Wednesday, July 29, 1998

A little boy in a too-big chair

By Bob Greene

His own lawyer compared him to a beaten dog.

The child known as Joe heard the comparison; it was made in open court. This was on the day that Joe - 8 years old, charged with the felony of aggravated criminal sexual assault - was taken in front of a judge at the Henry County courthouse in Cambridge, Ill. Eight years old - and he was a defendant.

His legs did not even reach all the way to the floor. Joe - a boy with soft, brownish-blond hair, wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt - sat in a hard, leather-backed chair in the old rural courthouse, and his little feet did not even make it to the blue carpeting. The sight broke your heart - this child's legs dangling in the air, white socks and black tennis shoes, a boy so small in a big defense-table chair.

The attorney who had been appointed by the court to represent Joe in the criminal case - Ed Woller - looked at Judge John Bell and told the judge that a sadistically treated dog might expect more sympathy than Joe had been shown in his anguished life:

"If we had a little puppy we were raising, and that dog was kicked around and abused and treated absolutely unfairly, and then that dog came over and bit someone - would we be angry, or would we think about how that dog had been raised, think about how that dog had been treated? We can't continue to mistreat him..."

Joe, hearing those words being spoken about him, looked up at Woller, trying to understand.

But how can anyone expect a child to understand the circumstances that led him to this courtroom? We have been reporting on this case for 3 1/2 years - how Joe had been ready to be adopted into a safe, loving home when an appellate panel, with James D. Heiple writing the order, had removed him from that good home and had sent him to a felon and his wife, people who were not related to the boy in any way; how the panel had not permitted any hearing at all on the child's behalf before sending him away; how his life had descended into such hell, until he now found himself here, a defendant....

His attorney made the comparison - little boy to beaten dog - and Joe looked and listened.

Earlier - before Joe had been brought into the courtroom - there had been graphic testimony about his life. Joe had been kept in the basement of the old courthouse for that. Why?

Because, his attorney had told Judge Bell, "It would be traumatic for him to hear some of this testimony." The child had been forced to live the life that was being described in court, but the details were so harrowing that he was spared from having to listen.

If only someone had spared him from having to endure that life. If only, when there was still time to save him, a court had been as careful with that child as the judge and the lawyers in this courtroom were trying to be now.

Joe was allowed to plead guilty to battery in exchange for the more serious sexual assault charge being dropped. Judge Bell, who referred to Joe's case as "a tragedy," talked gently to Joe. He told Woller and Henry County State's Atty. Ted Hamer, "We don't want to lose him." Judge Bell said, "I'm looking out for this young man and I'll continue looking out for this young man until I am no longer assigned to this case." He invited Joe to phone him personally if the boy ever felt the need.

All of this should have been so unnecessary - all these adults struggling to help a child whose future had shown every sign of being wonderful, until the Heiple-written order removed him from his safe home. All the child needed in the first place was a hearing - just a brief hearing, on his own behalf.

Virtually everyone who knew or cared about the child - starting with Judge Robert J. Cashen, the Stark County, Ill., judge whom the appellate panel had overruled, the judge who knew about the circumstances that awaited Joe in the house of the felon and his wife - virtually everyone knew, back when Joe was 2, what was right for him.

And he was never even given a hearing. He was just ordered out of the home where he was loved, and now, six years later, here he was - a defendant, an 8-year-old boy being compared to an angry, hurt, beaten dog.

The night before the court hearing, in a restaurant just off the main highway in Henry County, Ed Woller had eaten a late dinner and we had talked about his hopes for his young client.

"In spite of everything that has been done to him, he's a nice little boy," Woller said. "I hope we can start to turn things around for him."

It was not to be. Despite the best intentions of everyone in the courtroom that day in Cambridge, Joe was in for more pain, more heartache - pain and heartache that have culminated in the most awful way this summer. We will continue to report in our next column.

Chicago Tribune