white businessman on Michigan Avenue) but it’s absolutely essential to the work of catching drug dealers. Consider the problem from Sergeant Kosala’s viewpoint. Even if his men had found a bag of crack on one of the teenagers, they can’t go into court and say, “Judge, the kid looked suspicious so we braced him and found this in his pocket.” The judge would bounce the case in an eyeblink. So the facts are going to have to be altered to fit the Constitution. As Kosala says, “They lie, so we lie.”

The night shift is in session again at 26th & Cal, and once more lawyer Tim Lohraff is at the defense table trying to salvage what he can from a hopeless situation. Tonight two of his clients have already gone down in separate trials, both convicted on evidence that was almost certainly seized illegally. “A cop watching your average drug deal is hard put to make a righteous bust,” says Lohraff.  “All he can see is some guy giving another guy money, and a minute later a third person comes over giving the first guy something you can't see.  Well that isn't gonna work in court.  So the script is: ‘The suspect dropped a glascine bag to the pavement.  The arresting officer recovered glascine bag and saw it contained a controlled substance’  And of course we all know what happened. Everybody in the building knows that the cop threw the guy up against the wall and found the shit in his pocket or his shoe.”

But for Lohraff, there is something even more ominous here than the routine violation of his clients’ Constitutional rights. “There's a curious thing about these drop cases.  They're usually the lowest level felony—straight possession. Yet the cop will testify in court and lie—which is perjury. So you have a cop committing a greater felony to convict a lesser felony. It's gotta have an impact on a cop to stand up and lie on a regular basis and think nothing of it.”

Lohraff’s adversary tonight is an able and aggressive young prosecutor from downstate named Ed Ronkowski and he’s about as happy to be here as the rest of these people.  Ronkowski, a