I’ve mentioned before about my year at Northwestern University School of Law. I mentioned that I earned an LL.M. in Criminal Law, but I never mentioned what I had to do to get the degree. I had to earn 12 hours and write a thesis. Six of those hours (and 90% of my time) came from carrying a case load down at the Cook County Jail.
There were about nine of us in the graduate program and we were assigned to represent “clients” at the jail. We were like public defenders, but with a very limited case load. My observation of the public defenders was that they had so many clients that many of them couldn’t represent any of their clients very well.
Bill Martin was our program leader. No, he never managed the Yankees. But, what he did do was prosecute Richard Speck for raping and murdering eight Filipino student nurses in Chicago. The police found Speck’s finger print on the inside of a closet door from the nurses’ apartment. Bill introduced the entire door into evidence. Talk about demonstrative evidence. It took the jury 49 minutes to find Speck guilty and recommend his execution. Anyway, by 1969, Bill Martin had left the State’s Attorneys Office and was teaching at Northernwestern Law. The Ford Foundation was funding the graduate criminal defense program to which I was attached.
Probably the most significant case we defended during the year involved a felony murder charge. A black man came into a jewelry store and attempted to cash a Park Department pay check. He ended up robbing the store and killing the owner. Our client, Eugene Overstreet, worked for the Park Department and his name was on the check (the check was gratuitously left behind at the scene of the crime). Overstreet insisted he never received the check. The wife of the dead owner identified Overstreet in a police lineup as the robber/murderer.
Bill Martin actually took the lead in defending Overstreet, but a number of us in the program worked different angles of the case. One of my tasks was to try to find out what happened to the check. If the prosecution could put the check in Overstreet’s hands, we could fold our tent and slip silently into the night.
How does one get a city job with the Park Department? Keep in mind that this is Chicago. The answer is you go see your Ward Committeeman. Overstreet knew a committeeman and was able to get the Park Department job. The problem was that he didn’t live in the committeeman’s ward. Let’s face it, if the system is going to work, you have to live in the ward where you are being sponsored. In order to help Overstreet out and stay within the “rules,” the committeeman let Overstreet use his street address on the job application. Now, Overstreet “lived” in the right ward.
As fate would have it, Overstreet copied the street address incorrectly. The address he put down was to a vacant lot. Overstreet didn’t know this, but it was not a problem because, on payday, he would pick up the check at the Park Department Office.
Regarding the check in question, Overstreet was somewhere else on pay day. When he came in the next day to pick up his check, he was told it already had been mailed. When he checked with the committeeman, he was advised that he hadn’t received the check. We could verify all of the above facts. We also discovered the error in the mailing address.
Bill Martin asked me and Ty Fahner to track the route of the check. Ty subsequently became the Attorney General for the State of Illinois and is presently a partner with Mayer Brown. We suspected that if someone at the Post Office knew that the Park Department check was going to a vacant lot, they might just put it in their pocket. Chicago’s main post office was, at the time, one of the largest post offices in the world. It was a monster. With the help of a postal official, we started at the end of the building where the mail came in and followed the route the letter/check would have taken through the building. I should have worn gym shoes.
Even back in the late sixties, the post office had sophisticated equipment to send letters on their way. A letter would be picked up by an automated arm and the operator would type in the zip code. Then the arm would place the letter on a conveyor belt and away it would go. Somewhere down the line, it would end up in the proper basket. The final sorting, however, was done just like Ben Franklin did it when he was the Postmaster for Philadelphia in 1763. Someone stood in front of a bunch of cubby holes and flipped in the mail. We learned that the individuals assigned to sort mail for a particular area did not live in that area. Thus, they would not know of a vacant lot.
Of course, the mailman would know. When we spoke to him, he was convincing that he had received no mail to deliver to the vacant lot. So we never could prove who took the letter, but with the help of the testimony of two post office officials we were able to satisfy the court that Overstreet never received the check.
Bill Martin convinced Overstreet to be tried by judge alone (no jury). Since it was the check that put Overstreet at the scene of the crime, the case disassembled. The eye witness testimony proved not to be a problem. After the judge acquitted Overstreet, he told Bill that if he ever got in trouble, he hoped he could afford Bill’s representation. Hey, what about the gang of nine?
