How Illinois Poses a Grave Threat to the American Republic

Part I of II

In a courtroom far enough away from Chicago to be somewhat legitimate, two courageous attorneys presented a legal theory questioning whether the government of the State of Illinois continues to function under the authority of the United States Constitution.

Attorneys Maria McCarthy and Fabio Valentini have called into question whether the three branches of government in Illinois are undermined by political radicals in violation of the Constitution. The argument advanced by McCarthy and Valentini in a Will County courtroom is a powerful message that they not only believe their client, Kriston Kato, is innocent of charges Kato coerced confessions from murder suspects over his long and storied career as a Chicago Police detective, but the legal panel that led to many of the allegations against Kato was the result of the Illinois General Assembly (IGA) creating an illegal commission.

In a motion on behalf of Kato, McCarthy and Valentini posed the pointed question of whether Illinois abandoned a constitutional government framework with the creation of a little-known state agency, the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC), which granted the authority of unelected commissioners the right to overturn criminal convictions in Chicago.

Will County Judge David Carlson declined to declare TIRC constitutional or not. That, Carlson announced, may be debated in other judicial venues. It could conceivably end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, but the mere fact TIRC was created in 2009 and is only recently being challenged in courts reveals clearly that both Chicago and Illinois have become renegade legal and political outposts in the larger federal landscape. Here’s what Carlson said:

“The act itself skirts very closely to the edge of constitutionality…It also calls into question whether or not the TIRC statute in and of itself impugns the integrity of the judicial system of the third branch of government.”

It sure does. Since its creation, a collection of TIRC commissioners, many of whom are prominent members of the anti-police movement with deep roots in Chicago, have overturned one murder conviction after another even though the offenders have exhausted all their appeals and post-conviction hearings.

Meeting regularly in obscure locations, the members of TIRC — handpicked by the state’s notoriously corrupt governors — have been granted the authority to upend the entire process by which criminals are investigated, tried, convicted, and imprisoned under the judicial process enshrined in the Constitution.

TIRC’s ability to overturn convictions is only part of the damage it inflicts upon one of the nation’s most crime-ridden cities and corrupt state governments. By justifying their rulings on the subjective, biased, and largely evidentiary baseless claim that accused officers are the target of numerous complaints, TIRC turns rumor mongering and media manufactured lies into powerful forces in the demise of the justice system. By allowing corrupt governors like George Ryan and Pat Quinn to appoint the members of TIRC, anti-police zealots with dubious backgrounds find their way into paid positions that allow them to reject the legitimate rulings of juries and judges.

TIRC also paves the way for bankrupting the city and state by enriching the anti-police movement through subsequent civil actions against accused officers. Toss into this mix an inept prosecutor, Kim Foxx, who has declared her office an advocate of the exoneration movement from the moment she was sworn in, and you have a legal and political system wholly overtaken in a bloodless coup.

TIRC, therefore, stands as a shining success story of transformation by 1960s and 70s radicals who once worked outside the system -- by taking to the streets and building bombs -- into working within the system. Now in a position of power, they abscond institutions like public sector unions into political action committees, pushing radical elected officials under the guise of "social justice warriors" to create commissions like TIRC.

All too late in seeing this strategy and confronting it, conservatives are finally getting the picture. In a recent excerpt from a book in the The Federalist entitled The Secret To Marxism’s Success? Slowly Infiltrating Existing Structures, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz describes the tactics adopted by an Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci:

"According to Gramsci, the only way to truly change society was not by violent revolution, but by infiltrating the institutions that make Western society unique. If Marxists could get inside the universities, for instance, where knowledge is effectively “made,” or get jobs at publishing houses, which were the main avenues through which ideas were distributed at the time, they might be able to change the ways people thought in subtle ways, rather than having to resort to the kind of outward revolution that Karl Marx had planned on."

Yes, Ted. It’s called Chicago.

‍Origins: A Bright Shining Lie

TIRC was given life through one of the biggest media frauds in the history of the state. By 2009 the mythology that former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and his men regularly tortured African Americans into confessing to murders was media orthodoxy. Nevertheless, lacking in this mythology was a criminal conviction against Burge. In one of the earliest signs that the media had been bought and sold in Chicago, a criminal case was built against Burge claiming he lied in the course of a civil lawsuit brought by Madison Hobley, once convicted of killing seven people in a horrific arson that left more than a dozen others badly hurt.

Up until that criminal charge, the accusations against Burge were widely and heatedly debated among police, media, prosecutors, and citizens. Following Burge’s conviction, attacks against anyone who questioned the validity of a Burge accusation led to allegations of racism. This became one of the earliest instances in which the race card was played as a form of censorship.

The fact that many claims against Burge detectives by white activists and attorneys were blatantly false, and likely returned vicious killers back into minority communities, is never entered into any dialogue about racism within the city and state.

Regardless of the accusations against Burge, Madison Hobley’s exoneration was itself a stunning glimpse into the depravity of the left in Chicago and the lengths the media would go to drum up cases against police.

For whatever opinion on the spectrum of Burge accusations one might hold, the evidence that Madison Hobley was guilty of arson was overwhelming. In a reflection of how the process of determining guilt and punishment would be transferred to unconstitutional bodies aided by a corrupt media through the covert hijacking of the judiciary, no judicial body ever ruled in any form whatsoever that Hobley was innocent. Hobley only gained his freedom through a corrupt governor, George Ryan, who used the Burge mythology to pardon four convicted killers from prison, the worst of them being Hobley. Ryan did so shortly before he was sentenced to prison on 21 counts of corruption.

In a rare moment of candor and insight into what was forming in Illinois, former Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Devine attacked Ryan’s decision to set Hobley free. From the New York Times:

“Richard A. Devine, the Cook County state's attorney, issued a statement this afternoon calling the pardons ‘outrageous and unconscionable.’”

“These cases against these men are still before our courts, and it is the courts that should decide the issues in these cases,’ Mr. Devine said, referring to pending appeals. ‘By his actions today the governor has breached faith with the memory of the dead victims, their families and the people he was elected to serve.’”‍

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It was Hobley’s subsequent lawsuit against Burge that ultimately paved the way for Burge's criminal conviction, suggesting that the left in Chicago had so degenerated from the form of government conceived by America's founding fathers that a man who was convicted of setting his own family and five others on fire was the foundation to obtain criminal charges against a high ranking Chicago Police official.

While the Burge accusations and his conviction are the fuel of the contemporary radical left’s war on police in Chicago, the Hobley case is a window into the heart of the left. Rest assured no TIRC commissioner has ever brought up evidence Hobley should not have walked out of prison through the machinations of a corrupt public official kowtowing to a rabid media. And these unqualified, biased, self-aggrandizing leaches of Chicago’s deep state know they are free from being confronted by the media, because the media is on their side and, in Chicago, one hand always dirties the other.

The evidence that Hobley and scores of other “exonerations” are little more than fables invented by a deranged press is carefully protected in a dance of deceit between TIRC and the city’s scribes and broadcasters. And so TIRC plods on, a Frankenstein monster eroding a supposed republic governed by three branches of government checking and balancing each other.

Few are willing to stand up to its destructive force upon the city, county, state, and country, apart from attorneys named Maria McCarthy and Fabio Valentini in a municipality far from the crooked city of Chicago.

Which brings us to the next chapter of the TIRC threat: Who and why few, if any, entities in the city and state are willing to fight TIRC.

To be continued...