Questioning the Rationale and Practicality of the Current Legal Regime The first principle of the law in the USA is equality. That may not quite square up to the enhanced sentencing regime for designated drug free zones in Chicago. The current trends owe their origins partly to the 1980s when…
Chicago has never been able to quite shake off its sometimes unwarranted reputation as a corruption center in the USA. Take the case of a city insider who has been sentenced to 10 years in jail for taking bribes in a scandal that ironically involved jumping red light cameras. The…
Whenever another story comes in, there is shock from the legal and non-legal community. Even as the defendant desperately seeks an attorney; the prosecutor is working full-time to ensure a conviction and an exemplary sentence. The annals of embezzlement in Chicago include the relatively recent case of Caryn Benson, a…
The rationale behind the laws relating to unlawful use of a weapon in Chicago are simple. First of all, they are designed to protect the public from harm by making it incredibly difficult and illegal to obtain a firearm. Secondly, the rules must take into account the perspectives of the…
Receiving stolen property is one of the more elusive offenses on the Chicago statute books but it has been prosecuted vigorously on account of the fact that it is part of a network of criminality that must be broken from its source. The person that receives stolen property is not…
Even as some states such as Colorado move to deregulate some previously controlled substances or drugs, Chicago still grapples with the offense of Marijuana possession. At the moment, the state has decriminalized possession but not the actual smoking of pot, which in itself represents a dangerous contradiction. People buy and…
Credit card fraud is becoming the crime of choice for offenders in Chicago who are not particularly inclined to violence. If undetected, the crime can be staggeringly lucrative and often does not carry the stigma of outright theft, sexual depravity, or violence. It is tempting to cast credit card fraudsters…
Sometimes it is hard to tell who is a victim and who is a perpetrator when it comes to intimidation and extortion crimes in Chicago. Defense attorneys have too often found themselves changing their roles in order to effectively prosecute the police department for a series of failings including gross…
Kidnapping has often been one of those crimes that captures media headlines and the national imagination. The endless post-court investigations are a cottage industry in themselves. Illinois is not much different from other parts of the US in considering kidnapping to be a serious felony that attracts significant periods of…
Recently, President Barack Obama pardoned a number of people who had been given mandatory sentences for drug trafficking that many in the legal profession considered to be excessive. More worrisome was the notion that the judge in a court case lost the right of discretion at sentencing because the mandatory…