Chicago Criminal Lawyer Blog

September 9, 2022

Going After the Gangs

by Law Offices of David L. Freidberg, P.C.

In September of last year, Chicago police announced they were “going after the gangs” in an apparent bid to reduce crime. However, it is now a year later and the number of shootings and gang-related violence has yet to dwindle. Police Superintendent David Brown said that he wanted it well known, the Chicago police will be going after the gangs. He also mentioned that they would be doing it Constitutionally and without violating anyone’s rights.

Gang violence remains a major problem in Chicago and across the U.S. with gangs handling drug and weapons trafficking and becoming involved in an increasing number of identity thefts. Police struggle to keep up with the problem largely because they have lost control of the territories they patrol. This is not a new phenomenon. The birth of gangs in the U.S. relates to under-policing in certain districts. Instead of paying police for protection out of your tax dollars, you pay gangs for protection. The gangs identify and eliminate potential threats to the community. However, remaining solvent over the years has proven troublesome and the public does not trust the police enough to protect them if they provide information. In terms of hearts and minds, police have lost that battle largely due to abuses committed over the years by Chicago police officers who would have been happier operating out of gangs than within law enforcement. The following are some of the structural problems that allow gangs to thrive in cities.

Hearts and Minds

September 7, 2022

Chicago Contributes 14% of the Nation’s Shootings Over Labor Day

by Law Offices of David L. Freidberg, P.C.

With problems concerning “progressive prosecutors” now a major wedge issue in the political arena, you should expect to hear about the weekly number of shootings and murders in Chicago regularly. Are we really that bad, though? What about NYC and Los Angeles? How many people got killed there over the weekend?

Before we answer that question, it is important to understand that Chicago has its own unique problems and these comparisons are never as useful as they seem. However, it appears that Chicago will win the Labor Day contest as to which city contributed the most casualties to the weekend. In most cases, these attacks will be targeted and gang-related. In some cases, stray bullets will hit unintended targets. In other cases, disputes erupt in public that are solved with bullets.

How are Other Cities Doing With Gun Violence?

September 2, 2022

Teen Commits Nine Carjackings in One Day

by Law Offices of David L. Freidberg, P.C.

Call Guinness; it’s a new record! A South Side teen committed nine carjackings in one day. He has since been charged with 11 carjackings with a deadly weapon and two counts of damaging government property. No one was injured or killed during these carjackings. Instead, it appears to be an effort to commit as many carjackings as possible in as short a period of time as possible. While the carjacker is under 18, he is likely to be charged as an adult and face substantial prison time. His age will be considered a factor when sentencing him, but he will go to prison for these crimes.

Aggravated vehicular hijacking comes with a potential sentence of between four and 15 years. So, figuring this precocious teen will be sentenced toward the minimum because of his age, he still faces 44 years behind bars. That’s not good. Getting your name into Guinness isn’t a big enough payoff to spend the next 44 years of your life behind bars.

Now What?

August 31, 2022

Former High School Dean Charged With Sexual Assault of Student

by Law Offices of David L. Freidberg, P.C.

A former high school dean is facing disturbing charges that he had a sexual relationship with a former student while she was between the ages of 15 and 17. At one point, the dean posed as her stepfather and signed consent papers to have two abortions. The relationship is alleged to have begun in 2013 when the girl was 15. The former dean is accused of contacting the student over Snapchat and then initiating a sexual relationship that lasted for two years. The dean was terminated by the district in 2021 according to the current principal who sent a notice to parents.

The relationship did not come to light until 2021 when the former student filed a police report after the principal attempted to contact her. The victim reported the incident to a teacher in 2015, but the teacher never reported the matter to the police, which why it took six years for charges to be filed against the former dean.

The dean has been charged with criminal sexual assault after police obtained Snapchat messages and the medical consent forms for the two abortions.

August 26, 2022

Ending Cash Bail: What Does it Mean?

by Law Offices of David L. Freidberg, P.C.

While the media may have you believing that ending cash bail means allowing anyone charged with a crime to go free, the matter is not so simple or so haphazardly employed.

Imagine if you are charged with a crime you did not commit based on a witness misidentifying you. You don’t think it can happen to you? Well, it can. Now, if you have money, you just pay your way out of jail and wait for the charges to be dropped because the case is not strong enough. But what if you do not have the money to pay for the bail? You then have a choice. You can either plead guilty to the crime to get the matter settled and be on about your life, or you can fight the charges, stay in jail, and hope the system works the way it is supposed to. Since you have little faith in that happening for you, you end up taking a plea deal to get out of jail. In other words, the poor can be leveraged into plea deals simply to avoid being stuck in jail.

Is that fair? Of course, not. While some folks want to make the rules fairer, others are convinced that society would fall apart if we did not leverage the poor into false confessions based on the deprivation of their freedom.

August 24, 2022

Man Claims Parents Allowed Sexual Contact with Teen; Court Does Not Care

by Law Offices of David L. Freidberg, P.C.

A Chicago man is fighting charges in Iowa after he allegedly had sexual contact with a 15-year-old girl. The man claimed that the parents permitted the sexual contact between him and their daughter and thus should not be charged with a crime. However, consent is not a factor in statutory rape cases, and a parent cannot consent on behalf of a child to permit a crime to be committed against them. A judge informed the defendant of this fact and refused to dismiss charges against him related to unlawful sexual contact.

Age of Consent: How Does it Work?

The vast majority of states do not have a single age of consent but rather age differentials that are considered unlawful. Iowa has an age of consent of 16 which means that anyone over the age of 16 can consent to sex. This girl was 15. However, Iowa’s minimum age is 14 which means that an individual who is 14 years of age or older can consent to have sex with anyone who is within four years of their age. In this case, the defendant was 27 at the time of the alleged unlawful sexual contact, so the statute would not apply to him and the charges would still be actionable.

August 19, 2022

FBI Announces Major Sex Trafficking Sting

by Law Offices of David L. Freidberg, P.C.

The FBI announced an operation to break up a major human trafficking ring. The bust resulted in the liberation of 84 minors, 37 of whom were actively missing children. The average age of the minors was 15 years old, but there were some as young as 11. 141 adults were also among those liberated by police. Authorities have identified 85 suspects accused of involvement in human sex trafficking.

The operation included more than 200 local police departments across the country, FBI specialists including intelligence analysts and forensic interviewers. The partnership included National Center for Missing or Exploited Children (NCMEC). 391 operations were conducted over the course of a two-week period.

More than half of human trafficking victims are minors. More than half of all human trafficking victims were approached on social media sites, dating sites, and online.

August 17, 2022

Serial Scooter Groper Charged with Sexual Assault

by Law Offices of David L. Freidberg, P.C.

Two victims and a coworker have positively identified a man that they say groped them without their consent while riding by on a motorized scooter. The man now faces multiple accounts of aggravated battery, aggravated criminal sexual abuse, and criminal sexual assault. An image of the man had been circulated since August 6. The man was linked to four separate groping incidents, three of which occurred on August 4. The man allegedly groped the buttocks or genitals of women on the street before fleeing the scene. In at least one case, a victim said that there was sexual penetration. The case broke when an image of the man was distributed to the public. A former coworker was the one to identify the suspect.

The suspect has since admitted to groping the women because they were all “wearing something hot.”

Why Did He Think This Was Okay Behavior?

August 12, 2022

What Does a Woke Policing Model Look Like

by Law Offices of David L. Freidberg, P.C.

Are you woke? Are your kids woke? Is it good to be woke? Where does ‘woke’ come from? How do I become woke if I’m not already? What are these kids on about?

Woke is a new front of the culture war and it is essentially a type of rebranded identity politics that criticizes some of the structural problems with governance and policing. While it has serious marketing problems due in large part to troll armies and bad marketing, there are a lot of ideas that need to be looked at and even if they are discarded, being more aware of the problems and learning how to self-crit like these woke people do is not necessarily a bad thing.

In this article, we will take a look at some of the woke reforms that have the Boomers up in arms.

August 10, 2022

Chicago Sets Records for Homicides, Record Low Number of Arrests

by Law Offices of David L. Freidberg, P.C.

In 2021, Chicago set a 25-year record for the number of reported homicides. In 2022, Chicago police are being chastised for making a record low number of arrests. According to recent data, arrests have been made in only 12% of reported cases which is the lowest number since the statistics were first recorded in 2001. Additionally, murders are up a reported 3% since 2020 and sexual assaults have climbed 27%.

What’s going on? Well, the answer, predictably, falls along political lines. Conservatives want to blame “woke reforms” for the lack of arrests while “woke reformers” are blaming the police for “malicious compliance” with newer policies aimed at reducing police interactions.

Going Out There and Not Doing Anything