Last Monday morning, Lori Burger joined
hordes of petty criminals, plus their kith and kin, in room 7D of
the Sangamon County Courthouse. Crowded into pews and forced to sit
with unsavory strangers, some first offenders grew restless during
the hour and a half that lapsed before the judge appeared on the
bench. But Lori didn’t mind the tedious delay; she had
brought along her very best friend in the whole wide world —
a book. This one was a juicy paperback of the chick-lit
genre — not quite so highbrow as the fare that earned her a
degree in British and American literature. But on this day, she
needed a frothy distraction from the reality that she was facing
two to five years’ incarceration and up to $25,000 fine. Burger, as you probably don’t recall, is
the former library assistant who was caught last summer peddling
cast-off library donations on eBay. She was the topic of a press
conference featuring the mayor, the police chief, two city
attorneys, and the director of the public library, announcing that
the 31-year-old Burger had stolen some 2,000 books that had been given to the library. She immediately
resigned her $28,570-a-year job and returned about 1,000 volumes. But
that didn’t stop the justice system from throwing the book at
Burger: She was charged with theft over $300 — a class 3 felony
offense. The media mostly made light of the case,
focusing on the novelty of her crime. After all, it was tough to
make Burger sound like a menace to society, given that many of the
books she “stole” were textbooks or damaged editions
destined for the library Dumpster. The rest would have been offered
for sale in the library’s used-book store at a top price of
$2 apiece. My response to the press conference was a
column asking why city officials had felt compelled to alert the
media to Burger’s transgressions [see “One for the
books,” Aug. 18, 2005]. At the time, city communications
director Ernie Slottag offered this explanation: “I
don’t think we’ve ever had anyone charged with stealing
books and selling them on eBay,” Slottag says.
“That’s pretty unusual, don’t you think?”
The assorted cops and firefighters who drive
drunk and the maintenance worker who pilfered $11,000 from the
credit union are, apparently, not unusual enough to warrant the
public humiliation of a full-scale press conference. No, just the
lowly library assistant who took discarded books. Her felony charge made an amusing story on the front
page of the State Journal-Register, and then it was forgotten — by virtually everyone
but Burger. “I think about this all the time. I
ponder this in the shower. I ponder this on my drive to
work,” she said Monday. Coming to court — as she had
done a half-dozen times, only to hear that her case had been
“continued” — made the shame worse. “It’s another day where you worry
about things, where you scrape the scab off the wound again,”
she said. The one person she had on her side was John
Sharp. He’s a lawyer I contacted last August when I was
looking for someone to explain the charges against Burger. He never
gave me anything quotable; all he would say was “You’ve
got to be kidding! Tell the girl to call me.” He and partner
Mike Harmon ended up representing Burger for free. “It became obvious to us that this
wasn’t a felony. It was — if anything — a
misdemeanor,” Sharp said, “and we knew Lori
didn’t have the resources to retain us or anybody else. So
this was the right thing to do.” He reminded prosecutors that the books Burger
sold on eBay weren’t all from the library; she also listed
books she had bought from thrift stores, garage sales, and Web
sites. The dollar value of each book presented another question:
Should it be gauged by the sum she sold it for on eBay, or
by the paltry price the library would have charged? Steve Weinhoeft, first assistant state’s
attorney, finally dropped the charge to a class A misdemeanor. On
Monday, Burger pleaded guilty and agreed to two years’
probation, $1,000 in restitution to the library, and 250 hours of
community service — tentatively scheduled to be spent reading
newspapers and books onto tape for the visually impaired. The fact
that Burger will enjoy this part of the punishment tickled
Weinhoeft. “I think it’s a very appropriate
sentence,” he said. Of course, Slottag didn’t hold another
press conference to announce the downgraded charges, and the SJ-R relegated the
news to page 14 on Wednesday. Burger, though, has had her life irretrievably
altered by her small-time crime. Not only has she stopped selling
books on eBay, but she has also sworn off libraries. Forever. The
bookmark in the paperback she brought to court Monday was the
receipt she printed out when she purchased the volume from
Amazon.com. “Some people buy shoes; I buy books.
I’m always gonna have books, and I’m always going to
read,” she said. “But
I wish this had never happened. . . . You can’t go back and
redo things — but if I could, I would.”
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2006.
