For generations, illicit drag racing has been an open secret at what’s now Chicago’s 297-acre wetland Big Marsh Park. Politicians have decried it, residents have complained about it and cops have gone to war with it. 

But these days, the city has a new weapon in its arsenal: $150 tickets for drag racers and spectators for parking in the bike lane.

A Better Government Association analysis discovered more than 520 of the tickets — carrying about $78,000 in fines — were written since the beginning of 2020 along this isolated stretch of Stony Island Avenue at Big Marsh. That’s nearly six times the number of bike lane infractions Chicago police have issued in that time along all of Milwaukee Avenue, one of Chicago’s busiest cycling thoroughfares.

In interviews with the BGA, racers said police show up in their squad cars to disperse the crowds, record their license plate numbers and send them tickets in the mail. The more cunning drivers dodge the tickets by racing without plates or by using illegal remote-control hideaway license plate covers — easily available on Amazon for as little as $50 — when they see squad cars roll up.

Despite the city’s attempt at enforcement, and a larger citywide crackdown, the Big Marsh racing has continued unabated, posing a danger for park goers and for the bicyclists who are brave enough to cruise down the painted bike lanes. In recent years, the park’s main road that’s most associated with drag racing has been the scene of dozens of car crashes.

“There’s nothing that would suggest there’s any enforcement,” said Paul Fitzgerald, Friends of Big Marsh executive director. “You can reliably feel like nobody gives a damn if you race a car there.”

From industrial backwater to outdoor oasis

Big Marsh, a reclaimed industrial site east of the Bishop Ford expressway, opened to the public six years ago. A privately-owned backwater of landfills and the steel industry for the better part of the last century, the wetland has since become a southeast side oasis for bicycling, bird-watching and trail-hiking.

When the land was closed to the public, the empty half-mile stretch of Stony Island Avenue made for an ideal drag racing spot — no through-traffic, no driveways, no cross streets, no mom-and-pop businesses or humans getting in the way.

Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza, whose 10th ward encompasses the park, said that her 84-year-old grandmother remembers people racing at the site.

“When we were cleaning up Big Marsh, you should have seen how many cars we pulled out of there,” she said. “Just this summer, there were three cars pulled out because they drove into the water.”

In March 2021, a 30-year-old Chicago man was ticketed after reversing his 2016 Dodge Challenger into the marsh while doing donuts, police records show. When police arrived, the car was “partially submerged” and he was “attempting to drive out of the water.”

This local tradition has proven very dangerous. According to city crash data, there have been at least 30 crashes with four “incapacitating injuries” on that stretch of Stony Island since the park opened in November 2016. None of the crashes involved cyclists.

Bike Lane Tickets and Car Crashes at Big Marsh Park

Chicago police have issued more than 520 bike lane violations to vehicles on the stretch of Stony Island avenue leading to Big Marsh Park since the ticketing practice began in December 2019. There have also been 30 crashes along the road going back to November 2016, when the park opened.

Sources: City of Chicago Finance Department, City of Chicago crash data. Map by Casey Toner.

Chicago police said they continue to “adjust resources on a regular basis to address problems like drag racing and other illegal activities.”

According to data analyzed by the BGA, Chicago police have issued three speeding tickets on the road leading to Big Marsh Park beginning in 2020, when the deluge of bike lane tickets began. They have not impounded any cars, issued drag racing tickets or made drag racing arrests on that road since.

Jason Henricy, 42, said that when he raced there in the early 2000s, police would position themselves at the south end of Stony Island, get a train conductor to park a train on the tracks on the north end of Stony Island and then write tickets to the racers stuck in between.

“There have been nights where they literally have given hundreds of tickets,” he said.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in August, a handful of racers gathered at the site and waited for challengers. The scene showcased the casual comfort of the Big Marsh racing scene.

Marking the track, a circled red X was sprayed on the asphalt along with the word “FLAGGER” to show where the flagger should stand, about ten feet away from a stretch of asphalt smeared with tire tracks and burned rubber — the apparent starting line.

One of the racers, a 21-year-old car salesman from Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood, drove a yellow 2014 Chevy Camaro with black racing stripes — the “Bumblebee” car from the “Transformers” film. In the last year alone, Chicago police issued him three $150 tickets for parking in the Big Marsh bike lane.

“Some of them are cool, and they’ll come through and will be like ‘leave’,” he said. “Some of them will come and get the plate and that’s it.”

Speed cameras at Big Marsh?

City officials and park advocates say that speed bumps or cameras are needed to put the brakes on racing, and they may soon be coming.

Fitzgerald, Friends of Big Marsh executive director, said that infrastructure changes are necessary because racing happens to a “cartoonish degree” at Big Marsh.

“There’s a lack of interest in really engineering these streets to be safe for the community,” he said. “I think people worry it’s a political liability to decrease somebody’s ability to speed. Drag racing is part of that.”

Ald. Garza said she is pushing to install speed bumps down Stony Island or score the pavement. But she drew the line at speed cameras, which she opposes, claiming that the racers would quickly destroy them with bats.

According to city records, 157 speed cameras citywide have issued 11.3 million tickets to drivers  in the past eight years. Posted near parks and schools, the speed cameras are designed to improve pedestrian safety by ticketing cars that go as fast as six miles per hour over the speed limit. At Big Marsh, racers can exceed 100 miles per hour.

Garza said that Chicago police are “stretched to the limit” responding to violent crime, curbing their ability to stop the racing. Even then, she said that a midnight police officer frequently disperses racing crowds at the marsh.

“The fourth district does what they can but it’s never ending,” she said. “They are there every week. Sometimes three times a week.”

The drag racing has stopped some from using the park as intended. Allison Beaulieu-Cholke, said she will take her children and dogs to the park in the daytime, but never in the early evening, due to the drag racers.

“The thing that terrifies me is anytime there’s that kind of behavior and alcohol mixed together,” she said. “And everyone is always drinking.”

The politics of drag racing

It is unclear why city officials have chosen tickets that amount to a wrist slap when harsher penalties are available.

Under political pressure stemming from high-profile drag races and car stunts that have taken place on Lower Wacker Drive and elsewhere in the city, the City Council approved an ordinance earlier this summer that empowers police to impound cars involved in illegal drag racing even if the driver is not there when the car is identified. 

Drag racing penalties carry fines up to $10,000 in addition to a $500 towing fee and a new $2,000 impoundment fee attached to the ordinance.

Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd), whose district includes downtown and is a longtime critic of the drivers, said prior to the vote that the motor vehicle shenanigans “skyrocketed during the pandemic.”

In late August, a 41-year-old pedestrian died after being hit by a man racing a Corvette near Midway Airport as several “street takeovers” brought stunts, such as drifting and donuts, and racing throughout neighborhoods in Chicago.

Neither the Chicago Park District nor the Chicago Police Department would detail their strategy into reducing drag racing at Big Marsh.

In a statement, the Chicago Park District said that it “is aware of the drag racing activity that takes place off park property outside of Big Marsh Park” and reports these incidents to the Chicago Police Department.

The City of Chicago, after receiving numerous inquiries from a BGA reporter, increased their surveillance at the marsh.

They wheeled out a temporary security camera and parked it in the bike lane.

Raymond Galloway, a 48-year-old line cook at a Chicago soul food restaurant, got arrested on the West Side twice this year carrying small amounts of heroin.

Both times, the courts quickly tossed out his charges. Cook County’s judicial system, under an unwritten policy that even Cook County’s top prosecutor calls a failure, routinely dismisses minor drug possession cases — but usually not until after those arrested spend a few weeks in jail, often with life-changing consequences.

Galloway is among tens of thousands of Chicagoans — mostly Black men — who have been jailed in the past two decades on drug charges everyone knew from the beginning were never going to stick, an investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Better Government Association has found.

The police knew. The prosecutors knew. The judges knew.

Yet no one has put a stop to it.

Along with their freedom and their dignity, Galloway and others have lost jobs and homes and relationships. They’ve had to pay thousands of dollars to get their cars out of the city’s impound lot. And they often struggle to pay bills while fighting their addictions.

“I can’t pay the phone bill,” Galloway said. “I’m two months behind on my rent. Child support, I got kids to take care of. I can’t do anything.”

In addition to the human toll, this constant churn of dead-end arrests costs taxpayers tens of millions of dollars every year.

“What a waste of time and resources to drag people into court on a drug charge and dismiss it,” said Ben Ruddell, director of criminal justice policy for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

“What’s the point?”

Most cases under a gram dismissed

The BGA and Sun-Times analyzed 280,000 drug possession cases using nearly two decades of court data compiled by The Circuit, a collaborative of news organizations, including the BGA and Injustice Watch. The examination disregarded arrests involving marijuana, which has been decriminalized in Illinois.

About half of the drug possession cases in Chicago between 2000 and 2018 — about 140,000 — were dropped at their earliest stages.

And that dismissal rate has soared in the most recent years.

For instance, an examination of all 10,480 cases from 2018 in which drug possession was the most serious charge found that a whopping 72% were tossed out.

These dead-end arrests are the result of a long-standing, commonly understood rule among prosecutors not to pursue criminal charges against anyone caught with user-level amounts — around a gram, according to interviews with judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys, as well as an examination of hundreds of case files.

Under Illinois law, all drug possession cases involving less than 15 grams — as little as a single pill of Xanax or a grain of heroin — are lumped together under the same felony offense, making it impossible to isolate statistics for specific quantities.

To examine the lowest-level cases, the BGA and Sun-Times reviewed a random sample of 400 arrest reports from 2018 to determine the exact weight of the drugs listed.

About 95% of the cases involving less than a gram, about the weight of a paper clip, were dropped.

‘A colossal waste’

It’s difficult to find anyone involved in this catch-and-release system who’s willing to defend it or to end it.

Cops say they’re obligated to enforce the law.

But even Cook County’s top prosecutor — State’s Attorney Kim Foxx — acknowledges the futility of the endless cycle of arrest and release, which she says has been the norm at least as far back as when she first began prosecuting such cases in 2008.

She said young prosecutors almost felt as though they were being subjected to “hazing” when they brought drug possession cases to court.

“My colleagues were, like, ‘You’re never going to get a finding of probable cause on anything less than a half a gram,’ ” Foxx said.

After she was elected state’s attorney in 2016, she told her prosecutors to release low-level drug users within days. Previously, she said, that often took weeks.

When people are arrested, they have a bail hearing. Then, the case goes to a preliminary hearing.

“My directive was: If we knew these cases were going to be dismissed at the preliminary hearing stage, we would try to dismiss them [earlier] at the bond hearing,” she said.

“Just transporting the people to the courthouse, the sheriff and all, it was a colossal waste to me on a case that was just getting thrown out.”

But the steady flow of drug users into courtrooms continues.

The Chicago police have begun a diversion program to allow some people caught with small amounts of drugs to go into treatment instead of the courts, but the program — which began in 2016 — benefits only a small fraction who meet the stringent entry requirements.

Over the past three years, Illinois lawmakers have unsuccessfully proposed downgrading possession of small amounts of drugs from a felony to a misdemeanor.

But the idea follows a national trend of states reducing drug possession penalties.

In the boldest such reform, Oregon voters recently approved a measure that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of drugs.

‘It was dust, man’

Galloway said he first snorted heroin a few years ago while he was partying with friends. He’d done cocaine before and was curious about heroin.

“I was, like, ‘Damn, this got me feeling good,’ ” Galloway said.

Then he got arrested for heroin possession — twice.

First, he got caught with 0.2 grams of heroin in April.

“It was dust, man,” Galloway said. “I was, like, ‘Y’all taking me to jail for this?’”

He had to stay in a halfway house until that case was dropped.

Are Illinois’ Drug Laws Fair?

The Better Government Association and the Chicago Sun-Times asked readers to answer a few questions about the state’s drug laws.

Click here to read the results of our questionnaire.

In June, he was arrested for possession of 2 grams of heroin and ordered to live in another halfway house. That case was tossed out, too. The judge let him return to his Uptown apartment but ordered him not to leave except to get his daily methadone treatment to keep from going into a withdrawal.

“The withdrawal from heroin would kill me,” Galloway said.

Because of his arrests, Galloway was unable to work regularly for more than six months, which he said cost him more than $6,000 in lost wages.

In late September, a judge lifted Galloway’s stay-at-home order.

He returned to work at a soul food restaurant, where he prepares yams, collard greens and other comfort food.

His boss said his absence had “really messed things up.”

Galloway is now free on bail while he awaits trial for his 2020 drug-selling case.

His legal woes are an exception in the majority of drug cases: For seven of 10 people charged only for drug possession, it was their first and only charge since 2000, records show.

The BGA has filed suit against the Chicago Police Department on grounds it failed to turn over body-camera footage of Galloway’s arrests within the time required by law. But the BGA was able to obtain another video of Chicago police drug arrests through the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

West Side drug arrests

All of Galloway’s arrests happened in the West Side’s 11th police district, which is about 5 miles from downtown Chicago.

11th District

Drug arrests from January 2014 to March 2021

Chicago Area detailed
Humboldt Park West Garfield Park East Garfield Park Garfield Park W Chicago Ave W Madison St W Kinzie St Eisenhower Expressway 50 64 Over 500 arrests have occured within this half-mile alone

Source: Data analysis of Chicago arrest data by Casey Toner, Better Government Association

Graphic by Jesse Howe/Sun-Times

The 11th district has twice the drug arrests of any other police district in the city. In fact, more than half the drug arrests throughout the city are in a relatively small area on the West Side, according to the city’s arrest data.

The Eisenhower Expressway runs from the suburbs, through the West Side just south of Garfield Park and into downtown Chicago. Sometimes, it’s called the Heroin Highway.

Every day, people pull off the highway to buy drugs in open-air markets on side streets, alleys and vacant lots on the West Side. And every day, some get arrested for having small amounts of heroin, cocaine or illicit pills.

Movie palaces and fur stores

Decades ago, movie palaces and fur stores anchored a glittering hub of commerce along Madison Avenue just west of Garfield Park. And about a mile away, Sears once operated a massive distribution center. There were plenty of jobs.

In the late 1960s, riots triggered by the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. burned out sections of the West Side that were never rebuilt. White people fled, and their money went with them.

Sears closed its Homan Square facility in 1987, moving its headquarters to the Sears Tower. Today, the West Side’s population is poor and predominantly Black. Life expectancy in West Garfield Park is 68 years — 15 years less than in mostly white Edison Park on the Northwest Side, according to census data. Jobs are scarce. So are grocery stores.

This is the “constellation of forces” that produces open-air drug markets such as the ones on the West Side, according to Dr. Anthony Iton, a national expert on the effects of poverty and racism on public health.

“Let me take away your education, let me take away maybe one or both of your parents, let me take away your bank account, your transportation, let me just sort of constrain your choices so dramatically but in a way that you actually see opportunity, but you can’t get to it,” he said.

“That causes enormous stress, and the more stress you have, the more you’re likely to seek ways of short-term alleviation of that stress,” said Iton, senior vice president of health communities with the California Endowment.

‘Good dope sells itself’

Michael Pitts, 36, a Four Corner Hustlers gang member serving a 12-year federal drug sentence, said a West Side heroin operation staffed by four or more people can bring in up to $10,000 per day.

“Good dope sells itself,” Pitts said by email.

And there’s no shortage of sellers. Pitts, who sold heroin in West Garfield Park, said somebody is always “ready to hustle or ‘jug,’ as we call it, once a spot is gettin’ money.”

In a typical open-air market on the West Side, everyone has a job: Some people are lookouts; someone works “security” and holds a gun; and someone else supplies heroin, cocaine or pills to the sellers on the street.

Other parts of the city — even those with similar economic problems — don’t have the same levels of street dealing as West Garfield Park, Humboldt Park, Austin and North Lawndale, all on the West Side.

This series is a collaboration between the Chicago Sun-Times and the Better Government Association.

Reporters: Frank Main (CST), Jared Rutecki (BGA), Casey Toner (BGA)

Data Analysis: Hannah Cushman (DataMade), Forest Gregg (DataMade), Casey Toner (BGA), Jared Rutecki (BGA)

Contributors: Analisa Trofimuk (BGA)

Photographers/Video: Pat Nabong (CST), Ashley Rezin (CST), Joe Kline (CST)

Engagement/Social: Nina Fuentes (BGA), Olivia Obineme (BGA), Alyssa Billmeyer (CST), Brianna Peoples (CST), Satchel Price (CST)

Web/Graphics: Cesar Calderon (BGA), Jesse Howe (CST), Andy Boyle (CST)

Editors: David Kidwell (BGA), John Chase (BGA), Paul Saltzman (CST)

Read all the pieces in this series:

• Oregon Is First State to Ticket Narcotics Users, but New Reform Has Yet To Live Up To Promise
• Kim Foxx’s Ex-Trainer Caught Up in ‘Unending Cycle’ of Drug Arrests
• Dead-End Drug Arrests: How We Reported This Story

To support this kind of independent investigative journalism, you can sign up for a Chicago Sun-Times subscription or donate to the Better Government Association.

 

South Side gangs used to deal drugs outside the Robert Taylor Homes and other public housing complexes. But the high rises were torn down, and times have changed. Much of the street dealing on the South Side is gone, said Roberto Aspholm, author of “Views from the Streets: The Transformation of Gangs and Violence on Chicago’s South Side.”

“Why would I stand on the street corner and expose myself to police and my opposition and the elements if I can just work off of a phone?” Aspholm said. “That’s the transition of the South Side.”

On the West Side, people of all walks of life drive or walk up to the outdoor drug markets. The Eisenhower Expressway and the Blue Line and Green Line trains provide easy access.

In West Garfield Park, people who use heroin — many of them middle-aged and worn-out — trudge along Pulaski Road, crossing empty lots and approaching huddles of men who “sling dope” in the side streets and alleys.

This corridor of the West Side is not only a heroin marketplace, it’s also extremely violent. On just one block in West Garfield Park, five people were arrested on drug charges over the past year, five people were shot, and seven people were charged with carrying guns.

Last year, the 11th police district, which includes West Garfield Park, had more killings than many cities. In 2020, for instance, there were 82 killings in the entire city of Minneapolis, compared with 99 in the 11th district.

‘Officer, it’s not you. It’s just a low amount’

The low-level drug possession cases from the West Side are handled in Cook County’s felony branch court next to the 11th district police station. Most of the cases get thrown out. Defendants are often seen leaving the courthouse with smiles on their faces, some pumping their fists in victory and some skipping out of the door.

“People shuffle up, the case is dismissed, and they sprint out,” said one judge, who asked not to be named. “That’s what I would do. Before someone changes their mind.”

Judges and prosecutors say they’re reluctant to clog courtrooms and jails with people caught carrying a thimble-full of heroin or cocaine.

Nick Roti, a former chief of the organized crime bureau of the CPD, remembers being a street cop and judges explaining why his drug cases were being dismissed: “They’d say, ‘Officer, it’s not you. It’s just a low amount. Don’t worry.’ ”

Often, officers show up in court only to watch their cases disappear before they’re even called to explain the arrest. A lot of preliminary hearings for drug possession are wrapped up in less than a minute. The defendant’s name is called, he or she walks up, and the case is dismissed.

‘It would have taxed our abilities’

Prosecutors decide whether to charge someone with felonies such as murders and rapes. But drug charges have always been excluded from that felony review process, in part because prosecutors would have to look at thousands of cases per year. So police officers typically decide whether to charge people with drug possession.

Gino DiVito, a retired Illinois appellate judge who helped create felony review in 1972 when he was a prosecutor, said the decision was left to the cops because there was a mountain of drug possession cases every year.

“It would have taxed our abilities,” DiVito said.

Another reason: They’re the simplest felony cases. Unlike murder cases, drug possession arrests often hinge on the word of the officer. They typically don’t require a confession or witness testimony.

Some defense attorneys say that gives cops too much latitude to stop and search people for drugs.

In their reports, officers often cite “suspicious behavior” in a known drug area as the reason for stopping someone, according to a review of hundreds of arrest reports.

That can mean two people talking outside an Uptown L stop. Or, in Raymond Galloway’s case, chatting with a woman on the street and walking away when he sees a cop.

Arrest reports contain head-scratchers like this one: An officer stopped a woman in Austin in 2015 after she walked through a vegetable garden in the winter. The officer wrote the woman’s actions were “nonamenable to gardening” because snow was on the ground. She was arrested for possession of 0.3 grams of heroin. Her case was tossed out.

The steep cost of drug arrests

It’s expensive to lock someone up — even briefly — for having small amounts of drugs.

Kathie Kane-Willis, the Chicago Urban League’s research and policy director, once calculated the cost of jailing people whose drug charges were tossed out. In 2008, while she was an instructor at Roosevelt University, Kane-Willis studied 10 weeks of drug arrests at one Cook County branch court.

More than half of the possession cases for drug amounts lower than 15 grams were dismissed. About 75% of those cases involved half a gram or less of a controlled substance. During the study, about 100 defendants’ cases were dismissed, costing Cook County about $350,000. That included court costs and the cost of jailing those people, the study found.

The BGA and Sun-Times found more than $100 million was spent on briefly housing people in the Cook County Jail on low-level drug possession charges between 2013 and 2018. That figure includes the jail’s payroll and other basic incarceration costs but not medical care.

It’s a small fraction of the jail’s total budget over that period, but Kane-Willis said the money would be better spent helping drug users with their health and housing problems.

“I’ve spent two weeks in jail kicking dope, rather than going to my methadone treatment appointment,” said Kane-Willis, a former heroin user. “Is that a better system?”

‘A chronic disease’

The Chicago Police Department didn’t respond to requests for comment about officers making low-level drug arrests. But Roti, the former police supervisor, said some low-level drug arrests serve a purpose.

Roti said gang members who run West Side drug markets entrust hand-to-hand sales to “buffers,” people who aren’t in a gang but sell small amounts of heroin to pay for their addiction.

When buffers are arrested for drug possession, they can give up information that helps build cases against violent gang members on some of the most dangerous streets in the city, he said.

Roti said the number of buffers who get arrested by narcotics officers is fairly small. A lot more people who use drugs get arrested as a result of patrol officers responding to complaints from aldermen and residents about drug activity, he said.

Roti said weaker drug laws — such as one being contemplated in Illinois that would make possession of 3 grams of heroin or less a misdemeanor — would benefit drug dealers and make it harder for officers to tackle citizen complaints about drug dealing.

The Chicago police get tens of thousands of such complaints every year.

“How do you answer those calls for service?” Roti said. “Write a couple of tickets and drive away? More people come up, they sell more drugs. People don’t want to live like that.

“No person with a substance-abuse disorder walks around with 3 grams of opioids in their pocket.”

Three grams of heroin is equivalent to 30 “dime bags” sold on the street, Roti said.

Still, like others in law enforcement, Roti said drug addiction is ultimately a health problem.

“They say, ‘the war on drugs’ — they love to throw that around — they make it sound like it’s a war against addicts,” he said. “I’ve never seen a war on drug addicts. I think people need to look at this more like a chronic disease.”

Keeping people who use drugs out of jail

Roti spearheaded a CPD program that connects arrested people to treatment. The program is for people arrested with less than 1 gram of cocaine or heroin. They aren’t charged with a crime if they agree to meet with a counselor. But they’re barred if they’ve been charged with selling drugs or have convictions for violent crimes or gun possession.

Participants are in their late 40s, on average, and are typically unemployed, according to the University of Chicago’s Urban Labs Crime Lab, which is monitoring the program. Since the program started in 2016, police have referred more than 800 people to drug treatment. Some weren’t arrested but walked in to a police station for help.

In a sample of about 50 people in the program, 31% stayed in treatment longer than three months. The program — the largest of its kind in the country — operates in half of the city’s police districts and is expected to expand to all of them.

Addiction experts say keeping people who use drugs out of jail can save their lives. That’s because their tolerance for heroin diminishes in jail. They can risk overdosing if they return to their old habits when they’re out.

Since 2017, Cook County Jail detainees have been asked whether they use drugs, and they get treatment to minimize withdrawals, said Matthew Walberg, a spokesman for Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart. Methadone, Suboxone and Vivitrol have been given to detainees to treat opioid addictions, he said.

Detainees also are handed doses of the overdose-reversal drug naloxone when they exit the jail in case they relapse, Walberg said. More than 18,000 kits containing two doses have been distributed, he said.

“We’ve had some people who were given the naloxone within 40 minutes of leaving,” he said.

A card table on a sidewalk

In addition to the diversion programs, community outreach groups are going straight to the heroin markets on the West Side to offer help.

Thresholds and the West Side Heroin/Opioid Task Force send outreach workers to meet people on sidewalks and street corners. They provide naloxone, clean needles and syringes. They can arrange for them to get methadone treatment if they want to kick their drug habits. They also help people apply for government IDs.

On a chilly morning in late September, Elizabeth Elamri and her friend Rafi walked up to outreach workers sitting at a card table on a sidewalk near Roosevelt Road and Albany Avenue. They walked away with overdose-reversal supplies. Then they went down the street and scored some heroin.

Elamri, 56, said she’s had two friends die of overdoses. Rafi said his wife once revived him with naloxone.

“They’re saving lives here,” he said of the outreach workers.

Gail Richardson, who said she used to take heroin and was convicted of dealing drugs, is one of those workers.

“I have sat here and cried,” said Richardson, who works for the West Side Heroin/Opioid Task Force.

“That once was me,” she said of a man who walked up for help. “When you get up in the morning, heroin is your breakfast and coffee.”

Tim Devitt, Thresholds’ vice president of clinical operations, said even more street outreach is needed. A change in the way drug treatment is defined by the state could help thousands of people, Devitt said. The state will pay for drug treatment that’s performed in a building, but the streets are where most of the need is, he said.

“It’s important to expand that definition to include support and services that happen outside four walls that can include outreach,” Devitt said.

People who use drugs need help with housing, jobs and forming relationships with other people, according to Devitt, who’s excited about the passage of the state’s Housing is Recovery law, which will provide rental subsidies to people at risk of dying of overdoses.

‘No great revolution’

Ruddell, the civil rights lawyer, is pushing for Illinois to pass a law to reduce low-level narcotics possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors. Low-level narcotics possession is a felony in Illinois and 26 other states.

“This is no great revolution,” Ruddell said.

He noted that, in 2014, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police Supt. Garry McCarthy told legislators they supported making possession of less than 1 gram of a controlled substance a misdemeanor.

Ruddell is an architect of a recent bill that would go even further, making possession of under 3 grams of heroin or methamphetamine and under 5 grams of cocaine a misdemeanor.

The bill stalled in the spring session of the Illinois Senate after winning House approval. Police associations opposed the measure. ​​The leader of the Illinois Sheriffs’ Association said the bill wrongly reduced the penalties for what he considered to be large amounts of drugs.

And downstate lawmakers said the bill would make drug problems worse in their communities.

In Chicago, the mayor’s office and police department didn’t make any public statements about the legislation. The Cook County sheriff’s office didn’t take a position.

But the bill got support from the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and the Lake County and Champaign County sheriffs.

“People dealing with addiction need their safety net of support strengthened, not taken from them through incarceration,” Lake County Sheriff John Idleburg said in a letter to the Illinois House Judiciary Criminal Committee chairman. “Unfortunately, this is exactly what stiff criminal penalties associated with lower-level drug possession offenses do for people stuck in a destructive cycle of addiction and drug use.”

The bill isn’t dead, but it’s on a back burner, according to sources in the General Assembly.

Ruddell said the legislation would be a big step toward changing the way Chicago and other cities deal with people who use drugs.

“They’re still locking people up, and it’s still primarily Black people from low-income neighborhoods that we’re doing this to and sending them to prisons or jails,” Ruddell said. “Those are people whose employment and housing are being set back because of felony records. We need to focus on connecting people with access to services in their communities.

“Treating low-level drug possession as a felony isn’t working. It’s not reducing the use of drugs, the availability of drugs or the deadly overdoses.”

Frank Main is a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Casey Toner and Jared Rutecki are reporters for the Better Government Association. This story uses data from The Circuit, a courts data project by Injustice Watch and the BGA, in partnership with civic tech consulting firm DataMade. The University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Health Journalism provided support for the project through a 2021 National Fellowship.

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MADRAS, Oregon — Alicia Hume feared she was headed to jail after a sheriff’s deputy pulled over her borrowed Volkswagen Beetle and saw her put a bottle of eight fentanyl-laced oxycodone pills in her bra.

She faced a misdemeanor drug possession charge that could mean up to a year in jail, more than $6,000 in fines and court-ordered addiction treatment.

Instead, the Jefferson County, Oregon, sheriff’s deputy used his discretion to let the 42-year-old mother of two drive away that September night. And prosecutors later dropped her case, saying the deputy should have written her a ticket instead of charging her with a crime.

That’s because of a new Oregon law — the first in the nation — making possession of small amounts of drugs, such as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, into the equivalent of a minor traffic infraction.

“I was, like, ‘Oh, thank God,’ ” Hume said of her brush with the law in central Oregon.

Hume worried she would suffer from drug withdrawal in jail after her latest arrest.

“I would have been ‘pill sick,’ ” she said. “I was just thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I’m so blessed.’ ”

Since the Oregon law went into effect in February, police officers have written more than 1,300 tickets for drug possession instead of arresting people such as Hume, achieving the ballot measure’s aim of keeping people out of jail. It also steers hundreds of millions of dollars into expanding treatment throughout Oregon, which regularly ranks among the worst states for substance abuse and mental health problems, as well as access to care.

But records show few have entered drug treatment through the ticketing system, which the law also was supposed to encourage. And interviews suggest many cops aren’t carrying out their new responsibilities.

A new approach

Touted by supporters as a way to end “the war on drugs,” the controversial Oregon law is part of a growing trend away from a decadeslong practice of using jails to combat drug addiction and toward treating it as a public health crisis.

Oregon already was among states no longer charging low-level users as felons — a tectonic shift from 50 years ago, when then-President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “Public Enemy No. 1.”

Last year’s referendum, known as Measure 110, not only ended the practice of jailing drug users but also established new money and new avenues for treatment and counseling.

---

Oregon’s new Measure 110 narcotics “decriminalization” law

Addiction specialists and healthcare professionals widely supported the Oregon measure to decriminalize drug possession, while some in the justice system did not. Here is a list of reasons that people identified as positives and negatives associated with the new law.

Pros

• Keeps people caught with “user” amounts of narcotics out of the criminal-justice system, which can cause cascading problems like the loss of a job and housing.
• Frees up prosecutors to spend more time on violent crimes.
• Provides a path for people to obtain a substance-use assessment, which helps them decide if they want to seek treatment for a drug addiction or related health problems.
• Funds health treatment centers with more than $100 million a year in pro-tax revenue.

Cons

• Led to about 1,300 tickets for low-level drug possession but a low number of calls to a state hotline to get a substance-use assessment during the first half of 2021.
• Takes money away from traditional drug courts in which criminal defendants are compelled to enter a treatment program.
• Won approval on a “false premise” that people no longer would be sent to prison for user amounts. They weren’t getting prison time before the new law passed, critics say.
• Set too low a ceiling for the drug amounts that qualify for a ticket rather than an arrest. Some users say they often carry more drugs than the new law decriminalizes.

---

Throughout the rest of the country, people go to jail for low-level drug possession. In Illinois, it’s still a felony.

The analysis used data from The Circuit, a collaborative of news organizations including the BGA and Injustice Watch, that compiled Cook County court records from 2000 to 2018.

The BGA and Sun-Times traveled to Oregon to examine the impact of its drug law. As civil rights activists in Illinois push for policy changes, Oregon’s experience shows reform doesn’t always lead to its intended consequences — at least not right away.

Judge: Law wasn’t getting people into treatment

More than 1.3 million people voted last November for Measure 110, which fortifies the state’s drug-treatment network with more than $100 million per year from existing marijuana tax revenue. Most sheriffs and district attorneys in Oregon opposed it.

Under the new law, which passed with 58% of the vote, anyone caught with less than 1 gram of heroin or 2 grams of cocaine or methamphetamine should be issued a $100 ticket instead of being arrested. Officers are supposed to confiscate and destroy the drugs, write the user a ticket and send them on their way.

Oregon’s population is mostly white, but Black people were disproportionately targeted by drug arrests in the past. Supporters say Measure 110 should end that disparity, at least for those caught with small amounts of drugs.

The state also will save money because the law will prevent people from being charged and spending time in jail, officials say. About 9,000 people per year were being arrested in cases in which drug possession was the most serious offense, according to the ballot proposal.

Sam Junge, who helps run the volunteer organization Portland People’s Outreach Project, said his group qualified for nearly $450,000 in grant money through the measure. The money will help pay for condoms, pipes, syringes and the overdose-reversal drug naloxone, along with rent for space they can use for storage and where people who use drugs can go to relax and charge their phones.

But records and interviews show Oregon’s new law has so far fallen short of one of its central goals — getting people into drug treatment through law enforcement. It’s a failure advocates of the new measure attribute to growing pains.

Under the law, a state hotline was set up, so people who get police-issued drug tickets can call to arrange for a substance-abuse assessment. If they get an assessment or go into treatment, the courts will toss out their fines.

Through Sept. 30 — eight months into the new program — only seven of the more than 1,300 people issued tickets had presented a judge with proof they used the service, according to state records.

Andrew Balyeat, a judge in Bend, Oregon, said most people don’t even show up in his court for hearings about their drug tickets.

“I look at these numbers, and I have to agree with you that if the goal was for people to get treatment, it doesn’t appear at this time that it’s working,” Balyeat said.

Jacob Stoner, 30, who got a ticket for methamphetamine possession, was a no-show for his Bend, Oregon, court hearing in late October, records show. Had he appeared in court and shown he’d obtained a drug assessment through the state hotline, the judge would have tossed out his ticket.

His was the only drug-ticket case on the court’s docket that day. Stoner couldn’t be reached for comment.

The court system is dealing with hundreds of people who failed to appear in court for their drug tickets, according to a state report on the program’s progress.

Those who fail to appear after being issued a drug ticket can’t be charged with a crime, unlike those failing to appear on traffic infractions. But unpaid drug tickets still go through debt collection like any other kind of civil citation, officials said.

Hotline woes

Under the law, ticketed people can pay the fine, appeal or call the state’s hotline to arrange to get an evaluation for possible drug treatment and help with other health problems, housing, employment and child care.

If they show the judge they went through the screening or independently got drug treatment within 45 days, their tickets get dismissed, and their fines get wiped away.

The police are supposed to destroy confiscated drugs after they conduct a field test to confirm what they are.

When police officers hand out drug tickets, they’re also supposed to give people a palm card with instructions for calling the hotline, according to Dwight Holton, CEO of the nonprofit Lines for Life, which runs the hotline.

Are Illinois’ Drug Laws Fair?

The Better Government Association and the Chicago Sun-Times asked readers to answer a few questions about the state’s drug laws.

Click here to read the results of our questionnaire.

But boxes of the cards sat unopened in police stations, according to Holton and others involved in the implementation of the new measure.

The Jefferson County sheriff’s office, which charged Hume with misdemeanor drug possession before a prosecutor decided she should have gotten a ticket, wrote one drug ticket in the first eight months of the program.

“Even if we wrote them a ticket, there’s no teeth,” said Marc Heckathorn, Jefferson County’s sheriff.

Holton, a former U.S. attorney in Oregon, is pushing for the state to put hotline information on the drug tickets, which he and other advocates think might increase the number of calls.

Janie Gullickson, a chief petitioner for the ballot measure, acknowledged that people caught with narcotics might not call the state’s hotline, get substance-abuse assessments and go to court to get their tickets dismissed.

But she said the expanded health care funding would help people whether they got a ticket or not, she said. The law allocated $302 million over two years for behavioral health services in every county.

“A huge shift in the system is going to take some time, right?” Gullickson said. “It’s not instantaneous.”

Skepticism among people who use drugs

Some people who use drugs, such as Portland resident Sabrina Brandt, say the law doesn’t go far enough in decriminalizing drugs. They say drugs should be completely legalized and tested for dangerous impurities.

Brandt gives out hugs, water bottles and clean hypodermic needles to those living in the tent encampments sprawled along Portland’s downtown sidewalks, wooded bike paths and highway underpasses.

Brandt, who was wearing a black T-shirt with the message “Drug Users Deserve Dignity and Care,” said she has survivor’s guilt, having outlived many of her friends who died from drugs.

She said that’s why she volunteers to help people avoid overdoses.

Brandt, 38, is among the thousands the new Oregon law was intended to help. Her arms are scarred from decades of drug injections, which she said she started when she turned 16.

Brandt said she likes how the ballot initiative treats drug use as a public health problem instead of a crime.

“It’s great that Oregon voters passed this and the fact that other states are looking at us, like, ‘Wow, this could be done,’ ” she said. “It could be done in other states and in better ways.”

Brandt isn’t completely sold on the new law, though. That’s because longtime users such as her often walk around with larger amounts of narcotics than the Oregon law decriminalized, she said.

“From people I’ve talked to, including drug dealers, people who use every day and people that use recreationally, it really hasn’t changed business as normal,” she said.

Brandt said she has injected a mix of heroin and cocaine, known as a speedball. She’s been in and out of jail much of her life, mostly for drug possession and crimes connected to drugs.

She’s been homeless but now lives in a first-floor, two-bedroom apartment in southeast Portland with her boyfriend, Justin Adam “Jelli” Marshall, and their cats, Scooter and Ollie.

Marshall works as a handyman at a bar and makes extra money fixing mopeds and bicycles. He and Brandt are volunteers for harm-reduction programs that help people addicted to drugs.

Marshall, whose drug of choice is speed, said he also has misgivings about Oregon’s new drug reform.

He said he worries that failing to pay the $100 fine will “just get you wrangled into the system.”

Outreach worker: Law put ‘cart before horse’

This summer, 25-year-old Jerry Adams was living in a tent with his cat in downtown Portland. He pointed out rampant drug use along the sidewalk where he was camping with other people.

“Literally, like that tent right there,” he said. “There’s a dude who lives in it. And you can see him getting the air out of his needles, about to shoot up.”

Thousands of people live in such camps throughout Portland, but they’re concentrated downtown to take advantage of the services offered there. Oregon has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the United States, nearly four times the Illinois rate, according to 2019 census estimates. About 35 of every 10,000 people are homeless in Oregon compared with about eight of 10,000 in Illinois. And drug abuse often goes hand in hand with life on the street. So does mental illness.

Adams was staying downtown because his pregnant girlfriend was living nearby in temporary housing provided by the street outreach group Outside In, which also has a needle exchange.

Ria Tsinas, an Outside In needle exchange worker, said she can’t keep up with the demand from homeless people seeking syringes, needles and alcohol pads to stay safe while they shoot up.

She once had to close her office at 5 p.m. on a Friday, but people were still banging on the door for help an hour later. It shows Oregon’s new drug reform isn’t enough, Tsinas said.

“It’s like they put the cart before the horse,” she said. “What people want is a place to go.”

As drug users walked away from the site empty-handed, Tsinas said she sometimes doubts whether she’s doing any good. She recounted scenes of despair: People sleeping in the streets, doing drugs, in the grips of severe mental illness. Untreated and alone.

People, she said, the world left behind long ago.

Most prosecutors opposed Measure 110

One vocal opponent of the drug reform measure was John Haroldson, the district attorney in Benton County, home of Oregon State University.

Haroldson said the state should have continued to use drug courts for low-level possession cases instead of decriminalizing those offenses. Drug courts have been used in Oregon for decades and provide a “stick” to get treatment for users, he said.

“If people could stop using drugs on their own, then we wouldn’t have a problem,” Haroldson said.

In Cook County, the courts and police have programs to divert some drug offenders away from prison, but they do little to stop the churn of dead-end drug arrests. Cook County’s drug-court treatment program, for instance, is focused on providing help for those already on probation.

In Oregon, Haroldson said, supporters promoted Measure 110 on a “false premise” it would keep people out of prison. He was among 25 of Oregon’s 36 district attorneys who opposed the ballot initiative.

Since 1989, Haroldson said, people convicted of low-level felony drug possession offenses were sentenced to probation, and when they violated the conditions of their probation, they were sent to the county jail for up to six months.

Then in 2017, low-level possession offenses were reduced to misdemeanors.

Before voters approved the ballot measure last year, Haroldson said, cities in Oregon already had programs in which people arrested for drug possession weren’t charged and were referred for treatment.

Haroldson said he hopes Measure 110 will have a positive impact, but he’s “concerned” because he doesn’t think it’s based on an evidence-based approach such as drug courts.

“I imagine you’ve seen what Portland looks like,” he said of the widespread homelessness and drug use. “Ask yourself: How’s that working out?”

‘Hope to never see you again’

John Hummel, the district attorney of Deschutes County in central Oregon, strongly supported Measure 110 and still does.

Hummel, who began his career as a public defender and worked in health care policy for low-income people, said his background affected his policies when he was elected top prosecutor in 2014.

“I already had the mindset that the war on drugs has been a failure, and we need to just wave the white flag,” he said.

Deschutes County, in which the biggest city is Bend, draws tourists for skiing, white-water rafting and mountain biking in forests of ponderosa pines, but this health-conscious area is grappling with drug problems, too.

There, as across Oregon, many people are arrested for methamphetamine possession.

As district attorney, Hummel created a diversion program called Clean Slate to keep people who use drugs out of jail. Those with a low risk of getting rearrested are freed without charges and pointed toward health services.

“I shake your hand and say, ‘Good luck to you,’ ” Hummel said. “ ‘Hope to never see you again.’ ”

Those deemed likely to commit future drug offenses are assessed for possible substance-abuse disorders and other health issues. They can go to clinics that offer dental care, drug treatment and housing assistance. If they participate and stay crime-free, their arrests are expunged.

Hummel said Clean Slate has reduced the number of drug users he sees again in court. Less than 20% of “low risk” people have reoffended over the past three years, and less than 60% of the rest did. That reduced the number of drug-related crimes such as thefts, Hummel said.

“Now, we’re freeing up time to work on the child sex abuse, domestic violence,” he said.

Hummel said he’s continuing to offer Clean Slate to people arrested for higher drug amounts than those decriminalized by Measure 110.

Michelle Tobin, a landscaper who’s been arrested for drug possession, is a Clean Slate graduate.

Tobin said she started using methamphetamine when she was a teenager. It helped with her attention deficit and was cheaper than prescription drugs, she said.

This series is a collaboration between the Chicago Sun-Times and the Better Government Association.

Reporters: Frank Main (CST), Jared Rutecki (BGA), Casey Toner (BGA)

Data Analysis: Hannah Cushman (DataMade), Forest Gregg (DataMade), Casey Toner (BGA), Jared Rutecki (BGA)

Contributors: Analisa Trofimuk (BGA)

Photographers/Video: Pat Nabong (CST), Ashley Rezin (CST), Joe Kline (CST)

Engagement/Social: Nina Fuentes (BGA), Olivia Obineme (BGA), Alyssa Billmeyer (CST), Brianna Peoples (CST), Satchel Price (CST)

Web/Graphics: Cesar Calderon (BGA), Jesse Howe (CST), Andy Boyle (CST)

Editors: David Kidwell (BGA), John Chase (BGA), Paul Saltzman (CST)

Read all the pieces in this series:

• The Costly Toll of Dead-End Drug Arrests
• Kim Foxx’s Ex-Trainer Caught Up in ‘Unending Cycle’ of Drug Arrests
• Dead-End Drug Arrests: How We Reported This Story

To support this kind of independent investigative journalism, you can sign up for a Chicago Sun-Times subscription or donate to the Better Government Association.

 

Last year, an officer pulled her car over on Super Bowl Sunday and found a pipe. Police said there was methamphetamine residue in it.

“I was crying,” she said. “You’re willing to go put me in jail for a f- – -ing pipe?”

Instead of jail, she was admitted to Clean Slate.

“Technically, that case was never filed,” Tobin said. “So, like, if a cop pulled up my name, it wouldn’t say I had these charges as long as I completed this program. And I just had to go to my doctors’ appointments. It sets you up with counselors, therapists, whatever they feel that could be beneficial to you.”

She said Clean Slate might have kept her from losing her job.

“I didn’t have that humiliation of going to jail or the possibility of missing a court date and being thrown in jail if the judge was having a bad day,” she said.

This year, a friend of hers got caught with drugs, but the police didn’t arrest her because of Measure 110. The woman got into treatment because of the new law.

Tobin’s friend was one of 67 people to get a drug ticket in Deschutes County this year through the end of September, according to court records.

Tobin said it’s good that Measure 110 provides people across the state with the same opportunity to stay out of jail and get access to health services that she got in the county’s Clean Slate program.

“Decriminalizing, I think, is gonna help a lot,” she said.

Hummel said Oregon’s sweeping drug reform law represents a recognition that programs such as Clean Slate work.

But he said the implementation of the law needs “tweaks.”

“So my friends around the state who were opposed to 110, if they see some piece of it that they think isn’t working, they go, ‘ha ha,’ and do a little victory dance,” Hummel said. “What are they advocating for — going back to the system that has failed miserably since the founding of Oregon?”

Casey Toner and Jared Rutecki are reporters for the Better Government Association. Frank Main is a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. This story uses data from The Circuit, a courts data project by Injustice Watch and the BGA, in partnership with civic tech consulting firm DataMade. The University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Health Journalism provided support for the project through a 2021 National Fellowship.

Are Illinois’ Drug Laws Fair? The Chicago Sun-Times and the Better Government Association reported Dec. 3 on “The costly toll of dead-end drug arrests.” We found authorities in Chicago jail thousands every year — predominantly Black men — for possession of small amounts of drugs, charges most in the criminal justice system knew would get routinely dismissed, though often not before wreaking havoc with the lives of those arrested. As part of those stories, we asked readers their views on Illinois’ drug laws. More than 110 people responded. Here’s a summary of those responses:   Have you or someone you know interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug possession charge? No, I don’t know anyone who has had interactions with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge. 38.73% Yes, I have interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge. 12.62% Yes, someone I know has interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge. 48.65%   How familiar are you with Illinois’ drug laws? Familiar 32.71% Somewhat familiar 39.25% Neither 1.87% Somewhat unfamiliar 12.15% Unfamiliar 14.02%   How do you feel about the current Illinois law that makes possession of even small amounts of narcotics a felony? I’m in favor of the current law. 9.82% I’m somewhat in favor of the current law. 1.79% Neither 3.57% I’m somewhat not in favor of the current law. 8.93% I’m not in favor of the current law. 75.89% How would you feel about a change in the law that would make possession of small amounts of narcotics a misdemeanor? I’m in favor of the change. 66.97% I’m somewhat in favor of the change. 14.68% Neither 3.67% I’m somewhat not in favor of the change. 5.5% I’m not in favor of the change. 9.17%   How would you feel about a change in the law that would make possession of small amounts of narcotics a ticketed offense? I’m in favor of the change. 60.36% I’m somewhat in favor of the change. 13.51% Neither 6.31% I’m somewhat not in favor of the change. 9.91% I’m not in favor of the change. 9.91%   If that happened, would you agree with a law that also required people to get assessed for possible drug treatment? I’m in favor of the change. 54.47% I’m somewhat in favor of the change. 21.43% Neither 11.6% I’m somewhat not in favor of the change. 3.57% I’m not in favor of the change. 8.93%   Do you know where to find drug treatment in your community? Yes 29.47% I don’t know 19.64% No 50.89%   The results were based on 112 responses given by 10:00 a.m. on December 10, 2021.	Are Illinois’ Drug Laws Fair?	The Chicago Sun-Times and the Better Government Association reported Dec. 3 on “The costly toll of dead-end drug arrests.” We found authorities in Chicago jail thousands every year — predominantly Black men — for possession of small amounts of drugs, charges most in the criminal justice system knew would get routinely dismissed, though often not before wreaking havoc with the lives of those arrested. As part of those stories, we asked readers their views on Illinois’ drug laws. More than 110 people responded. Here’s a summary of those responses:	Have you or someone you know interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug possession charge?	No, I don’t know anyone who has had interactions with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge. 38.73% Yes, I have interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge. 12.62% Yes, someone I know has interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge. 48.65%	No, I don’t know anyone who has had interactions with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge.	38.73%	Yes, I have interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge.	12.62%	Yes, someone I know has interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge.	48.65%	How familiar are you with Illinois’ drug laws?	Familiar 32.71% Somewhat familiar 39.25% Neither 1.87% Somewhat unfamiliar 12.15% Unfamiliar 14.02%	Familiar	32.71%	Somewhat familiar	39.25%	Neither	1.87%	Somewhat unfamiliar	12.15%	Unfamiliar	14.02%	How do you feel about the current Illinois law that makes possession of even small amounts of narcotics a felony?	I’m in favor of the current law. 9.82% I’m somewhat in favor of the current law. 1.79% Neither 3.57% I’m somewhat not in favor of the current law. 8.93% I’m not in favor of the current law. 75.89%	I’m in favor of the current law.	9.82%	I’m somewhat in favor of the current law.	1.79%	Neither	3.57%	I’m somewhat not in favor of the current law.	8.93%	I’m not in favor of the current law.	75.89%	How would you feel about a change in the law that would make possession of small amounts of narcotics a misdemeanor?	I’m in favor of the change. 66.97% I’m somewhat in favor of the change. 14.68% Neither 3.67% I’m somewhat not in favor of the change. 5.5% I’m not in favor of the change. 9.17%	I’m in favor of the change.	66.97%	I’m somewhat in favor of the change.	14.68%	Neither	3.67%	I’m somewhat not in favor of the change.	5.5%	I’m not in favor of the change.	9.17%	How would you feel about a change in the law that would make possession of small amounts of narcotics a ticketed offense?	I’m in favor of the change. 60.36% I’m somewhat in favor of the change. 13.51% Neither 6.31% I’m somewhat not in favor of the change. 9.91% I’m not in favor of the change. 9.91%	I’m in favor of the change.	60.36%	I’m somewhat in favor of the change.	13.51%	Neither	6.31%	I’m somewhat not in favor of the change.	9.91%	I’m not in favor of the change.	9.91%	If that happened, would you agree with a law that also required people to get assessed for possible drug treatment?	I’m in favor of the change. 54.47% I’m somewhat in favor of the change. 21.43% Neither 11.6% I’m somewhat not in favor of the change. 3.57% I’m not in favor of the change. 8.93%	I’m in favor of the change.	54.47%	I’m somewhat in favor of the change.	21.43%	Neither	11.6%	I’m somewhat not in favor of the change.	3.57%	I’m not in favor of the change.	8.93%	Do you know where to find drug treatment in your community?	Yes 29.47% I don’t know 19.64% No 50.89%	Yes	29.47%	I don’t know	19.64%	No	50.89%
Are Illinois’ Drug Laws Fair?
The Chicago Sun-Times and the Better Government Association reported Dec. 3 on “The costly toll of dead-end drug arrests.” We found authorities in Chicago jail thousands every year — predominantly Black men — for possession of small amounts of drugs, charges most in the criminal justice system knew would get routinely dismissed, though often not before wreaking havoc with the lives of those arrested. As part of those stories, we asked readers their views on Illinois’ drug laws. More than 110 people responded. Here’s a summary of those responses:
Have you or someone you know interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug possession charge?	No, I don’t know anyone who has had interactions with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge. 38.73% Yes, I have interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge. 12.62% Yes, someone I know has interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge. 48.65%	No, I don’t know anyone who has had interactions with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge.	38.73%	Yes, I have interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge.	12.62%	Yes, someone I know has interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge.	48.65%
No, I don’t know anyone who has had interactions with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge.	38.73%
Yes, I have interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge.	12.62%
Yes, someone I know has interacted with the Illinois criminal court system related to a drug charge.	48.65%
How familiar are you with Illinois’ drug laws?	Familiar 32.71% Somewhat familiar 39.25% Neither 1.87% Somewhat unfamiliar 12.15% Unfamiliar 14.02%	Familiar	32.71%	Somewhat familiar	39.25%	Neither	1.87%	Somewhat unfamiliar	12.15%	Unfamiliar	14.02%
Familiar	32.71%
Somewhat familiar	39.25%
Neither	1.87%
Somewhat unfamiliar	12.15%
Unfamiliar	14.02%
How do you feel about the current Illinois law that makes possession of even small amounts of narcotics a felony?	I’m in favor of the current law. 9.82% I’m somewhat in favor of the current law. 1.79% Neither 3.57% I’m somewhat not in favor of the current law. 8.93% I’m not in favor of the current law. 75.89%	I’m in favor of the current law.	9.82%	I’m somewhat in favor of the current law.	1.79%	Neither	3.57%	I’m somewhat not in favor of the current law.	8.93%	I’m not in favor of the current law.	75.89%
I’m in favor of the current law.	9.82%
I’m somewhat in favor of the current law.	1.79%
Neither	3.57%
I’m somewhat not in favor of the current law.	8.93%
I’m not in favor of the current law.	75.89%
How would you feel about a change in the law that would make possession of small amounts of narcotics a misdemeanor?	I’m in favor of the change. 66.97% I’m somewhat in favor of the change. 14.68% Neither 3.67% I’m somewhat not in favor of the change. 5.5% I’m not in favor of the change. 9.17%	I’m in favor of the change.	66.97%	I’m somewhat in favor of the change.	14.68%	Neither	3.67%	I’m somewhat not in favor of the change.	5.5%	I’m not in favor of the change.	9.17%
I’m in favor of the change.	66.97%
I’m somewhat in favor of the change.	14.68%
Neither	3.67%
I’m somewhat not in favor of the change.	5.5%
I’m not in favor of the change.	9.17%
How would you feel about a change in the law that would make possession of small amounts of narcotics a ticketed offense?	I’m in favor of the change. 60.36% I’m somewhat in favor of the change. 13.51% Neither 6.31% I’m somewhat not in favor of the change. 9.91% I’m not in favor of the change. 9.91%	I’m in favor of the change.	60.36%	I’m somewhat in favor of the change.	13.51%	Neither	6.31%	I’m somewhat not in favor of the change.	9.91%	I’m not in favor of the change.	9.91%
I’m in favor of the change.	60.36%
I’m somewhat in favor of the change.	13.51%
Neither	6.31%
I’m somewhat not in favor of the change.	9.91%
I’m not in favor of the change.	9.91%
If that happened, would you agree with a law that also required people to get assessed for possible drug treatment?	I’m in favor of the change. 54.47% I’m somewhat in favor of the change. 21.43% Neither 11.6% I’m somewhat not in favor of the change. 3.57% I’m not in favor of the change. 8.93%	I’m in favor of the change.	54.47%	I’m somewhat in favor of the change.	21.43%	Neither	11.6%	I’m somewhat not in favor of the change.	3.57%	I’m not in favor of the change.	8.93%
I’m in favor of the change.	54.47%
I’m somewhat in favor of the change.	21.43%
Neither	11.6%
I’m somewhat not in favor of the change.	3.57%
I’m not in favor of the change.	8.93%
Do you know where to find drug treatment in your community?	Yes 29.47% I don’t know 19.64% No 50.89%	Yes	29.47%	I don’t know	19.64%	No	50.89%
Yes	29.47%
I don’t know	19.64%
No	50.89%

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx started working out in 2012 to cope with the grief after her mother’s death from cancer.

That’s when she met Juan Johnson at the gym, where he was a muscular trainer trying to hide his tattoos. Soon, he was her personal trainer.

The two bonded over their similar backgrounds. Foxx grew up in the now-demolished public Cabrini-Green housing complex; Johnson grew up in a rough part of Humboldt Park.

“We had personal intimate conversations about our life and her life where she grew up and stuff like that,” Johnson said. “She just opened my eyes to a lot of stuff.”

When Foxx knew him, Johnson was a 210-pound weightlifting fanatic. Now, he weighs 140 pounds because of heroin use, which he resumed about five years ago following a long stretch of sobriety when he ran his training business and counted Foxx among his clients.

“It’s so painful, actually, to hear that he is not doing well,” Foxx said after hearing about Johnson’s recent troubles. “It breaks my heart.”

Johnson was among several hundred low-level drug possession cases the Better Government Association and the Chicago Sun-Times randomly examined.

The arrests were concentrated in swaths of the West Side, where drugs are sold at open-air markets, and most of the people arrested were older Black men such as Johnson. Under state law, possession of any amount of controlled substance — even just the residue left in a baggie — is an automatic felony.

In interviews, Johnson revealed his relationship with Foxx during a discussion about his fitness career. He said he was Foxx’s trainer at a gym for a few years, and he did not do drugs during that period.

For him, the arrest was humiliating. He said he stopped communicating with Foxx because he was embarrassed about his drug use and legal struggles stemming from it.

Foxx said she didn’t know about it. She remembers Johnson as “a sweet, humble guy.” He’d gotten out of prison for a federal gun conviction and had worked hard to become a trainer at the LA Fitness in Broadview, where they became friends, Foxx said.

“He talked about the struggle of finding employment and how grateful he was — with having the record that he had — to be able to do this,” she said.

“I think I paid him $30 an hour. I spent four mornings a week with him, 6 o’clock every day. He was on time every time.”

Johnson was arrested for drug possession in 2017, about a year and a half after he said he started using heroin again. A Chicago police officer pulled over his car in Brighton Park while he was working as a ride-share driver. Police said they found a straw and 0.4 grams of heroin in his wallet and towed his car. He was in jail for a week until he was released on bail. About two weeks later, his case was dismissed.

Johnson said he had to pay $3,000 to get his car out from the police impound lot. Last year, the city lowered such fees, which Mayor Lori Lightfoot had promised to do during her campaign.

Johnson also lost his job because of the arrest. He wondered: “Am I going to go back to the streets?” He said he eventually got another job, but the arrest set him back financially.

Johnson remembers when Foxx was elected state’s attorney for the first time in 2016. He said he went on LinkedIn and congratulated her for “knocking out” incumbent State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez.

“I still got [Foxx’s] text that said, ‘She should have known better to go up against me,’ ” Johnson said.

But he said he was too ashamed about his arrest to congratulate Foxx on winning reelection in November 2020.

In an interview on a Humboldt Park bench, Johnson recalled his old life as a trainer. At the peak, he said, he made $5,500 per month training clients. This was during a period of sobriety he describes as one of the happiest periods of his life, when he had money, stability and peace of mind.

“And I let that go,” he said.

Foxx said she’s familiar with that.

“People in my family have struggled with addiction and arrests,” she said.

“The reality is for so many people who maybe are not ready for services or who have tried it for multiple years or who cannot unstick themselves from the addiction, it is just this unending cycle for them and for the people who love them, who root for them.”

Casey Toner and Jared Rutecki are reporters for the Better Government Association. Frank Main is a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. This story uses data from The Circuit, a courts data project by Injustice Watch and the BGA, in partnership with civic tech consulting firm DataMade. The University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Health Journalism provided support for the project through a 2021 National Fellowship.

To compile this report, the Better Government Association and Chicago Sun-Times analyzed 280,000 total drug possession arrests made in Cook County between 2000 and 2018. The data used was provided by The Circuit, a collaborative of news organizations, including the BGA and Injustice Watch, that spent years obtaining, analyzing and standardizing Cook County Circuit Court data for all criminal court cases.

The data provided includes the name, age, race, arrest date, jurisdiction and information from the court docket, which includes hearing dates and case disposition.

To determine how, over time, Cook County and Chicago have treated those charged with low-level drug offenses, the examination focused on only the cases in which the top charge filed against individuals was possession of less than 15 grams of a controlled substance — the lowest-felony drug charge in Illinois.

Because court data available does not provide some of the information needed for the analysis, such as the precise amount of drugs less than 15 grams, reporters took a random sample of 365 cases from the most recent year in our study — 2018 — so that they could examine the available paper records at the courthouse. The clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court doesn’t make scanned files of all years available at court terminals, but files from recent years, including 2018, are available. This allowed reporters to collect police reports, charging documents and other records that provided much deeper detail. Cases involving marijuana charges were not considered, as those charges are treated differently under Illinois law.

Cases were classified as advancing to the criminal phase or dismissed.

Of the 365 cases pulled, there were 227 where the highest quantity was 1 gram or less.

Our findings from this sample were then applied to all narcotics possession cases in 2018, with a confidence interval of 95% and a standard error of plus or minus 1.4%. Based on this analysis, the estimated dismissal rate for all narcotics possession cases of 1 gram or less in 2018 increased to greater than 95%.

This series is a collaboration between the Chicago Sun-Times and the Better Government Association.

Reporters: Frank Main (CST), Jared Rutecki (BGA), Casey Toner (BGA)

Data Analysis: Hannah Cushman (DataMade), Forest Gregg (DataMade), Casey Toner (BGA), Jared Rutecki (BGA)

Contributors: Analisa Trofimuk (BGA)

Photographers/Video: Pat Nabong (CST), Ashley Rezin (CST), Joe Kline (CST)

Engagement/Social: Nina Fuentes (BGA), Olivia Obineme (BGA), Alyssa Billmeyer (CST), Brianna Peoples (CST), Satchel Price (CST)

Web/Graphics: Cesar Calderon (BGA), Jesse Howe (CST), Andy Boyle (CST)

Editors: David Kidwell (BGA), John Chase (BGA), Paul Saltzman (CST)

Read all the pieces in this series:

• The Costly Toll of Dead-End Drug Arrests
• Kim Foxx’s Ex-Trainer Caught Up in ‘Unending Cycle’ of Drug Arrests
• Oregon Is First State to Ticket Narcotics Users, but New Reform Has Yet To Live Up To Promise

To support this kind of independent investigative journalism, you can sign up for a Chicago Sun-Times subscription or donate to the Better Government Association.

 

The broader data analysis determined the dismissal rate from all examined cases for 2018 — including cases where the weight was higher than 1 gram — was 71.8%, and 50% for 2000 to 2018. The rate of dismissal increased through the years.

A confidence interval defines the probability that another sample using the same method would return a similar result if tested again. Standard error shows how much the sample differs from the whole population.

The analysis also examined Chicago Police Department arrest data for 2014 to 2021, the most recent data available. This allowed reporters to understand the geography of drug cases more clearly than was possible from the court data.

In an effort to put a price tag on these dead-end drug arrests, data was requested from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office to determine how long those arrested between 2013 and 2018 were incarcerated, as well as the daily cost.

Figures for the daily cost of incarceration per person provided by the Cook County sheriff’s office. The estimates were made by the Cook County Office of Research, Operations and Innovation. These estimates include typical salary, food and uniform costs but do not include the cost of medical care or other common treatments for people brought to jail with addiction-related health issues.

The analysis was performed using PostgreSQL and various R packages, including ggmap and sf. Spatial analysis and maps were created using geocoded data from the CPD as well as shape files of police beats, police districts and streets.

Data analysis by Jared Rutecki, Casey Toner, Forest Gregg and Hannah Cushman Garland.

Additional reporting by Frank Main and Analisa Trofimuk.

Read more about the methodology of The Circuit project here, and about the process used for the charges, race, ethnicity and gender data here.

Casi año y medio después de que agentes federales allanaran las instalaciones del Ayuntamiento de Lyons como parte de una investigación de corrupción, el “gobierno limpio” se ha convertido en el tema principal de las próximas elecciones del suburbio ubicado al oeste, esto mientras su controvertido alcalde Chris Getty busca reelegirse para un cuarto mandato.

Getty, hijo de un ex alcalde que estuvo en prisión federal por robar a la villa, se defiende ante el desafío que representan los residentes que hacen votos por una reforma. Al mismo tiempo, el actual alcalde ha gastado casi $100,000 en fondos de campaña para pagar honorarios legales, esto como parte de la amplia investigación que ha golpeado a alcaldes suburbanos, legisladores estatales, contratistas y al gigante de servicios públicos Commonwealth Edison.

Lo que está en juego para Getty no es solo mantener su poder político y el acceso al dinero de la campaña, también un salario significativo. Si Getty gana las elecciones, ganará al menos $70,000 de salario por cada uno de los próximos cuatro años como alcalde y comisionado de licores. Eso comparado con los $10,000 que ganaba en ambos trabajos cuando fue electo por primera vez en 2009. Los salarios han aumentando de manera constante desde que el propio Getty solicitó los aumentos de sueldo ante la complaciente junta directiva de Lyons. Con el monto del seguro y la jubilación a finales de 2021 su compensación total superará los $109,000.

Richard Gatz Jr., quien ha vivido en el suburbio de la clase trabajadora durante años y quien fue miembro de la junta directiva de la villa hace casi dos décadas, se está postulando para alcalde junto con una lista de miembros de la junta y candidatos a secretario en la boleta del Partido de la Integridad del Pueblo (“Village Integrity Party”).

Gatz dijo que la investigación federal lo alentó a postularse y prometió, si era elegido, luchar para eliminar los aumentos de los sueldos de los funcionarios electos ya programados y volver a imponer los límites para el mandato.

“He escuchado que muchos de los residentes están cansados”, agregó Gatz. “Quieren un cambio y honestamente, creo que podemos hacer un cambio que es  muy necesario”.

El mandato de Getty como alcalde se ha caracterizado por una política de maquinaria. Ha contratado a familiares y amigos para trabajos en la villa y ha supervisado una serie de acuerdos convenientes para los contribuyentes a su campaña.

Puso a su padre Ken —que fue enviado a la cárcel como parte de un esquema de licitación fraudulenta que los fiscales dijeron fue de $179,000 netos— de nuevo en la nómina pública como presidente de la Junta de Apelaciones de Zonificación de Lyons. También compró una casa a un contribuyente de su campaña que está ubicada en terrenos que solían ser propiedad de la villa, una transacción cuestionable que fue planteada por primera vez en 2019 por Better Government Association (BGA) y Fox 32.

Unos meses después de ese reportaje de BGA, agentes federales allanaron el Ayuntamiento de Lyons y la oficina de seguros privada de Getty que está ubicada en la villa. Los federales también registraron las oficinas de un prominente contratista del gobierno y citaron las oficinas de otros. Entre los artículos que el FBI le pidió a Lyons estaban los registros de la compra de la casa de Getty.

Getty, que también es el supervisor del municipio de Lyons, no ha sido acusado y anteriormente negado que haya hecho algo malo. No respondió a varios mensajes que se le enviaron pidiendo sus comentarios para este artículo.

Aún así, la investigación federal ha mostrado poca evidencia de que se haya quedado quieto.

En las semanas siguientes a la redada, los registros y entrevistas muestran que Getty contrató a la firma de abogados de Chicago Hinshaw & Culbertson para representarlo, pagando a la firma por medio de uno de los fondos de campaña que controla. Estos pagos continuaron a lo largo de 2020 y los más recientes se realizaron en octubre, cuando el fondo de la campaña Ciudadanos por Christopher Getty envió dos cheques al despacho de abogados por un total de $30,400, de acuerdo con los registros electorales estatales.

“Como su abogado, he cooperado completamente con la investigación y no tengo ninguna indicación de que Chris será acusado de nada”, dijo Daniel Purdom, abogado de la firma que representa a Getty. Purdom es un ex fiscal federal adjunto que se especializa en la defensa penal de los delitos de cuello blanco.

A pesar de haber gastado casi $100,000 de su fondo de campaña en honorarios legales, Getty tiene una ventaja considerable en la recaudación de fondos sobre sus oponentes políticos.

Los registros muestran que Getty tiene a su disposición más de $327,000 en efectivo de su campaña, una suma masiva para un alcalde de una villa de aproximadamente 10,600 habitantes. Gatz dijo que solo tiene a su disposición cerca de $6,500 efectivo de la campaña.

“Somos ciudadanos de larga duración y puedo esperar que eso signifique algo, pero no sé qué esperar porque no tenemos dinero”, dijo Tina Marie Melendez, un paraprofesional que trabaja en el Distrito Escolar 103 de Lyons y que se postula para la Junta de la Villa de Lyons contra la lista del Partido de los Ciudadanos Unidos de Getty. “Esperemos que la gente haya tenido suficiente”.

Entre los que han contribuido al fondo de Getty para su campaña electoral actual están dos empresas que fueron identificadas en la orden de registro federal utilizada en las instalaciones del Ayuntamiento de Lyons en 2019.

En noviembre, Skyway Homes, una compañía constructora que opera desde un apartamento de Brookfield, contribuyó con $2,500 al Partido de los Ciudadanos Unidos, llevando a $28,000 la cantidad total de dinero que la firma o compañías afiliadas han contribuido a los fondos de la campaña vinculada a Getty.

En 2019,  BGA informó que la municipalidad de Lyons  – bajo la dirección de Getty –  demolió una casa deteriorada, compró el lote y luego lo vendió a Skyway con una pérdida de casi $13,500. La compañía luego construyó una casa nueva en el sitio y se la vendió a Getty sin ponerla en el mercado de bienes raíces donde podría haber atraído ofertas de la competencia. La compañía también ha construido otras casas en lotes comprados al municipio a precios de descuento. El otoño pasado compró una parcela a Lyons, seis semanas antes de la contribución de la firma a la campaña electoral de noviembre.

También el año pasado, Reliable Materials aportó $1,500 a los fondos de la campaña de Getty. La empresa, propiedad del magnate del asfalto y la construcción de Illinois, Michael Vondra, fue contratada por la villa de Lyons para llenar una presa adyacente al salón municipal. A lo largo de los años, en total, la compañía ha contribuido con más de $100,000 a las campañas de Getty. Días antes de que agentes federales allanaran las instalaciones del Ayuntamiento de Lyons también allanaron la sede corporativa de Reliable ubicada en Bartlett como parte de su investigación sobre tráfico de influencia a nivel estatal.

Hasta la fecha, la red federal ha llevado a cargos contra más de una docena de políticos de alto perfil y personas con información privilegiada y destapó un esquema de soborno casi decadente, en el que el gigante de servicios públicos Commonwealth Edison trató de ganar el favor de Michael Madigan, ex Presidente del Partido Demócrata de Illinois para la legislación, dando puestos de trabajo y contratos a los aliados de Madigan. Madigan no ha sido acusado.

En los suburbios del oeste, los políticos más prominentes para declararse culpables de cargos de corrupción relacionados con la operación federal son el fallecido senador estatal Martin Sandoval de Cicero y el ex comisionado del Condado de Cook Jeff Tobolski, quien tenía doble poder al ser también el alcalde de McCook, un suburbio industrial de menos de 300 personas que limita con Lyons.

Sandoval, un partidario de Getty y cuyo distrito había incluido a Lyons, se declaró culpable el año pasado de recaudar más de $250,000 en sobornos a cambio de usar su influencia política o tomar medidas oficiales en beneficio de negocios privados, incluyendo una compañía de cámaras de luz roja. Durante el registro de su oficina en Springfield, los agentes federales buscaron información sobre Vondra y sus compañías de construcción de carreteras. Como jefe del comité de transportación del Senado estatal, Sandoval sirvió como guardián para los proyectos de carreteras en todo el estado. Sandoval murió de COVID-19 en diciembre.

Tobolski, un antiguo aliado político y contribuyente de la campaña de Getty, renunció a ambos empleos antes de declararse culpable de fraude fiscal y aceptar más de un cuarto de millones de dólares en pagos de soborno y extorsión de empresas regionales en su doble papel como alcalde y comisionado. Los registros electorales muestran que Tobolski ha agotado su fondo de campaña después de gastar más de $400,000 en honorarios de abogados desde las redadas.

Traducido por Gisela Orozco

Nearly a year-and-a-half after federal agents raided Lyons Village Hall as part of a sweeping corruption investigation, clean government has become a top issue in the west suburb’s upcoming election as controversial Mayor Chris Getty seeks a fourth term.

Getty, the son of a former mayor who went to federal prison for stealing from the village, is fending off a challenge from residents vowing reform. At the same time, the current mayor has spent nearly $100,000 in campaign funds on legal fees as part of the wide-ranging probe that has hit suburban mayors, state lawmakers, contractors and utility giant Commonwealth Edison.

At stake for Getty is not only maintaining his political power and access to campaign cash, but a significant payday. Should Getty win, he stands to make at least $70,000 in salary for each of the next four years as mayor and liquor commissioner. That’s compared to $10,000 he made in both jobs when he was first elected in 2009. The salaries have been growing steadily since Getty himself pushed the pay hikes through a compliant Lyons Village Board. With insurance and retirement, his total compensation at the end of 2021 will exceed $109,000.

Richard Gatz Jr., a longtime resident of the working-class suburb who was a village board member nearly 20 years ago, is running for mayor along with a slate of board member and clerk candidates on the Village Integrity Party ticket.

Gatz said the federal investigation spurred him to run and he promised, if elected, to fight to eliminate the scheduled pay raises for elected officials and reimpose term limits.

“I’ve heard from a lot of residents that they are tired of it,” Gatz said. “They want a change and, honestly, I think we can make a change that’s needed.”

Getty’s tenure as mayor has been characterized by machine-like politics. He’s hired family and friends into village jobs and overseen a series of cozy deals with campaign contributors.

He put his father Ken — who was sent to prison as part of a bid-rigging scheme that prosecutors said netted $179,000 — back on the public payroll as chairman of the Lyons zoning appeals board. He also bought a house from a campaign contributor on land that used to be owned by the village, a questionable deal first raised by the Better Government Association and Fox 32 in 2019.

A few months after that BGA story, federal agents raided the village hall in Lyons and Getty’s private insurance office in town. The feds also searched the offices of one prominent government contractor and subpoenaed the offices of others. Among the items the FBI requested from Lyons were records regarding Getty’s home purchase.

Getty, who is also the Lyons Township supervisor, has not been charged and has previously denied he’s done anything wrong. He did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment for this story.

Still, the federal investigation has shown little evidence of subsiding.

In the weeks after the raid, records and interviews show, Getty hired the Chicago law firm Hinshaw & Culbertson to represent him, paying the firm through one of the campaign funds he controls. Those payments continued throughout 2020, with the most recent occurring in October when the Citizens for Christopher Getty campaign fund sent two checks to the law firm totaling $30,400, according to the state election records.

“As his attorney, we’ve cooperated completely with the investigation and I have no indication Chris will be charged with anything,” said Daniel Purdom, an attorney at the firm representing Getty. Purdom is a former assistant federal prosecutor who specializes in white collar criminal defense.

Despite having spent nearly $100,000 out of his campaign fund on legal fees, Getty holds a sizable fundraising lead over his political opponents.

Records show Getty has more than $327,000 in campaign cash at his disposal – a massive sum for a mayor of a town of about 10,600 people. Gatz said he has only about $6,500 in campaign cash on hand.

“We are long-term citizens and I can hope that stands for something but I don’t know what to expect because we don’t have money,” said Tina Marie Melendez, a paraprofessional at Lyons School District 103 who is running for Lyons Village Board against Getty’s United Citizens Party slate. “We can hope that people have had enough.”

Among those who have contributed to Getty’s campaign fund for his current election run are two companies that were identified in the federal search warrant used at Lyons Village Hall in 2019.

In November, Skyway Homes, a development company operating out of a Brookfield apartment, contributed $2,500 to the United Citizens Party, bringing to $28,000 the total amount of money the firm or affiliated companies have contributed to Getty-tied campaign funds.

In 2019, the BGA reported Lyons – under Getty’s direction – demolished a run-down house, purchased the lot and then sold it to Skyway at a nearly $13,500 loss. The company then built a new house on the site and sold it to Getty without listing it on the market where it could have drawn competing offers. The company has also built other homes on lots purchased from the village at discount prices. It bought its latest parcel from Lyons last fall, six weeks before the firm’s November campaign contribution.

Also last year, Reliable Materials contributed $1,500 to Getty’s campaign funds. The firm owned by Illinois asphalt and construction magnate Michael Vondra was hired by the village to fill in a quarry adjacent to village hall. In all, the company has contributed more than $100,000 to Getty’s campaigns over the years. Days before federal agents raided Lyons Village Hall, they also raided Reliable’s corporate headquarters in Bartlett as part of its investigation into statewide influence peddling.

To date, the federal dragnet has led to charges against more than a dozen high-profile politicians and insiders and uncovered a near decadelong bribery scheme in which utility giant Commonwealth Edison sought to win the favor of former Illinois Speaker Michael Madigan for legislation by giving jobs and contracts to Madigan’s allies. Madigan has not been charged.

In the west suburbs, the most prominent politicians to plead guilty to corruption charges related to the federal operation are the late state Sen. Martin Sandoval of Cicero and former Cook County Commissioner Jeff Tobolski, who doubled as the mayor of McCook, an industrial suburb of less than 300 people that borders Lyons.

Sandoval, a Getty supporter whose district had included Lyons, pleaded guilty last year to collecting more than $250,000 in bribes in exchange for using his political influence or taking official action to benefit private business including a red-light camera company. During the search of his Springfield office, federal agents sought information about Vondra and his road construction companies. As head of the state Senate’s transportation committee, Sandoval served as a gatekeeper for road projects throughout the state. Sandoval died in December of COVID-19.

Tobolski, a longtime political ally and campaign contributor of Getty’s, resigned from both jobs before pleading guilty to tax fraud and accepting more than a quarter million dollars in bribery and extortion payments from regional businesses in his dual role as mayor and commissioner. Election records show Tobolski has mostly exhausted his campaign fund after spending more than $400,000 on attorney fees since the raids.

A Chicago teenager pleaded with Cook County Judge James Linn to impose the maximum prison sentence on the man who sexually assaulted her and her two sisters for several years and threatened to kill them if they told anyone.

“Help us ensure that there will be one less rapist out on the streets,” the woman, then 19, wrote in a victim impact statement read aloud at the sentencing hearing in May 2011. “At the end of the day, I just want justice to be served the correct way. With absolutely no leniency, because he didn’t show us any.”

But in a huge break for the defendant, Joseph Fultz, Linn took the extraordinarily unusual step of reversing the jury’s verdict and convicting him of a far less serious sex charge. Linn then sentenced Fultz to 18 years in prison, a far cry from the mandatory life sentence he faced if the jury’s decision had stood.

For the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, the about-face marked the final straw following a series of what prosecutors viewed as unfavorable decisions by Linn on sex cases, according to internal office emails and interviews with several former prosecutors.

“What is his problem?” then-State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez wrote of Linn in an email at the time. “This is getting out of hand with him.” 

The state’s attorney’s office soon began regularly using an obscure legal maneuver to remove Linn from any sex cases assigned to him, filing what’s known as motions for a substitution of judge, or SOJ. No reason had to be given to boot Linn, and a new judge would be quickly appointed in his place.

In less than two years following his controversial handling of Fultz’s case, Linn was bounced from at least 25 sex cases using SOJs, about four times more than the next closest judge, according to an unprecedented analysis of criminal court data.

Then something yet to be fully explained happened: The number of felony sex cases randomly assigned to Linn by computer sharply decreased in following years, suggesting that court officials, aware of the state’s attorney’s campaign, largely stopped assigning sex cases to Linn.

As a result, Linn hasn’t presided over a sex case since November 2013, after having overseen more bench trials involving sex crimes than any other Cook County judge the previous 13 years. This finding emerges from the analysis by The Circuit, a new investigative collaboration by the nonprofit news organizations the Better Government Association, Injustice Watch and The Chicago Reporter.

Speaking out for the first time, three women who testified in Linn’s court say the judge’s lenient treatment of sex offenders left them feeling victimized twice over­ — first by the sexual assaults and then by a judge who didn’t fully believe them.

Linn “didn’t really think about the emotional damages that (Fultz) left on me or my sisters or the full nature of how sick he was,” said the youngest of the victims, who was just 12 years old at the time of his sentencing.

The woman, now 22 and a mother of two, issued a statement saying she didn’t think she’d ever regain her faith in the justice system.

“And it’s not because of the case,” wrote the woman, who is Black. “It’s because most of the time people don’t care about people that look like me or that have my kind of background. That’s why so many people take (the) law into their own hands.”

Linn, currently presiding over high-profile charges that actor Jussie Smollett staged a hate crime, declined to comment to The Circuit through a court spokeswoman.

Fewer sex crime cases heading Linn’s way

The Circuit’s monthslong project, which includes a first-ever analysis of more than two decades of court data on nearly one million Cook County felony cases, examined SOJs because many attorneys consider a large number of such motions to be a potential red flag for a judge’s fairness or temperament.

Between 2000 and 2013, Linn presided over more bench trials involving sex crimes than any other Cook County judge, a measure of defense lawyers’ comfort level in letting the veteran judge — and not juries — decide their clients’ fates, The Circuit analysis found.

More than other judges, Linn showed a tendency to find defendants facing sex charges guilty but on less serious offenses. Between 2000 and 2013, he did that at least 13 separate times in 67 bench trials involving sex charges he handled, according to the analysis. No other Cook County judge came close.

In reviewing the large number of SOJs filed against Linn by prosecutors for both State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and her predecessor, Alvarez, The Circuit also found a pattern in which the criminal division’s presiding judge — who is supposed to randomly assign all cases to lower-level judges — largely stopped referring sex cases to Linn.

That pattern was reflected in an internal email from a top prosecutor in Foxx’s office that was obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request by The Circuit.

“We’ve been SOJing (Linn) on sex cases so long that the last two presiding judges do not even send them to him,” wrote Joseph Magats, then-chief of the state’s attorney’s criminal prosecutions bureau and now Foxx’s first assistant, to a higher-up supervisor in 2017.

But the analysis of the court data paints a more complicated picture than Magats’ assertion. Since 2014, only a handful of sex cases were assigned each year to Linn but then quickly transferred by an SOJ to another judge. In both 2016 and 2018, however, the analysis of The Circuit’s data didn’t find that any sex cases had been randomly assigned to Linn.

That represents a stark contrast from the period 2000 through 2013, when Linn was randomly assigned by computer an average of almost 35 sex cases per year, the analysis found.

With fewer sex cases being assigned to Linn, prosecutors haven’t had to SOJ him as a much in recent years — a plus for the state’s attorney’s office, since the motions risk offending judges who preside over hundreds of criminal cases.

Despite the dramatically fewer sex charges going to Linn, Judge LeRoy Martin Jr., who presides over the criminal division, insisted that all cases are still assigned randomly to the division’s judges, according to a statement released on his behalf by the Cook County chief judge’s office. He declined through a court spokeswoman to be interviewed for this story. 

Martin’s predecessor, Paul Biebel Jr., who retired in 2015, also denied making any changes during his tenure to the computerized random assignment of criminal cases.

Magats did not return calls or emails, and Alvarez declined to comment. Foxx did not respond to a request to be interviewed, but her office issued a brief statement through a spokeswoman that said decisions to SOJ Linn on sex cases were “based on information available at the time.”

While prosecutors have repeatedly sought to block Linn from hearing sex cases, their disdain for him does not carry over to other serious felonies, the analysis found.

What’s more, several defense attorneys spoke in support of the judge’s handling of sex charges, saying Linn simply held prosecutors to proving their case — sex charges or not — beyond a reasonable doubt.

Indeed, in more than three decades on the bench, Linn has imposed lengthy sentences on sex offenders. In 2002, for instance, he sentenced Mark Anthony Lewis to 120 years in prison for raping a 15-year-old North Side girl.

“He starts out unbiased,” said attorney Keith Thiel, who had two clients acquitted by Linn on pimping and prostitution charges in 2013, one of the last sex crime bench trials overseen by Linn. Adding that he’s tried more than a dozen cases before Linn over the years, Thiel said, “I don’t find him to be state-oriented, but I don’t find him to be defense-oriented, either. He’s really middle-of-the-road. … He puts everyone’s feet to the fire.”

Raul Villalobos, a longtime defense attorney and former Cook County prosecutor, said Linn, whose father also served on the Cook County bench, is unafraid of controversy.

Villalobos recalled a client who faced predatory criminal sex assault charges for allegedly raping a 7-year-old boy. Linn convicted him of lesser sexual abuse charges in June 2012 and sentenced him to three years in prison.

“(If) he thinks someone is guilty, he will find them guilty,” Villabolos said. “But he holds the state to a burden of beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Questions of ‘forum shopping’

Around the same time the state’s attorney’s office was substituting Linn on sex cases, it was using the same playbook on another judge for a different reason, The Circuit investigation found.

Since 2013, prosecutors moved to SOJ Judge Ann Finley Collins, assigned to the west suburban Maywood branch, more than a dozen times on drunken-driving cases. The SOJs came after a court-watchers group and police in suburban Riverside appealed to the county’s chief judge following several acquittals and pretrial rulings favorable to defendants by Collins in drunken-driving cases.

Collins, a former assistant public defender, didn’t respond to repeated calls and emails seeking comment.

While moving to substitute Linn and Collins indicates that prosecutors view those judges as biased, some legal experts called into question the state’s attorney’s practice of routinely substituting a judge on certain types of cases.

Frank Cece Jr., a longtime defense lawyer and former assistant state’s attorney, said the moves were obvious attempts by prosecutors to gain a more favorable outcome.

“For (the) state to be forum shopping as a pattern and practice with one judge is beyond the pale,” he said.

Bennett Gershman, a law professor at Pace University in White Plains, New York, and an expert on prosecutorial ethics, also expressed concern that the routine substitutions of a judge could represent an overreach by prosecutors.

“It strikes me as misusing the ability to remove (judges) … in a way (to) skew the proceeding to better benefit the prosecutor,” he said.

The ability to substitute judges in Illinois was first accorded to just defense lawyers, but the Illinois Supreme Court extended the right to prosecutors in a decision more than three decades ago.

Patricia Brown Holmes, a former Cook County judge and federal prosecutor who successfully argued that case, said SOJs give lawyers “the ability to feel like any particular judge is not just handed to you and you can’t do anything about it.”

On occasion, though, the regular use of SOJs by prosecutors against the same judge has become a point of contention.

In 1990, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the state’s attorney in St. Clair County in Southern Illinois could not use the motions to repeatedly block a judge from hearing felony cases in an effort to force his reassignment to another court call.

More than a decade later, Cook County Judge Leo Holt complained that the state’s attorney’s office had been engaging in a pattern of removing serious felony cases from his call through the use of repeated SOJs after his assignment to the county’s main criminal courthouse at 26th Street and California Avenue. Prosecutors denied the allegations and took the fight — with mixed results — to the Illinois Supreme Court on a number of occasions after Holt refused to step aside from a handful of cases.

The now-deceased Holt was Black and helped defend Martin Luther King Jr. as a private attorney during the open housing marches in Chicago in the 1960s. Holt had a reputation for handing out lighter sentences and acquittals, contended detractors who derisively nicknamed him “Let ’Em Go Leo.” His supporters argued that the prosecutors’ campaign against him was racist.

Around the same time, another Black judge, James L. Rhodes, who handled juvenile cases and felonies in the south suburban Markham branch courthouse, successfully challenged prosecutors on their efforts to regularly substitute him, as well.

“Their idea with what to do with juveniles is just to lock everybody up,” said Rhodes, now retired, in a recent interview. “Since I didn’t agree with that, I didn’t do that. …They didn’t want to send cases to me.”

‘A slap on the wrist’

Before Linn’s reversal of Fultz’s jury verdict, his handling of other sex cases had drawn the ire of the state’s attorney’s office.

At about the same time as Fultz’s sentencing in 2011, Linn found Robert Rowels, a parole officer for the Illinois Department of Corrections, guilty of custodial sexual misconduct and official misconduct for threatening a female parolee in her 20s with prison if she didn’t repeatedly have sex with him.

But the judge acquitted Rowels of more serious sexual assault charges despite what authorities said was DNA evidence implicating him. Rowels, who faced at least four years in prison if he had been convicted of the more serious charges, was sentenced by Linn to 120 days in the Cook County Jail and two years of probation. Rowels declined to comment for this story.

In a telephone interview, the victim in that case said she had never been told much by the state’s attorney’s office about what happened to Rowels beyond his conviction. When a reporter from The Circuit shared more details about the outcome from nine years ago, the woman called the short jail sentence “heartbreaking.”

“Basically, he got a slap on the wrist,” said Kimeda McGinnis, who chose to go public with her name for this story in hopes of helping in her own healing and perhaps inspire other rape victims to come forward.

McGinnis, who moved out of state after the ordeal, doesn’t regret coming forward with the DNA evidence despite the case’s ultimate outcome and the retaliation that she said she experienced from her next probation officer.

“It can break your soul if you let it,” she said.

Earlier that year, in another surprising about-face, Linn threw out the sexual assault conviction that he had issued against Ryan Logan, who lived in Chicago’s River North neighborhood.

The decision came in February 2011, just months after Linn found Logan guilty of raping a 31-year-old woman he met on Match.com while acquitting him of the sexual assault of another woman he met on the dating website. Instead, Linn reduced Logan’s conviction to a lesser count of sexual abuse and sentenced him to just 90 days in jail. Logan had faced up to 15 years in prison before Linn downgraded the rape conviction.

Attorney Daniel Kirschner, who represented the victim in a lawsuit against Logan and Match.com, said Linn reduced the conviction after Logan completed treatment at a facility for sex offenders.

“My client was not terribly pleased,” Kirschner said recently.

Another decision that drew scrutiny came in 2009. Linn found George Turner III, the boys basketball coach at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School at the time of the abuse, guilty of molesting two female students but acquitted him of the more serious charges of sexually assaulting one of the teens. Linn sentenced Turner to three years of probation and fined him $25,000.

In an interview, one of the survivors, Camille Rodriguez —who also wanted to go public with her name for this story — said she learned not to trust the legal system after Linn cleared Turner of the more serious charges involving her in spite of her testimony at trial.

Rodriguez said she still recalled Linn saying he thought something had happened but not to the degree that she had described.

“To know that I sat in that courtroom with a bunch of adults bashing me, saying a 15-year-old could seduce (a) 30-, 40-year-old … led me to believe that I didn’t do a good job at really displaying what happened,” said Rodriguez, now a social worker who lives out of state. “It wasn’t him on trial; it was me on trial.”

A lawsuit filed by Rodriguez alleged that Turner raped her repeatedly when she was a manager of the boys basketball team.

Rodriguez, who still holds on to the trauma more than a decade after the trial, said a prison term wouldn’t have healed her pain but would have helped in other ways.

“It would have at least led me to believe that somebody gave a shit,” she said. “This internalized guilt is irrational. I know that with every fiber of my brain, but I haven’t come to terms with it.” 

Turner did not return multiple calls seeking comment.

Reversing a jury’s finding

It was just weeks before Fultz’s sentencing in May 2011 that Linn made the stunning announcement. Months after the jury found Fultz guilty of predatory criminal sexual assault for the repeated attacks on the three underage girls, Linn downgraded the conviction to aggravated criminal sexual abuse, a far less serious offense.

At the hearing, William Woelkers, an assistant public defender representing Fultz, asked Linn to throw out the jury’s conviction, pointing to what he said was a lack of physical evidence and inconsistent testimony by the three girls at the trial, according to court records.

Stephanie Miller, the lead prosecutor, strenuously objected to Linn’s decision, noting that the jury, not the judge, was in a “far superior position” to determine the truthfulness of the victims’ testimony.

“We’d ask that you not disturb the jury’s verdict,” she said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

In his ruling, Linn noted that state law required a life sentence for a conviction on the predatory criminal sexual assault charges and questioned whether the crime met the definition of a charge that required penetration.

“I believe that the children were molested,” the judge said. “So I will adjust the jury’s findings over the government’s strong objection. I cannot say that strong enough. They are absolutely objecting to the court considering this.”

In a letter read at Fultz’s sentencing, the mother of the three victims lamented how she hadn’t initially believed the girls’ stories of assault.

“They’ve had to tell this story over and over again. That’s hard for a rape victim; it’s hard for me to hear and see the hurt on their faces,” the mother wrote. “The confusion of wondering why no one … helped them, including myself. It’s been hard to find a smile from them on some days.”

The middle sister said in her victim impact statement that Fultz haunted her dreams, and that she lived in fear that he would follow through on his threats to kill her and her sisters if he was ever released.

“I just hope that justice will be served,” she wrote.

Woelkers, Fultz’s attorney, asked for mercy, noting Fultz’s tragic life. He was sexually abused as a child, dropped out of Harper High School as a sophomore because of a learning disability, and attempted suicide in 1999 after his young son and girlfriend were murdered, according to court records.

Linn sentenced Fultz to 18 years in prison — a sharp contrast to the mandatory life sentence that he once faced. Fultz ended up serving about half that time before his release from prison. He died early this year from heart disease, records show.

The youngest of Fultz’s victims said his death — as well as her going public with her story — has brought some measure of relief.

“I am still that little girl that was victimized,” she wrote in an email. “Every time I think of what he was or be reminded of what he did, I still feel like a victim. But thinking about where I was then and now, I am a survivor.”

Emails obtained from the state’s attorney’s office in response to the FOIA request make it clear that Linn’s reversal of the jury verdict marked a breaking point for the office.

“Judge Linn and his aversion to natural life sentences appears to have struck again yesterday,” wrote Magats of the state’s attorney’s criminal prosecutions bureau, in notifying the higher-ups of the decision in April 2011.

Alvarez expressed concern, as did Daniel Kirk, her chief of staff at the time.

“We are going to have to do something,” Kirk wrote of Linn in the email chain. “He is getting worse.”

The next month, Linn was randomly assigned the case of Cortez Foster, a homeless man accused of sexually assaulting and robbing a grandfather in Grant Park.

Prosecutors quickly moved to transfer Linn from the case. Another judge later sentenced Foster to life in prison.

Data analysis for this story was conducted by Forest Gregg and Hannah Cushman Garland of DataMade and Jared Rutecki of the BGA.

Una adolescente de Chicago le suplicó al juez del Condado de Cook, James Linn, que impusiera la pena máxima de prisión al hombre que la agredió sexualmente a ella y a sus dos hermanas, durante varios años, y amenazó con matarlas si se lo contaban a alguien. 

“Ayúdenos a asegurarnos de que habrá un violador menos en las calles”, escribió la joven, entonces de 19 años, en una declaración sobre el impacto en la víctima leída en voz alta en la audiencia de sentencia, en mayo de 2011. “Al final del día, solo quiero que se haga justicia de la manera correcta. Sin absolutamente ninguna indulgencia, porque no nos mostró ninguna “.

Pero en un giro favorable para el acusado, Joseph Fultz, Linn dio un paso extraordinario e inusual al revertir el veredicto del jurado y condenarlo por un cargo sexual mucho menos grave. Luego lo sentenció a 18 años de prisión, muy lejos de la cadena perpetua obligatoria que enfrentaba si la decisión del jurado se hubiera mantenido.

Para la oficina del fiscal estatal del Condado de Cook, el cambio radical fue la gota que colmó el vaso después de una serie de decisiones de Linn sobre casos sexuales que los fiscales consideraron desfavorables, según correos electrónicos internos de la oficina y entrevistas con varios exfiscales.

“¿Cuál es su problema?”, escribió en un correo electrónico sobre Linn la entonces Fiscal del Estado, Anita Álvarez. “Esto se está yendo de las manos”.

La oficina del fiscal del estado comenzó a utilizar regularmente una oscura maniobra legal para sacar a Linn de cualquier caso sexual que se le asignara, presentando lo que se conoce como mociones para la sustitución de juez (o SOJ en inglés). No era necesario dar ninguna razón para desplazar a Linn, y nombrar rápidamente un nuevo juez en su lugar.

En menos de dos años después de su controvertido manejo del caso de Fultz, Linn fue rechazado en por lo menos 25 casos sexuales usando SOJ, aproximadamente cuatro veces más que el juez más cercano, según un análisis sin precedentes de casos de los tribunales penales.

Entonces sucedió algo que aún no se ha explicado completamente: la cantidad de casos de delitos sexuales asignados por computadora a Linn disminuyó drásticamente en los años siguientes, lo que sugiere que funcionarios de la corte, conscientes de la campaña de la fiscalía estatal, dejaron de tenerlo en cuenta.

Como resultado, Linn no ha presidido ningún caso sexual desde noviembre de 2013, después de haber supervisado más juicios relacionados con delitos sexuales que cualquier otro juez del Condado de Cook en los últimos 13 años. Esta comprobación surge del análisis que hizo The Circuit, una nueva colaboración de investigación de las organizaciones noticiosas sin fines de lucro Better Government Association, Injustice Watch y The Chicago Reporter.

Hablando por primera vez, tres mujeres que testificaron en el tribunal de Linn dicen que el trato indulgente del juez a los agresores sexuales las dejó sintiéndose victimizadas dos veces, primero por las agresiones sexuales y luego por un magistrado que no les creyó del todo.

Linn “realmente no pensó en los daños emocionales que (Fultz) me causó a mí o a mis hermanas, o en lo enfermo que estaba”, dijo la más joven de las víctimas, que solo tenía 12 años en el momento de la sentencia.

La mujer, que ahora tiene 22 años y es madre de dos hijos, emitió una declaración en la que decía que no pensaba recuperar jamás su fe en el sistema judicial.

“Y no es por este caso”, escribió la mujer, que es afroamericana. “Es porque la mayoría de las veces a la gente no le importa las personas que se parecen a mí, o que tienen mi tipo de experiencia. Es por eso que tantos se toman la ley en sus manos”.

Linn, que actualmente preside el caso de alto perfil del actor Jussie Smollett, acusado de orquestar un supuesto ataque racista en su contra, se negó a hablar con The Circuit a través de una portavoz de la corte.

Menos casos de delitos sexuales se dirigen hacia Linn

El proyecto de The Circuit, que incluye un primer análisis de más de dos décadas de datos judiciales sobre casi un millón de casos de delitos graves en el Condado de Cook, examinó los SOJ porque muchos abogados consideran que una gran cantidad de esas mociones pueden ser una potencial señal de alerta sobre la rectitud o temperamento de los jueces 

Entre 2000 y 2013, Linn presidió más juicios judiciales relacionados con delitos sexuales que cualquier otro juez del Condado de Cook, una medida del nivel de comodidad que sentían los abogados defensores al permitir que el juez veterano, y no los jurados, decidiera el destino de sus clientes, comprobó el análisis de The Circuit.

Más que otros jueces, Linn mostró una tendencia a encontrar culpables a los acusados ​​de cargos sexuales, pero por delitos menos graves. Entre 2000 y 2013, lo hizo al menos 13 veces por separado en 67 juicios sin jurado que manejó, relacionados con cargos sexuales, según el análisis. Ningún otro juez del Condado de Cook se le acercó.

Al revisar la gran cantidad de SOJ presentados contra Linn por los fiscales, tanto al mando de la procuradora estatal actual Kim Foxx, como de su predecesora, Álvarez, The Circuit también encontró un patrón que indicaría que el juez a cargo de la división criminal, — quien se supone asigna aleatoriamente los casos a los magistrados de niveles inferiores — igualmente dejó de referir casos sexuales a Linn.

Ese patrón se reflejó en un correo electrónico interno de uno de los principales fiscales de la oficina de Foxx, que se obtuvo en virtud de una solicitud de la Ley de Libertad de Información (FOIA en inglés) que hizo The Circuit.

“Llevamos tanto tiempo en SOJing (sustituyendo a Linn) en casos de sexo que los dos últimos jueces presidentes ni siquiera se los envían”, escribió en 2017 a un superior, Joseph Magats, entonces jefe de la oficina de procesos criminales y ahora primer asistente de Foxx.

Pero el análisis de los datos de la corte presenta un panorama más complicado que la afirmación de Magats. Desde 2014, solo un puñado de casos sexuales fueron asignados cada año a Linn, que luego fueron transferidos rápidamente a otro juez. Y tanto en 2016, como en 2018, el análisis de los datos que hizo The Circuit no comprobó que se hubiera asignado ningún caso sexual al azar a Linn.

Eso representa un marcado contraste entre el período 2000 y 2013, cuando a Linn se le asignó aleatoriamente un promedio de casi 35 casos sexuales por año, comprobó el análisis.

Con menos casos de sexo asignados a Linn, los fiscales no han tenido que sustituirlo tanto en los últimos años, una ventaja para la oficina del fiscal del estado, ya que esas mociones corren el riesgo de ofender a los jueces que presiden cientos de casos penales.

A pesar de que Linn recibió drásticamente menos casos con cargos sexuales, el juez LeRoy Martin Jr., quien preside la división criminal, insistió en que todos los casos aún se asignan al azar a los jueces de la división, según un comunicado emitido en su nombre por el juez principal del Condado de Cook. oficina. A través de una portavoz de la corte, se negó a ser entrevistado para esta historia.

El predecesor de Martin, Paul Biebel Jr., quien se retiró en 2015, también negó haber realizado cambios durante su mandato en la asignación aleatoria computarizada de casos penales. Magats no devolvió llamadas ni correos electrónicos, y Álvarez se negó a comentar. Foxx no respondió a una solicitud de entrevista, pero su oficina emitió una breve declaración a través de una portavoz en la que dijo que las decisiones de sustituir a Linn en casos sexuales estaban “basadas en la información disponible en ese momento”.

Si bien los fiscales han tratado repetidamente de impedir que Linn decida sobre casos de sexo, su desdén por él no se traslada a otros delitos graves, según el análisis.

Es más, varios abogados defensores apoyaron el manejo de los cargos sexuales por el juez y dijeron que Linn simplemente pidió a los fiscales que probaran su caso, cargos sexuales o no, más allá de toda duda razonable.

De hecho, en más de tres décadas en el tribunal, Linn ha impuesto largas condenas a los delincuentes sexuales. En 2002, por ejemplo, condenó a Mark Anthony Lewis a 120 años de prisión por violar a una niña de 15 años en la zona norte de la ciudad.

“Empieza sin prejuicios”, dijo el abogado Keith Thiel, a quien Linn absolvió a dos clientes de cargos de proxenetismo y prostitución en 2013, uno de los últimos juicios sin jurado por delitos sexuales supervisados ​​por este magistrado. Agregó que ha defendido más de una docena de casos en la corte de Linn a lo largo de los años, y “no lo considero orientado hacia el estado, pero tampoco hacia la defensa. Realmente está en la mitad del camino… Él pone los pies de todos en el fuego”.

Raúl Villalobos, abogado defensor desde hace mucho tiempo y exfiscal del Condado de Cook, dijo que Linn, cuyo padre también sirvió en un escaño del Circuito de Cortes, no teme a la controversia.

Villalobos recordó a un cliente que enfrentó cargos de agresión sexual criminal depredadora por presuntamente violar a un niño de 7 años. Linn lo condenó por cargos menores de abuso sexual en junio de 2012 y lo sentenció a tres años de prisión.

“(Si) cree que alguien es culpable, lo declarará culpable”, dijo Villabolos. “Pero él exige al estado una carga de prueba que va más allá de toda duda razonable”. 

Preguntas sobre la “elección de foros”

Casi al mismo tiempo que la oficina del fiscal del estado sustituía a Linn en casos de sexo, también usaba el mismo libro de jugadas con otro juez por una razón diferente, comprobó la investigación del Circuito.

Desde 2013, los fiscales actuaron para sustituir más de una docena de veces a la jueza Ann Finley Collins, asignada a la corte de Maywood, en la zona suburbana del oeste, en casos de conducción en estado de ebriedad. Los SOJ se produjeron después de que un grupo de vigilantes de la corte, y la policía del suburbio de Riverside, apelaran al juez principal del condado por varias absoluciones y fallos favorables dictados por Collins en casos de personas que conducían ebrias.

Collins, ex asistente de la defensoría pública, no respondió a las repetidas llamadas y correos electrónicos en busca de comentarios.

Aunque la sustitución de Linn y Collins indica que los fiscales ven a esos jueces como parciales, algunos expertos legales cuestionaron la práctica del fiscal del estado de cambiar rutinariamente a un juez en ciertos tipos de casos. 

Frank Cece Jr., abogado defensor desde hace mucho tiempo y ex fiscal adjunto del estado, dijo que las medidas eran intentos obvios de los fiscales para obtener un resultado más favorable.

“Que (el) estado elija foros como patrón y práctica con un solo juez está más allá de los límites”, dijo.

Bennett Gershman, profesor de derecho en la Universidad Pace en White Plains, Nueva York, y experto en ética procesal, también expresó su preocupación de que las sustituciones rutinarias de un juez pudieran representar una extralimitación de los fiscales.

“Me parece que se está haciendo un mal uso de la capacidad de destituir (a los jueces) … de una manera (para) sesgar el procedimiento y beneficiar mejor al fiscal”, dijo.

La capacidad de sustituir a los jueces en Illinois se otorgó primero a los abogados defensores, pero la Corte Suprema de Illinois extendió el derecho a los fiscales en una decisión hace más de tres décadas.

Patricia Brown Holmes, ex jueza del Condado de Cook y fiscal federal que argumentó con éxito ese caso, dijo que las SOJ les dan a los abogados “la capacidad de sentir que no se le asigna a uno un juez en particular y no se puede hacer nada al respecto”.

Sin embargo, en ocasiones, el uso regular de SOJ por parte de los fiscales contra el mismo juez se ha convertido en un punto de discusión.

En 1990, la Corte Suprema de Illinois dictaminó que el fiscal del estado en el Condado de St. Clair, sur de Illinois, no podía usar las mociones para bloquear repetidamente a un juez y evitar que resolviera casos de delitos graves, en un esfuerzo por forzar a que fuera reasignado.

Más de una década después, el juez del Condado de Cook, Leo Holt, se quejó de que la oficina del fiscal del estado había estado participando en un patrón para eliminar los casos de delitos graves en su corte, tras ser designado en el edificio central del Circuito de Cortes, de la calle 26 y la avenida California. Los fiscales negaron las acusaciones y llevaron la pelea, con resultados mixtos, a la Corte Suprema de Illinois en varias ocasiones después de que Holt se negó a apartarse de un puñado de casos.

El ahora fallecido Holt era afroamericano y ayudó a defender a Martin Luther King Jr. como abogado privado durante las marchas por la vivienda en Chicago, en la década de 1960. Holt tenía la reputación de emitir sentencias y absoluciones más ligeras, afirmaban sus detractores que lo apodaban burlonamente “Let’ Em Go Leo” (Déjalos ir Leo). Sus partidarios argumentaron que la campaña de los fiscales en su contra era racista.

Casi al mismo tiempo, otro juez afroamericano, James L. Rhodes, que manejó casos de menores y delitos graves en la Corte de Distrito de Markham, en los suburbios del sur, desafió con éxito a los fiscales en sus esfuerzos para también sustituirlo regularmente.

“Su idea sobre qué hacer con los menores es simplemente encerrar a todos”, dijo Rhodes, ahora jubilado, en una entrevista reciente. “Como yo no estaba de acuerdo con eso, no lo hice… No querían enviarme casos “.

‘Una palmada en la muñeca’

Antes de que Linn revocara el veredicto del jurado de Fultz, su manejo de otros casos sexuales había provocado la ira de la oficina del fiscal del estado.

Aproximadamente al mismo tiempo de la sentencia de Fultz en 2011, Linn declaró culpable de conducta sexual inapropiada, y de mala conducta oficial, al oficial de libertad condicional del Departamento de Correccional de Illinois, Robert Rowels. Su víctima fue una mujer de unos 20 años, que se encontraba en libertad condicional y era amenazada de volver a prisión si no tenía sexo con él.

Pero el juez absolvió a Rowels de cargos de agresión sexual más graves a pesar de que las autoridades dijeron que era implicado por evidencia de ADN. Rowels, quien arriesgaba por lo menos cuatro años de prisión si era declarado culpable de los cargos más graves, fue sentenciado por Linn a 120 días en la cárcel del Condado de Cook y dos años de libertad condicional. Rowels se negó a comentar para esta historia.

En una entrevista telefónica, la víctima en este caso dijo que la oficina del fiscal del estado nunca le había informado mucho sobre lo que le sucedió a Rowels, más allá de su condena. Cuando un reportero de The Circuit compartió más detalles sobre el resultado de hace nueve años, la mujer calificó la corta sentencia de cárcel como “desgarradora”.

“Básicamente, recibió una palmada en la muñeca”, dijo Kimeda McGinnis, quien eligió hacer público su nombre para esta historia con la esperanza de ayudar en su propia curación y quizás inspirar a presentarse a otras víctimas de violación.

McGinnis, quien se mudó fuera del estado después de la terrible experiencia, no se arrepiente de haber presentado la evidencia del ADN, a pesar del resultado final del caso y las represalias que dijo haber experimentado de su próximo oficial de libertad condicional.

“Si lo permites, te puede destrozar el alma”, dijo.

A principios de ese año, en otro giro sorprendente, Linn rechazó la condena por agresión sexual que había emitido contra Ryan Logan, que vivía en el vecindario de River North en Chicago.

La decisión se tomó en febrero de 2011, pocos meses después de que Linn encontrara culpable a Logan de violar a una mujer de 31 años que conoció en Match.com, mientras lo absolvía de la agresión sexual a otra mujer que conoció en el sitio web de citas. En cambio, Linn redujo la condena de Logan a un cargo menor de abuso sexual y lo sentenció a sólo 90 días de cárcel. Logan arriesgaba hasta 15 años de prisión antes de que Linn le rebajara la condena por violación.

El abogado Daniel Kirschner, quien representó a la víctima en una demanda contra Logan y Match.com, dijo que Linn redujo la condena después de que el acusado realizó un tratamiento en un centro para delincuentes sexuales.

“Mi cliente no estaba muy satisfecha”, dijo Kirschner recientemente.

Otra decisión que atrajo el escrutinio se produjo en 2009. Linn encontró culpable a George Turner III, entrenador de baloncesto de la escuela secundaria preparatoria Walter Payton College, de abusar sexualmente de dos niñas estudiantes, pero lo absolvió de los cargos más graves de agresión sexual a una adolescente. Linn sentenció a Turner a tres años de libertad condicional y lo multó con 25.000 dólares.

En una entrevista, una de las sobrevivientes, Camille Rodríguez, quien también quiso hacer público su nombre para esta historia, dijo que aprendió a no confiar en el sistema legal después de que Linn absolviera a Turner de los cargos más graves que la involucraban a pesar de su testimonio en el juicio.

Rodríguez dijo que todavía recordaba a Linn declarar que pensaba que algo había sucedido, pero no en el grado que ella había descrito.

“Saber que me senté en la sala del tribunal con un grupo de adultos que me agredían, diciendo que una chica de 15 años podía seducir a un hombre de 30, 40 años … me llevó a creer que no pude mostrar realmente lo que sucedió”, dijo Rodríguez, que ahora es una trabajadora social que vive fuera del estado. “No era él el juzgado; yo fui enjuiciada”, dijo.

Una demanda presentada por Rodríguez alegaba que Turner la violó repetidamente cuando era el gerente del equipo de baloncesto masculino.

Rodríguez, que todavía se aferra al trauma más de una década después del juicio, dijo que una pena de prisión no habría curado su dolor, pero la habría ayudado de otras formas.

“Al menos me habría llevado a creer que a alguien le importaba una mierda”, dijo. “Esta culpa interiorizada es irracional. Lo sé con cada fibra de mi cerebro, pero no lo he aceptado “.

Turner no devolvió múltiples llamadas en busca de comentarios.

Revertir el dictamen de un jurado

Solo unas semanas antes de la sentencia de Fultz, en mayo de 2011, Linn hizo el sorprendente anuncio. Meses después de que el jurado encontrara a Fultz culpable de agresión sexual criminal depredadora por los repetidos ataques a las tres niñas menores de edad, Linn rebajó la condena a abuso sexual criminal agravado, un delito mucho menos grave.

En la audiencia, William Woelkers, un defensor público asistente que representó a Fultz, le pidió a Linn que desestimara la condena del jurado, señalando lo que dijo era una falta de evidencia física y un testimonio inconsistente de las tres niñas en el juicio, según los registros judiciales.

Stephanie Miller, la fiscal principal, se opuso enérgicamente a la decisión de Linn, y señaló que el jurado, no el juez, estaba en una “posición muy superior” para determinar la veracidad del testimonio de las víctimas.

“Le pedimos que no perturbe el veredicto del jurado”, dijo, según una transcripción de la audiencia.

En su decisión, Linn señaló que la ley estatal requería una sentencia de cadena perpetua para una condena por los cargos de agresión sexual criminal depredadora y cuestionó si el crimen cumplía con la definición de un cargo que requería penetración.

“Creo que abusaron sexualmente de los niños”, dijo el juez. “Así que ajustaré el fallo del jurado, con la fuerte objeción del gobierno. No puedo decir esto lo suficientemente fuerte. Se oponen absolutamente a que el tribunal lo considere”.

En una carta leída en la sentencia de Fultz, la madre de las tres víctimas lamentó que inicialmente no había creído las historias de agresión de las niñas.

“Han tenido que contar esta historia una y otra vez. Eso es difícil para una víctima de violación; es difícil para mí escuchar y ver el dolor en sus caras”, escribió la madre. “La confusión de preguntarme por qué nadie… las ayudó, incluyéndome a mí. Ha sido difícil encontrarles una sonrisa algunos días “.

La hermana del medio dijo en su declaración de impacto de víctima que Fultz la perseguía sus sueños y que vivía con el temor de que él cumpliera con sus amenazas de matarla a ella y a sus hermanas, si alguna vez lo liberaban.

“Solo espero que se haga justicia”, escribió.

Woelkers, el abogado de Fultz, pidió clemencia y señaló la trágica vida de su defendido. Fue abusado sexualmente cuando era niño, abandonó la escuela secundaria Harper en su segundo año, debido a una discapacidad de aprendizaje, e intentó suicidarse en 1999 después del asesinato de su hijo y su novia, según los registros judiciales.

Linn condenó a Fultz a 18 años de prisión, un marcado contraste con la cadena perpetua obligatoria que una vez enfrentó. Fultz terminó cumpliendo aproximadamente la mitad de ese tiempo antes de su liberación de prisión. Murió a principios de este año de una enfermedad cardíaca, según muestran los registros.

La más joven de las víctimas de Fultz dijo que su muerte, así como el hecho de que ella hiciera pública su historia, le ha traído cierto alivio. 

“Sigo siendo esa niña que fue víctima”, escribió en un correo electrónico. “Cada vez que pienso en lo que fue o recuerdo lo que hizo, todavía me siento como una víctima. Pero pensando en dónde estaba entonces y ahora, soy una sobreviviente”. 

Los correos electrónicos obtenidos de la oficina del fiscal del estado en respuesta a la solicitud de la FOIA dejan en claro que la revocación de Linn del veredicto del jurado marcó un punto de quiebre para la oficina.

“El juez Linn y su aversión a las cadenas perpetuas naturales parecen haber vuelto a golpear ayer”, escribió Magats, de la oficina de procesos penales del fiscal del estado, al notificar a los superiores de la decisión en abril de 2011.

Anita Álvarez expresó su preocupación, al igual que Daniel Kirk, su jefe de gabinete en ese momento.

“Vamos a tener que hacer algo”, escribió Kirk sobre Linn en la cadena de correo electrónico. “Está empeorando”.

Al mes siguiente, a Linn se le asignó al azar el caso de Cortez Foster, un hombre sin hogar acusado de agredir sexualmente y robar a un abuelo en Grant Park.

Los fiscales se apresuraron a sacar a Linn del caso. Otro juez condenó posteriormente a Foster a cadena perpetua.

El análisis de datos para esta historia fue realizado por Forest Gregg y Hannah Cushman Garland de DataMade y Jared Rutecki de BGA.

Traducido por Jorge Mederos.

For more than a year, Antwaun McLaren kept a spotless record while serving probation for a cocaine possession conviction, regularly checking in with his Cook County probation officer and passing urine tests to make sure that he remained drug free.

But unable to find work, the 23-year-old father of two, including a newborn son, had his cellphone service cut off after falling behind on his bill. When he missed his probation officer’s calls, McLaren found himself back in court, standing before Judge Diane Gordon Cannon in early 2018 for violating probation.

McLaren expected to be kept on probation after a brief hearing. He didn’t know that Cannon had a history of being tough on violators.

Cannon has sent some 1,450 defendants to state prison for violating probation, about 35% of those who appeared before her on such violations and the most of any judge currently on the Cook County bench, an unprecedented analysis of two decades of court data by The Circuit has found.

By contrast, dozens of past and present judges who heard a similar number of probation violations — for picking up a new charge, missing check-ins or skirting other rules — sentenced on average 13% of the defendants to state prison, according to the investigation by The Circuit, an investigative collaboration of the nonprofit news organizations the Better Government Association, Injustice Watch and The Chicago Reporter.

On that January day, Cannon ordered McLaren held without bond in the Cook County Jail until a hearing on the probation violation could be held. He remained in custody for two months before prosecutors dropped the matter.

Despite the fact that it was McLaren’s first run-in with the law as an adult, Cannon implied that he was part of a gang or mob, McLaren recalled in an interview. He said he felt Cannon’s animus toward him as a Black man caught up in the criminal justice system.

“Don’t look at me like I’m nothing. Still respect me as a human being,” McLaren said. “I can’t even pay a phone bill. What criminal organization am I in?”

Attorneys — many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation by Cannon and other judges — said Cannon has a long history of bullying behavior and verbal outbursts from the bench, insensitivity toward minorities and a noticeable prosecution preference.

Cannon, who is white and a veteran of nearly 25 years on the bench, did not return repeated calls and emails seeking comment. Judge LeRoy Martin Jr., who presides over the court’s criminal division, said in an emailed response Cannon has been on paid sick leave from her $206,400-per-year job since the beginning of 2020 and is not seeking retention in the November election to stay on the bench.

The court’s most substituted judge

Cannon’s record of harsh treatment toward defendants and verbal outbursts, as well as her reputation for being pro-prosecution, may have led to another dubious distinction: Over the last couple of years, attorneys, using an obscure legal maneuver, have bounced her off more cases than any other judge atin Cook County’s central criminal courthouse, the analysis found.

Criminal cases are randomly assigned to judges by computer. Under state law, defense attorneys and prosecutors can opt for a different judge once — twice in murder and a handful of other serious offenses. No specific reason has to be given, but the motions for a “substitution of judge,” or SOJ, must be filed within 10 days of a judge being assigned. Motions to substitute can still be made later, but attorneys then must show that a judge is prejudiced against them — a difficult hurdle to overcome.

Attorneys quickly removed Cannon from nearly one of every five cases cases randomly assigned to her in 2018 and the first half of 2019, far more than any other judge, according to the analysis. 

The high number of SOJ motions against Cannon showed just how much she is viewed as biased and unfair and should raise concern among top court officials about her conduct, attorneys said.

Thomas Geraghty, a longtime professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, called on Martin and Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans to track SOJs as one indicator of whether judges are up to the task of dispensing justice fairly.

“If judges are getting a lot of these motions … there should be some process for figuring out is there a problem with the judge,” Geraghty said in an interview.

Evans and Martin declined to be interviewed for this story, but Mary Wisniewski, the chief judge’s spokeswoman, issued a statement saying court officials do not track SOJs because they are not “a reflection of judicial performance,” noting that the motions can be filed “for any reason.”

But lawyers who regularly frequent the county’s main criminal courthouse at 26th Street and California Avenue said they share their take with one another on the judges presiding there, giving them a good sense of their qualifications. 

In time, more veteran attorneys get a good feel for how a host of judges behave, including whether they treat defendants and their lawyers with respect, show balance in their rulings, and sentence uniformly and fairly.

Their reasons for substituting a judge can be many but often involve concerns about a judge’s reputation for fairness.

“A lawyer makes up their mind by knowing the customs (of) that particular judge,” said John DeLeon, a longtime criminal defense attorney in Chicago.

If there are concerns, attorneys don’t hesitate to switch judges, DeLeon said.

Cannon was bounced from at least 56 cases in 2018, almost 16% of the approximately 360 cases randomly assigned to her, the analysis found. Lawyers for four more defendants — allowed to SOJ two judges each because they faced the most serious felonies — also blocked Cannon’s appointment that year after first substituting other judges, records show.

No other judge even came close. The judge with the second most SOJs that year had 32, the analysis found.

Of the 33 Cook County judges who were assigned at least 300 criminal cases in 2018, seven didn’t have a single SOJ filed against them, according to the analysis. Another 10 judges had only one or two SOJs on their record for that entire year.

Questions of demeanor and impartiality

The criticism against Cannon for her temperament and fairness goes back years. 

Angered two years ago when she caught an intern for the public defender’s office texting on his cellphone in the midst of a bench trial, Cannon took possession of the phone and read the texts aloud before tossing the young man from her courtroom, according to several attorneys in the courtroom at the time, as well as the defendant whose case was being heard.

“She was highly pissed,” said Flamond Williams, now 39, who was on trial on a weapons charge in March 2018 and recalled that Cannon almost threw out an assistant public defender along with the intern, both of whom were waiting to be heard on other matters. Cannon eventually found Williams guilty.

Attorneys said they were aware that a complaint against Cannon over the incident had been filed with the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board, the state agency that investigates allegations of judicial wrongdoing but rarely leads to consequences for judges. All complaints filed with the board are kept confidential until and whether administrative charges are filed. No findings have been made public on the matter.

That June, the Cook County public defender’s office halted assigning the same attorneys every day to Cannon’s courtroom, a longtime practice that the office has continued elsewhere at the courthouse at 26th Street and California Avenue.

In an emailed statement, Cook County Public Defender Amy Campanelli chalked up the change to a pilot project designed to keep her assistants on a case all the way from its inception to conclusion. No additional courtrooms besides Cannon’s have been added since then, though the office said it plans to expand the pilot project next month.

Tatyana Lewis, a Black woman who was sentenced by Cannon in 2018 to two years in prison following her guilty plea to a low-level felony drug possession charge, said she struggled to understand why, as a first-time offender, she didn’t instead receive community service with drug treatment.

Cannon, she said, lacked empathy.

“She’s got like this attitude, ‘This is my courtroom, you’re the criminal,’” Lewis said. “I don’t feel like she’s right for the community … especially someone who judges off of personal feelings or how they woke up this morning.”

Favoring the prosecution — except against cops

Cannon, who worked her entire career as a Cook County assistant state’s attorney before she was elected to the bench in 1996, has a reputation for favoring the prosecution — except when law enforcement officers face criminal charges.

She gained notoriety in 2015, when she acquitted Chicago Police Cmdr. Glenn Evans in a high-profile case on charges of shoving his gun into a man’s mouth. Cannon gave little credence in her ruling to evidence that the alleged victim’s DNA was found on Evans’ firearm.

Two years later, special prosecutors handling charges against three Chicago cops accused of conspiring to cover up the wrongful 2014 shooting death of Black teen Laquan McDonald by a white officer quickly substituted Cannon after she was randomly assigned the hot-button case.

“There’s no question that if I were the (special) prosecutor that I would have done what they did,” said G. Flint Taylor, a longtime civil rights attorney in Chicago. Taylor substituted Cannon on a post-conviction matter involving a client who alleged that he had been tortured by Chicago police detectives working under Cmdr. Jon Burge, who died in 2018. Taylor noted that Cannon had worked in the state’s attorney’s felony review unit at the time of Burge’s wrongdoing. 

“She’s one of the last surviving judges out there who has a direct connection with the Burge torture era,” said Taylor, calling Cannon’s courtroom style “authoritarian.” “It’s not surprising that defense lawyers, particularly in cases where police would be involved, would recuse her.”

From January 2018 through June 2019, attorneys substituted Cannon in at least six cases involving charges of battery to cops, the analysis of the court data found.

Lawrence Kennon, a Chicago attorney for more than 50 years, said his experience defending a Black woman years ago on charges of assaulting a police officer solidified, for him, Cannon’s reputation as a “cops’ judge,” especially for defendants of color.

Kennon, who died last month at age 91, was Black as well and thought his race also played a role in the judge’s treatment of him. He said in an interview in June that Cannon repeatedly cut him off during discussions with the judge and prosecutors in her chambers.

“She said, ‘Don’t interrupt. Listen to the other side,’” Kennon said. “She really did not want to hear the defendant’s side.”

‘You call that a report?’

Attorneys said Cannon’s animosity toward the defense could be open and obvious at times.

In a rare move in March 2012, an Illinois appellate court reassigned a murder case to another judge after reversing Chad Johnson’s conviction and rebuking Cannon for prohibiting the defense from questioning a Chicago police detective at trial about changes in a key eyewitness’s account.

The opinion also chastised Cannon for her personal comments in front of the jury on the quality of the defense evidence and the diligence of its investigator.

“You call that a report?” court records quoted Cannon saying as the investigator testified to the jury. 

The defense presented three witnesses who testified that they were with Johnson in Kentucky at the time of the drive-by shooting on Chicago’s South Side that killed Christopher Dorbin and wounded three others on Super Bowl Sunday in 2004.

In the appeal, attorneys for Johnson wrote that Cannon acknowledged that she had raised her voice after hearing the investigator’s testimony, but that the judge refused to preserve audiotape evidence that would have let the appellate court “hear for itself the tone of voice with which it taunted defense counsel and verbally accosted his witness.”

In a retrial in 2018, a Cook County jury acquitted Johnson, who has alleged in a pending lawsuit that Chicago police framed him for the murder.

In another long-running dispute, Cannon refused for months to step aside from overseeing Malvin Washington’s murder case, despite defense allegations that she had openly shown bias.

His previous attorneys had also alleged that Cannon unfairly favored the prosecution in her trial rulings, inappropriately scolded the defense lawyers in front of jurors, and treated Washington’s family with disdain.

In 2012, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld an appellate court’s decision to overturn  Washington’s first-degree murder conviction for the 2004 killing of Marquis Reed and wounding of a second man, ruling that Cannon had erred by refusing to let jurors consider second-degree murder charges.

At a hearing in 2017, Washington’s lawyers — with the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern’s law school — said they had been told that Cannon had mocked them behind their backs, calling Jeffrey Urdangen “Mr. Underpants” and Alison Flaum “Ms. Phlegm.”

Cannon denied the name-calling and accused Urdangen of telling people that he hoped she would die of cancer — an allegation that Urdangen denied.

The next week, Cannon abruptly reversed herself, withdrawing from the case.

At a retrial before a different judge, Washington was convicted by a jury of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years in prison — far less than the 65-year sentence that Cannon had earlier imposed.

A life disrupted for a minor infraction

When Cannon sent McLaren to jail for missing the check-in with his probation officer two years ago, the toll of the two months in custody crippled his physical and mental health, said McLaren, who was already on disability for serious medical issues. 

McLaren said he became so ill he was unable to move from his cell bed and battled thoughts of suicide and fear he would die in custody. 

“That was the worst time of my life,” he said. “Three strokes didn’t compare to that.” 

McLaren wasn’t released from the jail until prosecutors — at the urging of his attorney — withdrew the probation violation, taking the issue out of Cannon’s hands. 

McLaren said the jailing cost him a chance at a job, disrupted his second year at Kennedy-King College, and put him in a tailspin that he’s still struggling to overcome.

Data analysis for this story was conducted by Forest Gregg and Hannah Cushman Garland of DataMade and Jared Rutecki of the BGA.