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Counted by the Pound
The Prosecutors Who Weighed Their Wins
In Cook County, prosecutors raced to convict 4,000 pounds of defendants and treated it as a game. The record shows what that game cost.
A bathroom scale is not something you expect to find near a judge’s chambers. But that was what David Goggin remembered encountering when he began working in a trial courtroom as a Cook County prosecutor. When he asked about it, another prosecutor explained that it was for the:
“Two-Ton Contest”
The objective was simple:
become the first prosecutor to secure convictions against defendants whose combined weight reached 4,000 pounds
According to Goggin’s account, published in a 1999 Chicago Tribune investigation, convicted defendants were brought into the room and weighed. Most were Black. Behind closed doors, he recalled, the competition had another name:
“Niggers by the Pound”
The phrase is difficult to read. It should be.
But the slur is only the beginning of what makes this history disturbing. The deeper offense was the transformation of human beings into units of professional achievement.
