By now, the Cook County state's attorney's office is accustomed to the withering critiques of reporters, pundits and activists with their crusading attorneys. We challenge the prosecutors' commitment to truth — not just locally but in many such offices across the state, where victory and vengeance seem to take priority over justice for the accused. We accuse them of seeing themselves as adversaries of the defendants rather than advocates for accuracy and fairness, which they ought to be given the enormous power they have over the lives of individuals. And we are accustomed to them sloughing us off or shrugging in sulky defiance even after we reveal grotesque wrongful convictions they've perpetrated. But now the withering critique is coming from inside the office. Or, rather, from someone formerly inside the office — Sonia Antolec, who resigned Aug. 1 as an assistant Cook County state's attorney. Antolec has since delivered several broadsides at leaders of the office, headed by Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, suggesting that politics and public relations are interfering with proper prosecution.



The back story: In late March, a group of teen girls was arrested and charged in a mugging that had taken place on a Red Line CTA train. Antolec was assigned to the case.



"We subpoenaed video evidence," she said in an extraordinary interview last week on WTTW-Ch. 11's "Chicago Tonight" program (embedded and partially transcribed here) "We subpoenaed police records. We called the victims and the witnesses and spoke to them. And there were some red flags that were raised after our investigations."



One red flag? The victim told Antolec that the police conducted their suspect identification lineup with the subjects facing a wall, away from the victim, she said.



Police have denied this allegation.



Another? The images on the grainy surveillance video of the crime caused Antolec to believe that police might have arrested the wrong people. She said she and a supervisor, "zoomed in on the girls. We did enlargements. And we could not match any of the three girls that were on the video to any of the girls that had been arrested."



Antolec said that, in consultation with her supervisor, she elected to drop the case just before it was scheduled to go to trial last month.



About a week later, she said, office higher-ups called her into several meetings, accused her of not following protocol by informing her supervisor of her decision on the day she acted on it, suspended her for three days without pay and demoted her.



"My supervisor was aware of all of the flaws (in the case)," she told WTTW's Carol Marin. "My supervisor was aware what was going to ultimately happen with the case. No one (in the state's attorney's office) has ever said" that there was enough evidence in the case to go forward.



"I specifically asked if I made the right judgment call, and I was told, "Yes you dismissed unprovable cases."



Did she follow proper procedure?



"The first and foremost procedure is that you don't proceed on a case that you cannot prove and that you don't have a good-faith basis for proceeding on," Antolec said.



So rather than accept the suspension and demotion, she quit.



"I couldn't work for an office that no longer encouraged me to do the right thing," she said. "My (12-year-old) son, when he was younger and when I started the job, he asked me if I wore a cape to work because I do what Batman does, and he wears a cape to work. That's what this job meant to me. I was upholding justice. I was seeking justice. It wasn't about convictions, it was about justice."



She added, "While these cases are very important and of the utmost importance, and public safety is of the utmost importance, so are children's rights and so are defendants' rights. ... And so is a prosecutor's oath.



"And when I can no longer walk into work knowing that someone will respect me or stand up for me when I make the right decision, and in fact I'm being punished for making the right decision, that's an employer that I can no longer work for."



Considering the source, it's as damning an assessment of the integrity of the Cook County state's attorney's office as I've ever heard.



A spokeswoman for Alvarez released a response to the Sun-Times, which broke this story, saying only that "clearly defined office policies and procedures were not followed in the manner in which these cases were handled" and that "the law does not permit us to comment beyond that."



Such sticklers!



But the proof will be not in their words but in their actions; whether prosecutors demonstrate that Antolec erred by having the state's attorney's office reinstate the charges — the law does permit the office to do that — and convicting the defendants at trial.



I asked the office about this possibility.



"We are currently evaluating our options as to reinstating charges in some or all of the cases that you inquire about," the spokeswoman replied in a written response. "However, Ms. Antolec's extra-judicial comments in the media regarding the weight of the evidence in these cases may preclude us from being able to do so."



In the court of public opinion, perhaps. But in a court of law, "Antolec's extra-judicial comments in the media" aren't evidence and they aren't admissible.



If the witness ID is solid, as police say, and Antolec's interpretation of the surveillance video is errant, as her suspension and demotion suggested, then oyez, oyez! Bring it on.



But if they don't have a case — if they never had a case — they should say so.



If they admitted it when they were wrong now and then, it would spare the rest of us some trouble.

--------------

Carol Marin wrote a column for the Sunday Sun-Times based on the interview: ‘Heater’ case couldn’t wilt lawyer

Alvarez’s office does not dispute problems with the evidence. What the office does dispute is whether Antolec observed proper protocol in getting the upper echelons of the office to agree to dismiss.



“Whether these cases are bad or not is beside the point,” Alvarez chief of staff Dan Kirk told me Friday. “You have to go through procedures.”



Kirk added that he’s just learned Antolec had been looking for another job before this whole controversy blew up.



Can’t say as I blame her.

What's still missing from Team Anita is a specific explanation of what the "procedures" were and how egregious Antoloc's alleged failure to follow them was. The idea that "the law" does not permit the office to comment beyond the vague assertions they've already made raises yet another question: What "law" are they talking about? What "law" forbids a public official or group of public employees who are attacked from responding with factual information? Did they break that supposed "law" by telling Marin that they'd learned Antolec was looking for another job and thereby implying that she invented the entire controversy?

I'll forward that question to them as well.



