By John Ruberry
A legal challenge, struck down by the Illinois Supreme Court, delayed the start of Illinois’ ludicrously misnamed SAFE-T Act, but it finally went into effect last Monday.
The SAFE-T Act’s opponents refer to it as the “Purge Law,” a reference to the movie about a generally peaceful dystopian society, except for an annual 12-hour period where all crimes, including murder, are legal. The SAFE-T Act abolishes cash bail. Accused criminals are either set free after their arrest to await trial. Or they are locked up with no bail. The latter category is reserved for the most heinous criminals, as well as flight risks, and those who are suspected of being likely to intimidate witnesses, and the like.
Most accused criminals in Illinois, public safety be damned, will walk free, albeit some while wearing an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet, which, in case you didn’t know, are very easy to remove.
Of course, without cash bail, which often is paid for by a friend or relative, accused criminals can be expected to be more likely to skip out of town and blow off their trial dates.
Welcome to Illinois, the criminal paradise, where Alex and his “Droogs” of A Clockwork Orange fame, will feel at home.
Here are some of the lowlights of the first week of “the Purge.”
One of the first accused thugs arrested and set free pretrial was a woman raising hell during an unofficial, and at times disruptive, Mexican Independence Day automobile caravan celebration in downtown Chicago. Esmerelda Aguilar of suburban Cicero allegedly attacked four Chicago police officers with pepper spray. Prosecutors didn’t even ask the Cook County judge presiding over her hearing to detain Aguilar.
Cook County prosecutors, in another case, didn’t ask for another accused criminal to be detained in another egregious case. A Ukranian national, Ivan Muryn, was ordered by a Cook County judge not to drive, to submit to electronic monitoring and to surrender his passport. According to CWB Chicago, Muryn has been “charged with failure to report an accident involving death.”
That death was of his wife. According to the Arlington Cardinal, Muryn was arguing with his spouse while driving in Inverness. His wife removed her seatbelt and she “fell” out of his car, and then she was fatally struck by another vehicle. Muryn kept driving. Yeah, she “fell” out of her car.
Outside of the Chicago area, two California men were pulled over in Henry County, near the Quad Cities, driving an old bus that contained over 5,000 pounds of marijuana. The value of the drugs is estimated to be worth between $6 million and $14 million. They were not jailed, even though the duo is accused of committing an Illinois Class X felony. The drug bust is being called one of the largest in Illinois history.
Eight days ago, the sheriff of Williamson County in southern Illinois released 30 jail inmates, because of the SAFE-T Act, the sheriff said he could no longer detain them as they awaited trial.
Back to the spiritual descendants of Alex’s Droogs.
Criminals are risk averse. If criminals believe they can get away with lawbreaking, or if they are caught, they won’t get locked up, they become emboldened.
Early Thursday morning, at least 10 people, including a 72-year-old man who was beaten, were robbed on Chicago’s North Side.
In an encore performance on Saturday night, in at least five incidents, a dozen people were robbed at gunpoint in a two-hour period on the city’s Northwest Side. No one has been arrested for either wilding spree.
That last story led CWB Chicago to quip, “Did anyone in Chicago NOT get robbed or shot last night?” Oh yeah, of course people have been shot in Chicago this weekend, including an 86-year-old man.
Violence also hit DePaul University’s North Side campus on Saturday night. Four students were mugged, and one of them was beaten, another was pistol-whipped.
The Purge is here.
No one has recently heard from the SAFE-T Act’s primary champion, possible presidential candidate Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who is on an extended vacation with his wife. Citing “security concerns,” the Democrat governor’s staff isn’t saying where Pritzker is. The governor, laughably but repeatedly claimed that the SAFE-T Act was about, “Making sure that we’re also addressing the problem of a single mother who shoplifted diapers for her baby, who is put in jail and kept there for six months because she doesn’t have a couple of hundred dollars to pay for bail.” The truth is, and Pritzker knows it, is that these Jean Valjeans of motherhood weren’t being jailed in Illinois, and they haven’t been so in quite some time.
Oh, back to Pritzker and his vacation: What about the security concerns of Illinois’ 12 million residents?
Kim Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney who is more of a social worker than a prosecutor, says Illinois is “on the right side of history” now that the SAFE-T Act is up and running.
Well, history sometimes takes an evil turn.
John Ruberry regularly blogs, more nervously than ever, just outside of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.
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