Prairie State Wire

Chicago Morning Answer host Dan Proft noted the crimes under which criminals will be allowed to be charged with and released after the SAFE-T Act goes into effect.

“In point of fact, under the SAFE-T Act, non-detainable offenses would include – by non-detainable meaning you're released – burglary, robbery, arson, kidnaping, second-degree murder, intimidation, aggravated battery, aggravated DUI, aggravated fleeing, eluding drug offenses, drug induced homicide and threatening a public official,” Proft said on his Aug. 5 broadcast of Chicago’s Morning Answer on AM 560.

Proft spoke with Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow regarding how a man plotting to assimilate Glasgow would have been treated if the SAFE-T Act would have been in effect.  

DuPage County State's Attorney Bob Berlin | DuPage County State's Attorney

“Jim, I know you've made this point, and so I'd like you to make it just to make this concrete. When Drew Peterson, you know, was plotting to assassinate you – and under this law, if he hadn't been in prison, he wouldn't be in prison,” Proft said.

Glasgow said the murder trial he undertook with Peterson was difficult and would have been made worse – and possibly deadly for him – if the accused had been free.

“If you go back to his murder trial, he was in jail for three years on a $20 million bond,” Glasgow said. “That's the most difficult prosecution I've ever handled. And there's no way in the world that I would have weathered that storm had he been out of jail. In fact, on the overhear when he was captured by the FBI, when they were discussing my murder, he said if he was out on the street, he'd take care of it himself. And then he referenced back to '07 when it all started that he was going to take care of it then but he couldn't slip the media and the police. So there's real danger at all levels here when violent offenders cannot be held.”

Proft also spoke with DuPage County State’s Attorney Bob Berlin on the program.

“Heightened standards had seen the shifting standard on things like use of deadly force under this law,” Proft said. 

Berlin said under the new law, officers have to evaluate the entire situation before acting.

“Yeah, they did change the law. And when a police officer can use deadly force under the new law, officers now have to evaluate each situation in light of the totality of the circumstances. In each case, which includes proximity in time to the use of force, to the commission of a force of a felony, and the reasonable feasibility of safely apprehending the subject at a later time. So in any emergency situation, a split second decision, an officer has to be thinking, am I able to reasonably apprehend this person at a later date?” Berlin said.

In his highly publicized resignation letter James Murphy III, a former office manager for Cook County State Attorney Km Foxx, criticized the SAFE-T Act, which would take effect on Jan. 1, 2023 for removing cash bail from criminal cases.

The prosecution has the burden of proof under the SAFE-T Act if they think a person accused of a crime should be kept in jail. Detention is only permitted under the law if it is proven that the defendant "poses a specific, real and present threat to a person or has a high likelihood of willful flight."

“I have been thinking about leaving for a while now. Really, the thoughts began back in January of 2021, when the 'SAFE-T Act' was passed,” Murphy said in the letter, according to CWB Chicago. “Seeing this administration’s involvement in that process was an eye-opening experience for me. To be clear, I am in support of eliminating cash bail – no person should sit in jail solely because they can’t afford to pay for bail. But I never understood the rush on an issue that was so important. I voiced my concerns at the time. And it was in that process that I began to realize that the administration’s ‘Mission Vision and Values’ was just a PR stunt, just words on a page. Fairness. Accountability. Integrity. Respect. Collaboration. Those words should mean something. They do to me. And I know that they do to you as well. Yet time after time after time this administration has shown that they don’t live the meaning of those words. Or they don’t care.”

Several are advocating the General Assembly take another swipe at the legislation.

"This January, if nothing is done, mayhem will ensue across Illinois as alleged perpetrators held in pre-trial confinement for crimes from petty theft all the way up to murder will be let out of jail everywhere," Mike Koolidge, a spokesman for the Political Action Committee People Who Play By the Rules, said, Prairie State Wire reported. "Any respectable legislator and state's attorneys who doesn't do something about this before then will have blood on their hands, the least of which being the man who signed this catastrophic bill into law, Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker.”

Glasgow has declared that the violence is likely to get worse with the forthcoming implementation of statewide cashless bail under the SAFE-T Act, Will County Gazette reported.

Even those charged with the most serious crimes can be released on bail, according to the bill, without having to deposit a monetary bond.

“A murderer who was on an ankle bracelet in the city of Chicago killed the person that was the eyewitness against him in the first murder," Glasgow noted regarding a recent case of an alleged cashless bail case in Chicago.