Another Governor Sell Out to the Anti-Police Movement?

Judicial Watch Eyes Governor Pritzker’s Inmate Releases . . .

Did Governor Pritzker just send word to all the citizens of Illinois that his office, like that of so many governors before him, has been completely bought and sold?

The answer is moving rapidly toward the affirmative. The reason is that Pritzker announced last week that his administration has commuted the sentences of seventeen Illinois prisoners since March. Of those, seven were convicted of murder. That’s right, seven murderers have been set free.

Pritzker’s announcement came just a few days after federal Judge Robert Dow squashed a move by a collection of “civil rights” law firms claiming that a host of inmates should be released from prison due to the threat of coronavirus in prisons. Just how releasing criminals, who will likely create more crime, will bring order to the pandemic is not clearly explained by their advocates. Nevertheless, after Dow’s ruling was announced, one of the attorneys for the inmates reportedly said ominously they were not going away.

In addition to this announcement, some media reports indicate that as many as 700 inmates have already been released due to coronavirus. What’s more, the public has not been informed who has been released or why.

In response, this week Judicial Watch, the conservative group that monitors government agencies for accountability and transparency, filed a Freedom of Information Request (FOIA) about the prisoner releases, attempting to assemble the basic facts about them.

Judicial Watch’s investigation is crucial. Pritzker’s potential release of inmates at the behest of “civil rights” law firms reignites one of the darkest chapters in Illinois political history and is a potentially chilling indication that much of the political establishment in Illinois has been taken over by the anti-police movement, whose central strategy is to get convicted offenders out of prison.

History is important here.

The origins of this movement go back to the late 1960s, when groups like the Weather Underground were calling for revolution and whose tactics included detonating explosive devices. Whether or not these groups actually killed anyone in their bombings is still debated, but what is crystal clear about them is that many of their members got off scot-free for their crimes, none more so than founding members Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.

Both Dohrn and Ayers were able to get charges against them dropped because they claimed that federal investigators had violated their rights by opening their mail and tapping their phones without warrants. Known as “Black Box jobs, these measures were approved by some top FBI officials and even President Nixon, who believed that the group’s violence, revolutionary rhetoric, and ties to communist countries made their actions more than simple crimes. In the minds of many in law enforcement and government, these radicals had become revolutionaries and posed a grave threat to the country, especially after their bombmaking factories were discovered. Because of this, these officials believed the threat they posed allowed law enforcement to deny their constitutional rights. They approved the FBI “Black Box” tactics against the group’s members.

Later, after the evidence of these tactics emerged I (D-ID) in the media, a committee led by Senator Frank Church was formed in 1975 to review alleged abuses by agencies like the FBI and the CIA. The problem was that the committee had largely formed their conclusions before they even investigated the agencies.

“The most liberal Democrats in the Senate, known for their animosity to the agency, are shouting for a chance to sit on a select committee of accusation,” wrote James Kilpatrick in the Atlanta Journal.

“Rather than conducting a no-nonsense, serious investigation, Church carried out an inquisition—sometimes sensational and sometimes melodramatic. The committee’s inquest was tailor-made for television. Each hearing had the goal of creating news headlines,” wrote former CIA member Frank Rafalko and author of the book MH/CHAOS: The CIA’S Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers.

The Church committee issued a scathing attack on the CIA and FBI and rejected all the evidence collected against Weather Underground members, who had been living underground for several years. With the evidence dropped, the Weather Underground members were free.

“Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country,” Bill Ayers said after charges were dropped against him.

Thus began the process of the radical left turning the tables on law enforcement, making them the villains and violent offenders like Ayers and Dohrn the heroes, a strategy that found a profitable, powerful home in Chicago, as both Dohrn and Ayers returned to the city and found careers at universities educating young people. Dohrn ended up at Northwestern University School of Law, an institution that became a key player in alleging police corruption and profiting from it through civil lawsuits, just as the allegations against the FBI and CIA had led to the release of Dohrn and Ayers. Like Dohrn, Ayers landed at UIC, where he became a professor in the School of Education.  Neither Dohrn nor Ayers have ever expressed remorse for their activity.

Thus, the long, sordid history of the movement to criminalize the police and transform criminals into heroes is vast and complex, but one ominous measure of it may be the impact of the “civil rights” law firms upon the Illinois governor’s office.

In 2003 Governor George Ryan, a Republican governor facing his own 21-count indictment for corruption, released four men from death row to the breathless approval of both the wrongful conviction lawyers and activists who supported these once-convicted killers and Chicago’s fawning, barely functioning Chicago media machine. One of the men, Madison Hobley, had been convicted of setting a fire that killed seven people and left others jumping from the third floor of an apartment building. Ryan’s decision, pushed relentlessly by “wrongful conviction” advocates, was made with no new evidence of their innocence. Describing the circumstances of Hobley’s release from death row, the New York Times wrote:

Mr. Hobley, who was convicted of killing his wife, infant child and five others in a 1987 arson, walked out of Pontiac Correctional Center this afternoon, one of four death row inmates that Governor Ryan pardoned three days before the end of his term. Experts said it was the first time in memory that condemned men had been directly pardoned, as opposed to being released through a court proceeding, an extraordinary step Governor Ryan took because, he said, he is convinced of their innocence.

Ryan’s decision generated nauseating and unquestioning press approval in Chicago, particularly from journalists and columnists at the Chicago Tribune, a level of media advocacy indicating just how far the press, just like the governor’s office, had gone in transforming itself from a watchdog into agents of a narrow, extreme political movement.

Then came Governor Pat Quinn. In the waning moments of his scandal-plagued administration, former Governor Quinn commuted the 40-year sentence of Howard Morgan, a man convicted on four counts of attempted murder against four police officers. Three of the officers were wounded in a shootout with Morgan in 2005 during a traffic stop. Morgan’s release left prosecutors and police dumbfounded, as they had fought for nine years to see him convicted.

What was the point?

Quinn also commuted the sentence of another man, Willie Johnson, convicted of perjury in another wrongful conviction bid that could have gotten two men released from life sentences for a shooting that killed two other men and wounded Johnson. Prosecutors unearthed evidence that Johnson had received phone calls from a top-ranking gang member shortly before he announced that his original testimony at the criminal trial of the men was false. Prosecutors didn’t buy Johnson’s recantation, so much so that they indicted him for perjury and he was sentenced in a plea deal, but Quinn put an end to all that when he let Johnson out.

Johnson and the two convicted shooters were represented by prominent wrongful conviction law firms.

Quinn also commuted the sentence of Tyrone Hood and Wayne Washington for the 1993 murder of Marshall Morgan Jr. That commutation is also under fire, as city attorneys are seeking to depose former Governor Quinn in connection with the case. The attorneys are claiming that Hood’s release was the result of media pressure applied by the Exoneration Project, one of the legal organizations demanding Pritzker release criminals because of coronavirus.

Incredibly, neither Quinn nor Ryan ever faced any investigation into the release of so many convicted criminals, not by the feds and not by the Chicago media, even though the evidence mounts that it could be one of the greatest scandals in the state’s history. Indeed, this potential corruption almost seems protected by a media code of silence.

Imagine that.

The notion that a party hack like Pritzker—the one who was on the other end of the calls with former Governor Blagojevich that got Blagojevich indicted—would stand up to this aggressive movement by the “civil rights” law firms is doubtful.

In the midst of a pandemic, the magnitude of Pritzker’s decisions increases.

One wonders if the question even needs to be asked: Will he govern or sell out like so many governors before him?

Guilty as hell. Free as a bird.