Appolon Beaudouin Jr., 39
Title: Chief investigator
Employer: Office of the State Appellate Defender, Capital Litigation Division
Salary range: $40,000-$45,000
Q. How do you describe your job to people?
A. I tell them that we re-investigate death-penalty cases. That’s the simplest way to put it.
Q. What does that entail?
A. Reading court transcripts, reading appellate briefs, ordering records and, most importantly, locating and interviewing witnesses. Witnesses who probably don’t want to be found–I want to make that clear. It’s real tough.
Q. So you’re looking for witnesses who were initially interviewed by the police and then by the state’s attorney’s office?
A. Absolutely. First, we get the police reports. We try to get a full set of police reports, but that’s not always possible because you could be working on a case from five, 10, 20 years ago. We get the reports with the intention of re-investigating the entire case and making sure that whatever it is [a witness] said, they really said, and under what circumstances they said it.
We do not have witnesses sitting around waiting for us to show up to talk to them. Most of the time, they have criminal records and they usually have something to hide.
Q. In other words, people who helped commit a crime but were encouraged to testify against their partner?
A. Absolutely. Co-defendants, jailhouse snitches, alibi witnesses.
Q. So you’re a state employee, but you’re coming at the case, basically, from the other end of the prosecutors?
A. Yes. We are the post-appeals division of the public defender. Whoever can’t afford attorneys, we’re assigned to their case.
Q. What’s your educational background?
A. I have a bachelor’s and master’s in criminal justice.
Q. Describe a typical day.
A. There is no typical day. I keep at least three files in my car, so between the suburbs [where I live] and downtown [where my office is], I stop somewhere to see who’s out in the morning. We try to get ’em out of bed.
Between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. is when I find most of my witnesses. We do not use phones because people need to see a face; they need to see some kind of sincerity. I have three investigators who work under me–two in the Chicago office and one in Springfield–and that’s part of their training. We go straight to the witness and avoid anyone else.
So I stop on the way to work, and when I come to the office, I usually have two or three tasks I want to accomplish. There’s so much to do because these are old cases.
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Q. What’s the best part about your job?
A. The fight to save someone who’s innocent. The fight to get someone [a sentence] less than death. You have to have a certain attitude about this.
My attitude is: You mean to tell me that there’s no one in the world who can say something good about this [convicted] person? This person was not born a criminal.
Q. What’s the worst part?
A. The time problem. Too many cases and not enough people working on them. On certain occasions, it’s taken me two or three years to find a witness. That’s nothing to brag about because I’m an investigator and there’s no excuse for that. But I didn’t give up.
We do a lot of talking to the victims’ families, and that is the hardest thing to do. But you can do it.
Q. What are the essential attributes to doing this job well?
A. Absolutely essential, the most important thing, is communication. Your mouth is your weapon. There’s no such thing as being good at it; you have to be great. … We don’t tell witnesses they have to talk to us, but people want to talk. However it is they respond, you get information.
Perseverance is the other quality. In my last evaluation, my boss said he appreciates my “stick-to-it-iveness.” That’s a compliment, to hear something like that. And I just like all those syllables.