A day after her acquittal on a DUI charge, Cook County Board of Review Commissioner Samantha Steele said her position of power hurt her more than it helped in the case, and she blasted the Cook County state’s attorney’s office for prosecuting her.
Steele said she felt “justice prevailed” when Judge Donald Suriano ruled Tuesday that the evidence against Steele amounted only to “suspicion of intoxication.”
“The state’s attorney had no real evidence to prosecute the case, but they chose to do that anyway, which is unfortunate for me,” Steele said. “It’s been a difficult year and a half to say the least.”
Instead of prosecuting her, Steele said “what [the state’s attorney’s office] should be doing is taking on ICE and providing people with the true sense of justice.” She echoed others who have called on Cook County’s top prosecutor to charge federal agents involved in aggressive immigration enforcement tactics in Chicago and the suburbs.
Chicago Police arrested Steele after she crashed a car on the North Side in November 2024, and the case against her finally went to trial Monday — weeks after she lost her re-election bid in the March Democratic primary.
The office of State’s Atty. Eileen O’Neill Burke said in a statement that the prosecution of Steele was no different than any other drunk-driving case in the county.
“In this matter, [the state’s attorney’s office] prosecuted the case because we believe the facts and the evidence demonstrated that the defendant violated the law,” according to the statement. “While the court ultimately rendered its verdict, our office remains committed to ensuring that all individuals are treated equally under the law.”
Police body-camera videos showed that Steele repeatedly invoked her position as an elected official at the scene of the crash, and she refused to submit to field sobriety tests. A police officer who responded to the crash alleged she made lewd remarks to him.
In the interview Wednesday, Steele denied making those comments but said she should have spoken in a different manner with the cops than what was shown in the videos.
“I regret the way I treated the officers,” Steele said. “I was shaken up. I was in a car accident, and I was trying to be jovial — which, after watching that, it didn’t come across that way.”
Steele said she did not mean to try to flex clout when she told police that she was a county elected official: “What was going on in my head was that I wanted them to know I knew my rights, and that I was not just someone that didn’t know what was going on.”
Steele’s defense lawyer, John Fotopoulos, said she simply exercised her rights to decline to cooperate.
“Any time you invoke your rights to the Constitution, a lot of times it’s not pretty,” he said. “It’s confrontational at times. Police officers, the government, doesn’t like when citizens invoke their rights.”
Fotopoulos said Chicago police “could have easily gone and requested a judge to issue a search warrant if they actually thought that she was under the influence of alcohol, and had the court order her to submit to blood or urine tests.”
Unlike his client, Fotopoulos did not criticize the state’s attorney’s office for prosecuting the case.
“I have the utmost respect for Eileen O’Neill Burke,” he said. “I think she’s doing a phenomenal job, but I can actually say if Eileen tried it herself, it still would be a ‘not guilty’ with what the evidence was.”
Steele said the long-running DUI case “definitely affected” her re-election bid and she would not totally rule out a political comeback attempt.
But she added, “In the end, I’m not a politician, right? I’m a messy person. I’m a normal person.”
Dan Mihalopoulos is an investigative reporter for WBEZ.