These “are not ordinary times at the Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse” in Chicago’s Loop.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Fuentes made that point Thursday, as he closed the book on the last of five now-dismissed prosecutions tied to September protests outside a federal immigration holding facility in the western suburbs.
Fuentes used a nine-page opinion not only to dismiss, with prejudice, a misdemeanor charge against Dana Briggs, but to highlight how each of those five cases, all tied to Operation Midway Blitz, “were highly unusual in this district for several reasons.”
“The court cannot help but note just how unusual and possibly unprecedented it is for the U.S. attorney’s office in this district to charge so hastily that it either could not obtain the indictment in the grand jury or was forced to dismiss upon a conclusion that the case is not provable, in repeated cases of a similar nature,” Fuentes wrote.
The five people charged in connection with the Sept. 27 protests were Briggs, Ray Collins, Jocelyne Robledo, Paul Ivery and Luci Mazur. Prosecutors wound up dropping charges that had been brought against all five, for various reasons.
Fuentes pointed out that, in the case of Collins and Robledo, a grand jury refused to hand up an indictment, a result known as a “no bill.” Not only that, but a prosecutor acknowledged the same thing happened in an additional case, which he did not identify.
“A ‘no bill’ vote by a grand jury was virtually unheard of in this district until Operation Midway Blitz,” Fuentes wrote Thursday. “The last and only one the court can remember was from the early part of this century. Then, in the past two months, at least three have occurred.”
In each of the five cases, Fuentes pointed out, he obtained sworn statements that “not only were the affidavit allegations true, but that video evidence of the encounters existed, that the affiants had reviewed the video evidence, and that the video evidence corroborated the version of events set forth in the affidavits.”
He pointed to the ruling last month by U.S. District Judge April Perry, questioning federal agents’ “ability to accurately assess the facts.” He noted that Briggs had U.S. Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino on his witness list — and that U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis found he “lied multiple times about the events that occurred in Little Village.”
Fuentes called these “extraordinary judicial determinations.”
And, he made clear that “being charged with a federal felony, even if it is later reduced to a misdemeanor, is no walk in the park.”
“Any responsible federal prosecutor knows this,” Fuentes wrote. “Any responsible federal prosecutor knows that federal charges, or any actions by the United States attorney directed at the citizenry, must be undertaken with the utmost care.”
Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, said Thursday that “the U.S. attorney’s office is constantly evaluating new facts and information relating to cases and investigations arising out of Operation Midway Blitz … This continuous review process applies to all matters — whether charged or under investigation.”
Fuentes has been a magistrate judge for more than six years, following a 20-year career at Jenner & Block. He also once worked as a federal prosecutor and a Chicago news reporter. He noted that, “these are not ordinary times at the Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse.”
The judge wrote that nothing in his Thursday order “should be construed as scolding the government for dismissing in these cases. Dismissing appears to be the responsible thing for the government to have done.”
“Today the court stops short of concluding that the government struck any foul blows,” Fuentes wrote. “But in charging Briggs, it sought to strike hard blows. It swung and missed — multiple times.”
Fuentes concluded by noting that “doing the right thing has been a mantra of the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office for generations.”
“Let it remain so.”