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According to jail guards at the Lake County Jail, unsafe jail conditions are causing very dangerous situations. A letter to the Chicago Tribune from Cass Casper, senior staff attorney for the union local, states that there is a “substantial risk of the safety of the officers” due to broken elevators and radio systems. The letter alleges nine instances in which the radios or elevators failed from November to January.

Jail guards allege they have been stuck in elevators without the ability to use their radios due to radio “dead zones.” Wait times up to 25 minutes and rescues by ladders have been reported. An officer reported that the response time to an attack in which another officer was grabbed by the throat and thrown to the floor was “severely delayed due to one of the two elevators being nonoperational.”

According to jail officials, the main elevator has been fixed and the radio system will be replaced. Lake County plans to spend more than $7 million to buy a more advanced radio system that should be up and running by April.

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The City of Chicago is rolling out an amnesty program for old parking tickets, red light tickets, back taxes and building code violations. Penalty and collection costs will be waived for eligible tickets. The program begins November 15, 2015 and runs through the end of the year. The program applies to tickets issued prior to January 1, 2012, which are not currently enrolled in a payment plan or part of pending legal activity with the City of Chicago.

To search for outstanding tickets, you may visit www.cityofchicago.org/finance and click “Search for Tickets” or call the City at (312) 744-7275. All eligible tickets must be paid in full by December 31, 2015 to receive the reduction. Any eligible tickets not paid by the deadline will revert to the original amount due.

Chicago amnesty on penalties for old tickets, other debt to start Sunday, www.chicagotribune.com, November 10, 2015

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On August 26, 2015, Public Act 099-0467, eliminating statutory hard times, was signed into law by Governor Rauner. The legislation was sponsored by Rep. John D’Amico and will become effective January 1, 2016.

The legislation eliminates all ‘hard times’ under current law. Simply put, these are statutory periods during which a driver could not obtain relief from certain periods of a statutory summary suspension (‘SSS’) or DUI revocation. This includes:

1. First offender SSS – Drivers will be eligible for a Monitored Device Driving Permit (MDDP) from day 1 of the suspension (currently cannot obtain a permit until the 31st day of the SSS);

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A Chicago Tribune investigation revealed that federally backed DUI patrols and sobriety checkpoints in Illinois usually result in ticketing drivers for minor infractions rather than drunk driving. Of the 270,000 citations issued across the state through these patrols, 93% were for less serious offenses than DUI. Records from 2008 to 2013 reveal that ten police agencies throughout the state accounted for more than half of the citations issued by these patrols. These agencies include Chicago, Skokie, Elgin, Will County, Waukegan and Illinois State Police.

The Skokie Police Department logged 14,000 citations through their drunk driving patrols, but only about 3% of the citations were for DUI. The Elgin Police Department issued around the same number of citations, but arrested more than twice as many drunk drivers as Skokie. About 7% of Will County’s citations through these patrols were for DUI and about 11 percent of Waukegan police’s citations were for DUI.

Last year, a Des Plaines commander padded the number of DUI arrests made by his department in an effort to collect federal grant money. At his sentencing hearing, his attorney spoke of the pressure the commander was under in meeting the department’s quotas.

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An electronic insurance verification program may soon be implemented in Illinois. This program will make it much easier for officers to catch those driving without car insurance. In 2014, the Illinois legislature established a committee to design the program, which will likely include a computer database that would be accessible to law enforcement during traffic stops. The system would allow officers to ensure you are up to date on your monthly insurance payments. Often, individuals make a down payment on their insurance, receive their insurance card, and do not follow up on monthly payments, allowing their coverage to lapse while retaining the card showing that they are insured. As of now, in order to ensure you are currently covered by insurance, officers must call the insurance company.

It is expected that the Secretary of State will adopt the rules for the program by 2016. The agency has estimated that of the 9 million licensed drivers in Illinois, 6% are uninsured.

Michigan has recently adopted a similar program, allowing police to access information on whether a vehicle is insured by running the license plate through their computer. Michigan insurance companies are required to transmit policy information twice a month, so the information provided to officers is reasonably accurate.

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For the last several years, Larry Davis has been engaged in negotiations on behalf of the Illinois State Bar Association (‘ISBA’) and the Illinois Lawyers and Substance Abuse Counselors Association (‘ILSACA’) with the Office of the Secretary of State (‘SOS’) regarding several proposed changes to the Illinois driver licensing laws as well changes in the Illinois DUI laws with other interested parties.

We are pleased to advise you that the SOS Traffic Safety Advisory Committee has voted to approve many these proposals. The accepted proposals include the following:

Elimination of all ‘hard times’ under current law. Simply put, these are statutory periods during which a driver could not obtain relief during certain periods of a statutory summary suspension (‘SSS’) or revocation. These include:

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A federal lawsuit filed on Monday on behalf of six African-American men contends that the Chicago Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy has violated their constitutional rights. The lawsuit alleges “suspicionless” street stops led to unlawful searches and seizures as well as the use of excessive force by the police department. The suit is seeking class-action status, alleging that the constitutional rights of mostly African-Americans have been violated. The named defendants are the Chicago Police Department, superintendent Garry McCarthy as well as 14 unnamed police officers.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Terry v. Ohio permits police to make a stop when there is reasonable suspicion that a person has committed or is about to commit a crime and there is a reasonable belief that the individual is armed and imminently dangerous. In these cases, a brief patdown of the individual’s outer clothing in search for weapons is permitted.

Gregory Davis, 58, is a plaintiff in the case. He alleges that in July 2014, he was waiting in his vehicle for a family member to come out of Walgreens when officers asked him why he was sitting there and demanded his driver’s license and insurance information. The allegations further state after looking into his vehicle, the officers allowed him to return to his home without issuing a citation. Davis was stopped again three months later as he drove through an alley in his neighborhood. He alleges that there was no probable cause for the stop and officers took his license and registration, making him wait 20 minutes while they ran his information. Again, there was no charges or citations issued.

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Orangelo Payne, 35, has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the FBI, Chicago police, the Cook County probation department, an FBI agent as well as individual police and probation officers. He alleges that while he was on probation for a drug offense in 2013, his home was illegally searched by an FBI agent and probation officers, who found an antique shotgun. This led to 16 months in jail for Payne, before the gun charges were eventually dropped.

The lawsuit alleges that there were improper partnerships between probation officers and law enforcement agencies. Payne alleges that the probation department did not investigate or discipline these probation officers, thereby encouraging misconduct.

Less than a year ago, the Tribune ran a story alleging that the probation department’s gang unit improperly worked with the FBI and other agencies to conduct warrantless and possibly illegal searches. The former Deputy Chief of the gang unit is one of the defendants in Payne’s case.

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An Aurora man was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving after allegedly threatening to fight a customer in the McDonald’s drive-thru line.

Just after midnight on Monday, Aurora police were called to a home after reports that someone was playing music too loudly in a maroon Jeep. When police arrived, they found Daniel Garibay sitting in the vehicle. Police reports indicate that Garibay appeared to be drunk and that officers warned him not to drive. Officers then left the residence and believed the incident to be over.

However, about an hour later, a McDonald’s employee called police, stating that someone in a maroon Jeep was being disruptive in the drive-thru line. The same officers that had responded to the earlier call arrived at McDonalds and quickly realized that this was the same man they had earlier warned not to drive. Besides threatening to fight another customer, the restaurant manager stated that she believed Garibay to be drunk after he seemed confused and had trouble speaking when ordering.

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Angel Gonzalez, of Waukegan, spent 20 years behind bars before being formally exonerated of rape and abduction charges on Monday. The basis of the exoneration was DNA. While bodily fluids implicate two different men in the crime, neither DNA sample matched that of Gonzalez.

Gonzalez appeared in a Lake County courtroom, shackled at the ankles, as Judge Victoria Rossetti vacated the conviction. While the excitement was evident, Gonzalez was then sent back to prison for a 1997 charge of criminal damage to property for allegedly damaging a sink while in solitary confinement.

On Tuesday, Gonzalez’s attorneys asked a Livingston County judge to vacate the charge because there was no interpreter present when Gonzalez, who speaks little English, pled guilty. Judge Jennifer Bauknecht agreed to vacate the conviction and the prosecutors then agreed to drop the charges.

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