
and before I do any more podcasts and ask them
their opinion about this. But I think the system has
to be a lot cleaner than it used to be,
at least in this regard.
Speaker 2: How does that actually work? How do you buy a
judge Back in the day, in the battle days of
Chicago justice.
Speaker 7: They're basically two models of going what's going on here?
Most of the corrupt judging was happening at the lowest
levels in volume, so it was little bits of money
in a lot in a high volume courtroom, these are
misdemeanors and not felonies. And basically the corruption is a
fueled by the bond slip system, where when you go
out on bond, you post one hundred dollars for one
thousand dollars bond or whatever, so you have a one hundred
dollars bond slip or a thousand dollars bond slip. And
these corrupt lawyers who are in cahoots with the judges,
would prowl the courtroom and say and offer them legal
services in return for their bond slip. Because that bond slip,
after the case is adjudicated and the person shows up
for court, that bond can be signed over to anybody.
And so they say, look, we'll represent you. They said,
let me see your bond slip. They show the bond slip,
they see how much money is there. I'll represent you
for the bond slip. So the guy says, yeah, but
this guy, this lawyer, has a standing relationship to split
the bond slip, proceeds with the judge and so they
get the judge to assign that guy to the lawyer,
or the lawyer comes into court with that guy and
after the fact there's a settlement up. There's they settle
up all the cases in which they owe the money.
That's the wholesale thing. That's one paradigm, one model. With
respect to this judge that I really admired, I have
to say I tried too. Not only did I was,
I appear in front of him, in front of him
Misdebeanter Court. I tried two jury trials in front of
him as when he was a Fellony trial court judge
and a very good one. But it turns out, prior
to being on the bench, he was a lawyer for
the mob. Now we see it, the only cases he
fixed were these mob cases, for which he got paid
good of a very healthy sum. I'm giving away a
bit of the surprise ending here, but I'm not giving
away the whole thing.
Speaker 2: You still have to read the book Felony Review, and
I love the surprise inding.
Speaker 3: Actually, like when I got to it, my jock and
hit the floor.
Speaker 6: I was were you relieved other peaks?
Speaker 3: It was, yes, I was so relieved.
Speaker 7: Overwhelming responsive people to the surprise ending is relief.
Speaker 3: It was definitely.
Speaker 5: I was like, no, Randy, definitely wasn't that bad A
touch of characters?
Speaker 3: This was I was sitting in the green head. There's
no way.
Speaker 6: There's no way.
Speaker 5: I am curious as somebody who works in I can't
say I work in academia.
Speaker 3: I work in a public high school.
Speaker 5: But as somebody who teaches talking to another person who teaches,
which do you enjoy more? Do you enjoy the teaching
more or do you miss the days when you were
in the courtroom.
Speaker 7: I used to miss it when I taught evidence law.
When I first started teaching, I taught evidence and I
would always dream about being in the courtroom. And when
I was writing felony review, I once again started dreaming
I was back in the courtroom.
Speaker 6: Oh interesting, I have my dream job.
Speaker 7: Now I have the job that I love, which is
being a law professor, and I get to do and
constitutional law is the subject I'm the most interested in,
and I have been for two or three decades and
do most of them. I do all my writing and
publishing in that area. And I have my dream job,
and I couldn't. Also, it's a young it's a young
person's game. I couldn't put up with the bullshit that
I had to put up with. Then you just do
it because it's I used to think I used to
say that being in the circuit corpor County was a
cross between being in an urban public school system and
the post office.
Speaker 2: It's a good analogy.
Speaker 6: It was a cross between those two things.
Speaker 7: It was like when I first got there and when
I first was in the misdemeanor branch courts, and I thought,
why this stills familiar?
Speaker 6: What does it feel like? And the reason I.
Speaker 7: Couldn't get it is because it was two things meshed together,
post office or the DMV and the public school system.
Speaker 2: And you use the word volume regarding misdemeanor court just
you picture them just cranking through case after.
Speaker 7: Had eighty cases a day on our call Wow screen,
and it was very Now, this is a I don't
think most of the audience will have watched Hill Street Blues,
it's that old. But if you ever did the courtroom scenes,
there are quite reminiscent of the misdemeanor branch court scenes.
Because you ever, you've got eighty cases, sixty or eighty cases,
you have sixty or eighty defendants, many of them are
on bonds, some of them are not. You've got their families,
you've got the victims, and you've got the cops and
then you've got the lawyers all in one courtroom. That's
a lot of people, and so it's very much like
a zoo. And then they throw you in. Now this
I do talk about in Fellony Review, how they throw
you in. They threw me into the system, not knowing
what the heck was going on at all, and having
to stand up in front of all these people and
do the job of a prosecutor and I don't even
know what I'm supposed to be doing, and what I
decided to do, and it was extremely risky. I decided
to follow the lead of the judge in that case
in that courtroom, and the judge did not have a
reputation for being crooked. But nevertheless, you never know, and
I should not have ever given up my independent judgment
to the judge. My job is to be independent, and
I always was after this. But in the beginning, when
I didn't know what the heck was going on, I
followed his lead and over a course of four months,
Judge Crowley, John Crowley, one of the two crial judges
I dedicate the book to, he taught me what bullshit was.
That's because he and basically that was his word for it.
That's bullshit. Now, I never know what you have to
know what bullshit he means? Does he mean it's like
a bad complaint? Does he mean it's like a trivial charge?
Does he What does he mean? But I learned from
him and after that, after a while, I could figure
it out myself. And then I knew he's the one
that taught me how to be that kind of prosecutor.
Speaker 2: Were there ever opportunities with the judge where he was
able to speak to you privately and explain more of
the backdrop of what was going on in the courtroom.
Speaker 6: All the time.
Speaker 7: Now, this didn't happen with every judge, but that happened
with two judges in particular, John Crowley and Eugene Pnscham,
the other judge to whom I dedicate the book to.
And John Crowley, I would sit back in his very
spartan office you're talking about something like on TV. Had
broken chairs and metal desks, and we sit back there
and he would just pontificate. He would just talk to
me the job and about the cases. And the one
thing that one of the things he said to me,
which is in the book, that is the most memorable
line to me, which it has to do with the
sort of corruption in Chicago, and that he says, Randy,
I'm constantly getting bulk. It was a I should set
the stage here. He was an old, an elderly, cranky
Irish judge with a shock of white hair, and he
was known to throw files at prosecutors if he didn't
like the case.
Speaker 6: And that happened.
Speaker 7: And so he said, Randy, I get calls all the
time telling me the mayor's got an interest in this case.
And you know what I say to them, I say, fine,
you have the mayor call me. And in all the
years I've been on the bench, that mayor has never
called me. Now one's I got to mention Eugene Pinchham
because he was the other mentor I had. He was
an African American criminal defense lawyer. When I was a
law student. I got to know him when I was
the law clerk in that courtroom, that same courtroom I
was talking about earlier, and he would come in. He'd
be waiting for his case to be called, and he
liked to pontificate, and he would pontificate with me. And
then out of the blue, during my third year of
law school, when I was in this intensive trial advocacy
program at Harvard Law School. He was brought in as
one of the instructors to do a sample closing argument
in a criminal case.
Speaker 6: And then he took me.
Speaker 7: He and his wife took me out to drinks at
the Charles Hotel. I got to know him, and then
I ultimately get assigned to his courtroom. And he was
so hard on states attorneys because he was a very
pro defense judge that it was considered very hard time
to go there. So they threw me into this courtroom.
But they didn't know, and I didn't tell him that
I really liked this guy, and he really liked me.
And in between cases, I would sit back in chambers
and he would go through the docket and just tell
me his opinions on all these cases and who was
doing what and why they were doing And at one
point in the book, I want to tell the story,
but there's a story where I had a moral dilemma
about something to do, and I confided my moral dilemma
in the judge. If I had confided in anybody in
my office, it could have hurt my promotion.
Speaker 2: But he gave me.
Speaker 7: His opinion, and what he told me in response could
have jeopardized his career. But anyway, I learned what it
would like to see a case from the defense standpoint
from Eugene Benscham.
Speaker 5: When your readers close the book at the end of
Felony review, what do you want them to come away with?
Speaker 6: It depends on who the reader is.
Speaker 7: If it's somebody who's thinking about going to law school
or somebody who's in law school and they think they
might want to be a criminal lawyer, don't let the
system talk you out of it, because it's better than TV.
So I want them to realize that the real world,
real life is dirty and gritty, and that's what makes
it more interesting than what they can show yellvision except
for the wire. We'll say, watch the wire, see if
you like that system, because that's the system we're talking about.
With respect to everybody else, I like them to be entertained.
But by the true crime genre. This is real true crime,
and a lot of the true crime stuff is not
real true crime, like making up a murderer we find
out later on was like they left out all the
evidence of guilt, which was inconvenient with their narrative. We
all watched when we watched the first season. We all
thought one thing, and then we found out later on
we didn't get the whole story. I'm telling the whole story.
And here's the other thing. And this is also true
of law students and general public. And I think you'll
confirm this. I tell all of my mistakes. I lay
all my mistakes out there. This is what I did wrong.
This is the murder confession in which I failed to
give Miranda rights at the beginning of the murder of
the court reporters statement, and that was the way I
how I came to make that mistake, and how it
was fixed. And here's what I did this wrong, and
here's when I did that wrong. I had the worst
performance I ever had in my whole life, the first
time I ever had the first time I cross examined
a defendant in a jury trial. I talk about what
I did wrong and why I made that mistake, and
so there's a lot of learning there. And plus there's
the lessons. Why do people why do guilty? Why do
people confess? Why do they talk to the why do
they make confessions to the police without being coursed? What
kind of defense attorneys should you have? And why it's
a different kind if you're guilty than if you're innocent.
Whether there should be a replacement for the exclusionary rule.
I try to work these lessons into the narrative that
you can take away a better understanding of the criminal
justice system. Then TV will tell you out.
Speaker 5: The book is Felony Review Tales of True Crime and
Corruption in Chicago by Randy Barnett. Randy, where can everybody
find your book?
Speaker 7: Where all leading books are sold primarily on Amazon is
where I would recommend that you go. It was coming
out March sixteenth, but it'll be delivered to your door
at the guaranteed lowest price if you go to Amazon,
and that's where I would buy it. Tales of True
Crime and Corruption in Chicago.
Speaker 3: Love it, Randy. Thank you for joining us today. We
really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: I knew it would be fun and it was. Thank
you so much. That is going to do it for
this episode of Mind Over Murder. Thank you so much
for listening. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.