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Courtroom 302

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Submitted By pnew
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Professor Chapleau
CJS
7 April 2013 Courtroom 203 My understanding of the court system has changed almost weekly from the beginning of my semester. I do understand things that I never thought I would’ve have known or even cared about in the least. The book Courtroom 302 has brought an even different side of thinking into this. The book goes into detail about the criminal court in Chicago. He watches all of the actions and different trials that come and go in the courtroom 302. He presents many different cases throughout the book which gives more insight then just a single case. Overview of the book: The book is written by Steve Bogira, who is a reporter for a newspaper is Chicago. He goes into the courtroom 302 whose judge is Judge Daniel Locallo, a former prosecutor. The judge does share many of his thoughts which Bogira throughout most of the cases that are presented before him. The book talks about many stages of the process: such as sentencing, plea bargaining, discretion, law officers misconduct/corruption. One of the cases that stuck out was that in chapter 4 “Good Facts, Bad Facts”. The case involved a guy named Harris who had killed a person sitting in a car, because he thought the victim was a rival gang member. He based that idea off of a baseball hat the guy was wearing with the letter ‘T’ on it. The idea of doing that because of a hat seems to be crazy but because they had an eyewitness who at first labeled another man the killer but then stated that Harris was the killer. That was a good and bad thing for him. Because he had said a different person before then changed his mind he lost credibility but then he still had someone saying he did it which isn’t good. Harris did confess to the shooting. The subject of public defenders is a very interesting topic in the book. Most of the cases in criminal courts use a public defender. Most of the

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