Nine months after the Democratic National Convention swept over Chicago, the city’s law department continues to prosecute ordinance violations leveled at protesters arrested during demonstrations against the war in Gaza.
But the city has little to show for the effort in the way of winning cases at trial or securing meaningful punishments in plea deals.
The harshest punishment the city has secured so far was 10 hours of community service as part of a plea deal, according to the National Lawyers Guild, which is tracking DNC protest-related cases.
Most of the 18 plea deals the city has reached have been settled with no fine and “court supervision” that was immediately terminated, according to the NLG.
In total, 62 cases fell under the city’s purview, with roughly a dozen others being prosecuted by the state. About half of those were dismissed before trial primarily because an officer failed to show up for court, or there wasn’t body-worn camera footage relevant to the arrest, the NLG said. Of the cases that went to trial, the city hasn’t won any — it lost seven, the NLG said, with five others dismissed on the day of trial. Four city cases are pending.
All of these outcomes leave civil rights attorney Amanda Yarusso “baffled” as to why the city has continued to pursue pending cases, particularly on non-violent arrests.
“What is the point of it? It’s been an incredible waste of resources,” said Yarusso, who has represented some of the DNC defendants.
“It’s, as far as we can tell, a refusal to dismiss these cases… I don’t know if it’s at the police department’s insistence, it certainly seems at odds with what we would think that the mayor stands for… But what the result is is both the city and the defendants and the attorneys representing them have had to waste an incredible amount of time and resources on these cases, to what end?”
And as Chicago Police tout their response to the DNC in recent debates over a proposal to issue ad hoc curfews to address teen gatherings, Yarusso called into question whether the department should be granted further enforcement powers.
The city’s law department declined to say how many attorneys are assigned to prosecute DNC cases or quantify the resources spent, including by asking officers to appear in court for the cases that went to trial. The Law Department also declined to say why the city feels it’s important to continue to prosecute the cases.
A spokesperson said the department can’t comment on even the cases that have already been settled, because they might resemble ongoing cases. But the department has noted that the city pursues prosecutions impartially and neutrally.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd Ward, and chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee, said the city and State’s Attorney must prosecute high-level DNC protest cases “especially when there’s evidence to support the charge.” But, he said, if the city is spending resources pursuing lower-level offenses “perhaps we need to raise the bar a little bit higher.”
“If the minor acts are being treated the same way as the major acts, it just dilutes the message,” Hopkins said. “You want to be more selective, and you want to prosecute the more serious violations… We simply don’t have the resources to focus on every single violation. We just don’t have the available staff.”
Overnight detention and confusing court dates
Outside a Cook County courtroom on a recent sunny morning on the West Side, protester Janalene Franklin struggled to understand why the city was fighting to keep her case alive.
Franklin was arrested amid the breach of a security perimeter on the first day of the DNC, but claims she was swept up by police nearby the chaos and wasn’t involved in breaking through the fence. Police accuse Franklin of refusing to obey orders to leave the restricted area multiple times, according to an incident report.
Franklin said she was separated from her 10-year-old son, who was at his first-ever protest and held a sign that read “I’m a child. I hope I matter.”
Franklin said she spent the night handcuffed at a police station. After she was released, she said the city gave her wrong information on her court date and even her attorneys couldn’t figure out the right place for her to show up.
The city initially won the case by default due to her absence. But a judge later overturned that judgement, siding with Franklin. Now, the city is fighting that decision, Franklin’s attorney said.
“We literally don’t got nothing else better to do with our time? I stay on the South Side of Chicago — you know what they say in our neighborhoods when the summertime’s coming? That’s when we know babies are dying,” Franklin said. “I got a whole lot I could be doing with my time instead of at court for this where you want to dredge this up. I thought this was just gonna be actually thrown out, I was gonna be able to heal from it, walk away.”
Retired doctor Charles Steinbruegge is in a similar situation — except he says he wasn’t even protesting.
Steinbruegge made news headlines during the protests when he got arrested in his “skimpy little” bike shorts after taking a ride from his Lakeview home to peruse the area, he said out of curiosity. He was arrested for trespassing by a Homeland Security officer who passed him over to Chicago Police. Police accused Steinbruegge of ignoring signs deeming the area off-limits and refusing to leave despite multiple police orders. He spent the night in jail and was released at 4 a.m.
But he says the city failed to give him or his attorneys the proper hearing information, too. He spent “hours and hours” driving around to multiple county courthouses and municipal buildings looking for his court hearing to no avail, and lost his case by default.
Parking receipts at all of the stops he made trying to find his hearing helped bolster his case and a judge ruled in his favor. The city is now fighting to overturn that decision.
“It’s ridiculous,” Steinbruegge said outside a county courthouse after his most recent status hearing. “I’m sure they’re trying to make it seem like they’re not too soft on crime or whatever. Because the ‘blue city’ has a bad reputation, so they’re probably trying to beef up their credentials. But it’s just a complete waste of money especially for people who were really doing nothing violent.”
At least six people were charged with more serious and in some cases violent felonies during protests at the DNC — which featured tens of thousands of others protesting peacefully, in harmony with police, for days. Those cases are being handled by Cook County prosecutors.
Five of the felony cases are still playing out in court, including that of a person accused of throwing a bottle of liquid at a police officer, the National Lawyers Guild said.
One person charged with aggravated battery of a police officer pleaded guilty. That person, who was not represented by the NLG, rammed into an officer with his head down and struck him in the stomach, and grabbed another officer by the legs at the same time, causing the officer to hit their head on the ground, according to the arrest report.
Their plea deal included dropping felony charges and sticking with a misdemeanor charge instead, and the punishment was time served for being on electronic monitoring as the case played out, the NLG said.
Photographers pulled into the fray
The cases that have been dismissed pretrial include three photojournalists, but only after a fight.
Olga Fedorova was on assignment for a wire service called European Pressphoto Agency when she was arrested. Fedorova said her CPD-issued press credential was confiscated as she was attempting to photograph a person being carried away by their hands and feet by police.
Like dozens others, Fedorova was charged with disorderly conduct for failure to obey a police order, a violation that carries no jail time, according to the city’s municipal code. But she said she was placed in a dark van with protesters for hours before being transported to a police station cell where she spent the night.
“There’s no sleeping in that cell whatsoever. It’s just like a stinky, disgusting place where there’s no food, there’s no shower,” Fedorova said.
Fedorova was able to get her press credentials back shortly after. But it wasn’t until a couple months later before the city dropped the charges against her, she said. In one case, she had bought a flight to come back to Chicago for a hearing, only to learn a day or two before that it would be on Zoom.
Charges against photojournalist Sinna Nasseri also lagged for months, according to a lawyer who worked on the case. After numerous delays, a judge ordered the lead prosecutor to appear at court. At that point, the city decided to no longer pursue prosecution. The case against photojournalist Josh Pacheco has also been dismissed.
Cases lost at trial
All cases that the city lost at trial stemmed from the most contentious protest of the DNC, with the most clashes between the provocative group Behind Enemy Lines, and the police.
That’s where the vast majority of the arrests took place, of mostly white people who hailed from outside Chicago — from Barrington to Willimantic, Conn., according to arrest records. The group was separate from the larger Palestinian-led marches that took place near the United Center, where Franklin and Steinbruegge were arrested.
In the lead up to the Behind Enemy Lines protest, organizers promised clashes with police and criticized other protest leaders for coordinating with police to avoid conflicts.
At the Behind Enemy Lines protest, demonstrators tried to push past a line of police officers, leading to violent skirmishes. In one of the trials, the judge noted that police were pushing and hitting people with batons, based on body worn camera footage presented at trial, the NLG said.
Still, police allowed the protest to continue for hours after that as people marched to different locations. Eventually, blocks away from the initial chaos of the night, police said they started issuing dispersal orders in earnest.
The National Lawyers Guild argued that by that time, people were cornered into an area between a building and a line of police where it was difficult or impossible to leave, nor did people know that they had to. In several cases that went to trial from the protest, a judge agreed.
“The City has not provided even by the low, low, low burden of more likely than not that there was any evidence that Mr. Orta, with a crowd of 75 to 100 people, loudspeakers, drums, police officers, sirens that he could have possibly heard the dispersal order,” Cook County Judge Peter Gonzalez said in one of his rulings, according to court transcripts.
“There is no specific instructions given to the defendant on what to do or where to go or what the consequences would be if he failed to abide by those.”
In another case, Gonzalez called out the city for pursuing prosecution on a case with “insufficient evidence.”
“There’s a reason why the State didn’t pursue these charges and put this burden upon the City. It is because the State sees it the same way this Court sees it. There was insufficient evidence, really, none, that the second [dispersal] order was actually heard,” Gonzalez said.
“There was just a lack of preparation on this case… The government bears a high burden of proof… This is the first amendment. People have a right to protest.”
After his verdict, city attorney Marianna Kiselev responded “Unbelievable,” which the court had stricken from the record, according to the transcripts.
One woman who was charged with disorderly conduct for failing to disperse has had to fly in and out from California for the trial. She asked not to be named because the case against her has led to missed job opportunities.
“I was trying to become a substitute teacher, and I was for some weeks a substitute teacher, but the California Teacher Credentialing commission stopped my credential application until the case was resolved… That’s like 1000s of dollars of lost earnings because of this,” she said on the day her case was dismissed at trial because the officer involved did not show up.
Her last flight to Chicago was on May 1, when her case was dismissed at trial after the officer set to testify skipped court in order to cover May Day protests.
Yarusso, the civil rights attorney, said the city has repeatedly lost at trial because they have, at times, struggled to find officers who have firsthand knowledge of the charge against a protester due to how the arrests were made. As officers were trying to clear the scene, she said, they would apprehend someone in the crowd, essentially pass them back through rows of officers, and then that last line of defense — far removed from the initial apprehension — would be tasked with placing the handcuffs and filling out the paperwork.
“So the listed arresting officer didn’t actually witness whatever the alleged conduct was that justified the arrest. And you can see on [body-worn camera] like, ‘What [charge] should we put down for this person?’ and ‘Just put this,’ — just really them guessing at what to say our clients are being arrested for,” she said.
A model, or not, for mass teen gatherings
After the DNC ended, the city wasted no time getting to its victory lap. The City Council passed a resolution to tout the convention’s success and thank volunteers, staff and police officers for their integral role. And for the vast majority of people — tens of thousands of attendees, protesters, and journalists — that likely rings true.
Most recently, a CPD official raised the success of the DNC at a hearing on a proposal to allow police to issue a three-hour curfew anywhere, anytime throughout the city. CPD Chief of Patrol Jon Heim told council members that the DNC proves that CPD can disperse teens subject to a curfew “constitutionally.”
Yarusso bristled when she saw the comments.
“My thought was: ‘Hmm, our experience does not reflect that, specifically at the DNC where the dispersal orders weren’t given properly, where people weren’t able to hear them, and then were arrested anyway,” she said.
“Whether they disperse a group of teens, gathering, socializing, whatever other activity might be occurring, they’d presumably be doing it in the same way… and I don’t have confidence that they’re going to do that constitutionally or correctly or fairly or equitably or properly according to their own procedures, because of what we’ve seen.”
Hopkins, lead sponsor of the curfew proposal, said the opinion that police would arrest teens for curfew violations as they have DNC protesters is “misinformed.”
“CPD does not make arrests for curfew violations. The minors are taken into protective custody, held until they can be released to a responsible parent or guardian. They are not booked or charged,” Hopkins said.
Mariah Woelfel covers city government and politics for WBEZ.