Courtroom 302

Dan Locallo (now retired) was the judge at Cook County Courthouse. He lived in the affluent Chicago suburb of Norwood Park, comprised mostly of white people of Polish, German, Italian, and Irish descent. He had a sister and two brothers. His older brother, Victor, was the family rebel but was later “diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic” (197). Victor killed himself at the age of 24. Locallo believed that knowing Victor taught him “to be more compassionate and tolerant of people who are different” (197). That said, he believed people mainly operated according to their free will and could not use their backgrounds as excuses. Locallo was raised near his current neighborhood. He married a woman named Jean, a teacher’s aide. Together, they had two children, five years apart—Kevin and Lauren, both of whom attended Catholic school.

Locallo was born in October 1952 to August Locallo, a former police officer. Two months later, his father became a Chicago cop and spent the 1950s and 1960s working as a robbery detective. It was from his father that Locallo developed an interest in the law. Locallo’s interest also emerged from having watched To Kill a Mockingbird at a movie theater in Little Rock, Arkansas—his mother’s hometown—when he was 10.