Authors: Steve Bogira
KARI MASON
, the assistant state’s attorney who took McGee’s confession, reads it to the jury, employing a normal tone for the questions she put to McGee and a singsong voice for McGee’s answers.
On Placek’s cross, Mason acknowledges that when she arrived at the station to question McGee, the detectives informed her they’d brought McGee to the station from a hospital. “Did you inquire what she was in the hospital for?” Placek asks. Placek is backing Mason into a corner. If Mason says she knew McGee was at the hospital because she’d threatened to kill herself, Placek’s next question certainly will be about the appropriateness of questioning a sixteen-year-old in such a fragile state. Perhaps Mason can see this coming. “You know, I don’t think I did ask,” she says. Placek screws up her forehead and glances at the jury. She presses Mason further, and Mason allows that she “might have” asked detectives where the gun that was used in the shooting had been recovered from. (It was recovered from the sidewalk where McGee dropped it to end her suicide threat.)
Mason also acknowledges on cross that she never asked McGee specifically why she shot François. Placek says later she thinks she knows why Mason didn’t pose that question during McGee’s court-reported confession: because had McGee responded that she shot François because she feared he was going to rape her or continue attacking her, it would have impaired the murder case. (Mason didn’t return my phone calls.)
“Didn’t you consider it relevant why a sixteen-year-old girl would shoot a cabdriver?” Placek presses Mason. “Or wasn’t that good for the state’s case?” Nolan objects, and Locallo directs Placek to rephrase the question.
“Did you ever say, ‘Well, Leslie, he was letting you out of the car. Why did you shoot him?’ ”
“No, I didn’t ask her that.”
MCGEE WASN
’
T LEGALLY
an adult at the time of the shooting, but it was always certain she’d be tried as one. Under Illinois law, a person is a juvenile until she or he turns seventeen, and McGee was three months shy of that when she shot François. But in Illinois, fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds accused of murder, rape, armed robbery, and certain other felonies are
tried as adults. Thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds are also tried as adults for these crimes when prosecutors request it and a juvenile court judge approves. Most other states have similar provisions.
The Juvenile Court of Cook County,
the world’s first such court, opened in Chicago in 1899.
Similar courts were soon born
across the nation. The movement was founded on the idea that young offenders lacked the maturity to be fully responsible for their acts and that the punitive approaches of adult court were therefore inappropriate. The focus in juvenile court was on the child, not on the alleged offense. As Julian Mack, one of the first judges of Cook County’s juvenile court, wrote in 1909: “
The problem for determination by the judge is not, ‘Has this boy or girl committed a specific wrong?’ but, ‘What is he, how has he become what he is, and what had best be done in his interest and in the interest of the state to save him from a downward career?’ ”
But even in the earliest years of the juvenile court here, juveniles in their early and mid-teens, charged with murder, rape, and armed robbery, were often tried as adults. Critics of this practice protested that it was inconsistent with the juvenile justice philosophy; if juveniles were too immature to be responsible for lesser crimes, why were they responsible for more serious ones? Pragmatism was behind the inconsistency. Supporters of the fledgling juvenile justice movement, already fending off complaints that juvenile courts were just havens for young hoodlums, were unwilling to fight to retain jurisdiction of notorious young offenders.
In more recent years, Judge Mack’s philosophy of trying to determine how to save a youth from a downward career has been displaced by another tenet: “If they can do the crime, they can do the time.” Across the nation in the last two decades, legislators have raced one another to introduce bills calling for more and more youths to be tried and sentenced as adults. Lawmakers have done so even though the in-vogue mantra apparently has a corollary: when they do adult time, they do more crime. Studies indicate that transferring youths to adult court
increases the recidivism of those youths.
Perhaps this is in part because those who are convicted as adults and sent to adult prisons before they’re twenty-one suffer many more violent and sexual attacks while incarcerated than do similar youths kept in juvenile facilities.
BEFORE THE TRIAL
, Placek asked Locallo to bar the state from introducing any testimony or evidence regarding a certain tattoo on McGee’s calf. Placek knew the state had a photo of the tattoo, taken when McGee was jailed. “To put it bluntly, Judge, it’s a hand holding a penis,” she’d told Locallo. She argued that it was irrelevant to the case and that the state
wanted to use it simply “to besmirch Miss McGee’s character.” Nolan countered that McGee’s character might be relevant, depending on how Placek conducted her defense. Locallo at first responded as if it were a tattoo of Snow White he was considering. The tattoo “doesn’t besmirch her character,” he said; what McGee chose to put on her body was simply a “matter of free expression.” But he ultimately sided with Placek regarding its admissibility. “I’m the gatekeeper,” he told the lawyers. “We’ll not talk about a tattoo of a handheld penis until it becomes relevant.”
Now, on the afternoon of the trial’s second day, before McGee takes the stand, Nolan asks Locallo to reconsider this ruling. Nolan wants to ask McGee about the tattoo on cross-examination, he tells the judge. Of course he’d like to show the jury the photo of the tattoo as well. “I think it’s relevant based on the way she’s been appearing before the jury with Winnie the Pooh clothing on … obviously, to make a different impression in front of the jury than is normal,” the prosecutor says. But Locallo decides the tattoo is still irrelevant.
Nolan is worried that the jurors might not be too disturbed about François’s death. “Under our theory, he’s a scumbag cabdriver trying to cop a feel,” as Nolan says later. He’s concerned the jurors might sympathize with McGee instead, because she’s young and female. He wanted to use the tattoo to undermine her sweet-little-lamb appearance.
Before the trial, McGee said in the jail that the tattoo was just something she got to retaliate against a boyfriend after he got himself a tattoo of a half-naked woman. She hadn’t thought about how it would look to others, she said. “I wasn’t nothing but fifteen.”
Placek believes the tattoo represents more than that. She guesses that McGee had been compelled to get it by a “sadistic pimp” who pushed her into prostitution. “It’s not a saucy, sexy, cute thing,” Placek says. “It’s like an advertisement, a branding, showing that she was some man’s property.” But Placek had no delusions about jurors sympathizing with McGee if they were allowed to see a photo of the tattoo. “Jurors want to feel superior,” she says. “When they get into court, they’re with a bunch of strangers, and they want to show that they’re different from the defendant, that they’re nice, normal, middle-class people. If they saw the tattoo, the reaction would be, ‘My
God
, what kind of an arrogant little whore
is
she?’ ”
IT
’
S NOT RARE
, Deputy Rhodes says, for a prisoner in the women’s lockup to “flash” the males in the lockup across the way—to raise her shirt or lower her pants for a cigarette or a piece of candy that the men will toss to her. Rhodes says she’s seen McGee flash the males for no obvious reward. Except for the flashing (which doesn’t particularly disturb Rhodes
but annoys Guerrero), McGee has been a docile prisoner, Rhodes says. Sometimes she curls up on the lockup’s tile floor, sucking her thumb. This offended one of Rhodes’s bosses, a sergeant, when she saw it one day this summer. The sergeant had come to the lockup to escort the female prisoners back to the jail. “Get that thumb out of your mouth,” the sergeant snapped at McGee. “How old are you? If you don’t stop sucking your thumb, I’ll leave you here, I don’t care.”
McGee has frequently been a soothing influence on her cellmates in the lockup, Rhodes says. One morning a female defendant who was in court for a mental fitness hearing was ranting and raving in the lockup, alarming the other females—all except McGee, who calmed the woman by launching into a Supremes medley. “The other female defendants were cowering in the corner, and Leslie’s there singing ‘Baby Love,’ ” recalls Placek, who witnessed the episode. Deputy Rhodes has never seen McGee particularly upset and believes she’s resigned to going to prison. But Rhodes has seen McGee comfort weeping cellmates after Locallo has sentenced them to prison. One image stands out in Rhodes’s memory: that of McGee sucking her thumb while cradling the head of a sobbing woman in her lap and stroking the woman’s hair with her free hand.
“I always have loved to take care of others,” McGee said in the jail before the trial. “I don’t worry about me first.”
She started running away from home when she was twelve, she said, to get away from her parents’ constant fights. She started drinking at that age, too. She liked “the feeling of absence from this world” that drinking gave her.
McGee said she was close to her father even though he was a harsh disciplinarian. She didn’t fault him for the frequent whippings she says he gave with belts and extension cords. (“That’s what he felt was right to do.”) He was also fiercely protective of her. The police charged him with battery one time for beating a classmate of hers with a fiberglass fishing rod at her school. McGee had complained to her parents that the boy was picking on her. McGee was then nine, as was the boy. Her father “grabbed that boy by the ankles, he hit him in the head and everything. He beat him like he was his own child,” McGee recalled. According to the police report, the elder McGee also attacked several other children, aged six to ten, at the school that day. The battery charge was thrown out when the complaining witnesses didn’t appear in court. James McGee says he only hit one of the children. (“A little boy jumped right in front of me, so I spanked his ass.”)
James McGee allows that he was a “pretty strict” parent. He only whupped Leslie “when she did something she wasn’t supposed to do,” but
that became fairly often as she advanced into her early teens and “started listening to the wrong people and wouldn’t listen to me,” he says. When she began running away, he whupped her for that. Leslie was “strong-willed,” he says. “She didn’t want nobody to tell her what to do. She got that from me.”
Leslie McGee is her father’s second child to have killed someone as a teen. When she was six, her seventeen-year-old half brother plunged a butcher knife into the face of his mother’s boyfriend during a fight. He said he’d caught the boyfriend slapping his mother. He got six years for voluntary manslaughter.
McGee described her mother as “paranoid, schizoid.” She remembered her frantically stuffing suitcases one morning, telling Leslie, then seven, and her brother that they had to flee their home because their father was plotting to burn them up so he could collect the insurance money. “We believed her—she’s Mama, and she’d never whipped us,” McGee said. They spent nearly a year living with her maternal relatives in a decrepit flat before Leslie’s mother was willing to return home with the children.
Court records indicate McGee’s mother has been arrested once, for selling incense on a city bus.
McGee’s parents divorced when she was ten, reunited, and split for good when she was fourteen. She kept her things at her mother’s after that and stayed there or “with friends,” she said. To her drinking she said she added an occasional snort of cocaine. She stopped attending school her freshman year and found work as a cocktail waitress at a south-side lounge whose owner didn’t ask her age.
After she was charged with the murder of Jean François, she was held at first in the county’s juvenile detention center. The county commemorated her seventeenth birthday, in June 1997, by shipping her to the adult jail at 26th Street. She was scared at first about being locked up with adults. But she learned that “it’s a lot of talented, intelligent people locked up. It’s a lot of people who do things out of necessity. Some people have unique situations.”
She’s been diagnosed in the jail as having bipolar disorder, a mood disorder characterized by swings between extreme highs and lows. McGee said she’d had days “where I do flips over the furniture” in the division day room, “I turn the TV [channel] rapidly, I run across the room, I do everything all in one breath, and I don’t care who’s watching me.” But she’d also had “horrible crying spells, where nobody could calm me down.” After vomiting one evening six months before the trial, she told the jail doctors she’d taken a two-week supply of her antidepressant—she’d been pretending to take the pills daily but was saving them up, she said. She told counselors
she’d tried to kill herself several times before—at age eleven with rat poison, at age fourteen with muscle relaxers, at age fifteen by cutting her wrists. The jail overdose was prompted by her thoughts “about something bad that happened a long time ago,” she told a counselor.
McGee has also told counselors, in response to their queries, that she was physically and sexually abused by relatives while growing up. She was reluctant to talk about sexual abuse when I raised the subject, other than to say that for a period of her childhood, a relative had indeed sexually assaulted her, and to stress that the perpetrator wasn’t anyone in her immediate family.
McGee said she thought she needed to be locked up for a few years regardless of how her trial turned out. “If they just let me go home I know I’m gonna have problems again. Maybe they could send me to a mental institution, somewhere I can close myself off from the world, clear my mind of all the negatives.” Placek later said McGee’s professed desire to stay locked up awhile was immaterial for her. “What do I look like, a social worker?” the lawyer asked. Her job was to get McGee off if she could, she said, and otherwise to keep her sentence as short as possible.