Law & Order column: Former Lake County prosecutor honored
Perillo, 70, who recently retired after 42 years in the practice of law, was given the award during a March 18 ceremony. Lake County judges Michael Nerheim and Patricia Fix nominated him.
The award goes to a former prosecutor, 'who has distinguished himself in public service and whose commitment to justice and serving the communities where he lives is particularly praiseworthy.'
Perillo's law career began as an active-duty judge advocate general attorney in the 1980s while serving in the U.S. Navy. He later served as a special public defender and special assistant state's attorney in Lake County before entering private practice in 1992.
'I am exceptionally honored to have received this award from the Lake County Bar Association and cannot thank Judge Nerheim and Judge Fix enough for putting me up for this award,' Perillo said. 'Without question, Robert H. Jackson is an inspiration to those of us who practiced as prosecuting attorneys. This award will always be very special to me, and the fact that the award is named in honor of Justice Jackson makes it all the more special.'
Jackson was a former associate justice of the Supreme Court who served as the chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg trials following World War II.
Subdued with Taser
A Mundelein man is facing drug and weapons charges after Lake County sheriff's deputies said they found a stolen firearm in his possession during a traffic stop.
The sheriff's office Special Investigations Group said it stopped Benjamin Rodriguez, 29, of the 900 block of Stratford Lane, on March 27 on Illinois Route 83 in Mundelein.
Police said they saw controlled substances in plain sight on Rodríguez's face and on the driver's seat. After exiting his vehicle, he became combative and attempted to re-enter his car, police said
Officers used a Taser to subdue Rodriguez, and found a loaded handgun in the front waistband of his pants. They also found several packets of suspected fentanyl in his pockets, police said.
Two officers were exposed to an airborne powder during the incident and were treated at a hospital for possible fentanyl exposure.
Zion first responders recognized
Zion recognized firefighters and police officers recently for their brave and meritorious actions in two different instances.
Officers Conor Lima and Dante Burchfield were cited for aiding a woman during a house fire in October. Lima located a woman in a nearby residence who was suffering from smoke inhalation and was able to help her out of her house. The woman collapsed and Burchfield stepped in to help her and Lima, who was also suffering from smoke inhalation.
Officers Haley Pacholsky and Tai Coggins and Fire Lt. Nicholas Urbanik were recognized for their efforts to help an elderly man during a January call. The man was destitute and living in poor conditions, including a non-working furnace.
The officers bought the man a meal and convinced him to seek medical help. While firefighters were assessing the man's condition, Urbanik repaired the man's furnace.
Dangerous game
Antioch police are warning that a game called 'Senior Assassin' could have some potentially dangerous outcomes.
In the game, students target fellow students for 'assassination' by stalking them and shooting them with water guns.
Police said that residents may mistake students for actual armed subjects, leading to unwarranted calls to police. The situation could become dangerous should police or armed citizens think that the students are armed with actual firearms.
There are also potential legal issues; participants could face charges for things like disorderly conduct or even aggravated assault in certain situations.
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Vox
36 minutes ago
- Vox
The real reason Trump's DC takeover is scary
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. Depending on who you listen to, President Donald Trump's decision to seize control over law enforcement in Washington, DC, is either an authoritarian menace or a farce. The authoritarian menace case is straightforward: Trump is (again) asserting the power to deploy the National Guard to a major US city, while adding the new wrinkle of federalizing the local police force based on a wholly made-up emergency. He is, political scientist Barbara Walter warns, 'building the machinery of repression before it's needed,' getting the tools to violently shut down big protests 'in place before the next election.' The farce case focuses less on these broad fears and more on the actual way it has played out. Instead of nabbing DC residents who oppose the president, federal agents appear to be aimlessly strolling the streets in safe touristy areas like Georgetown or the National Mall. During a pointless Sunday night deployment to the U Street corridor, a popular nightlife area, they faced down the terrifying threat of a drunk man throwing a sandwich. 'This ostensible show of strength is more like an admission of weakness,' The Atlantic's Quinta Jurecic writes. 'It is the behavior of a bully: very bad for the people it touches, but not a likely prelude to full authoritarian takeover.' So who's right? In a sense, both of them. Trump's show of force in DC is both cartoonish and ominous, farcical and dangerous. It serves to normalize abuses of power that could very well be expanded — in fact, that Trump himself is openly promising to try it out in other cities. However, both the DC deployment and Trump's prior National Guard misadventure in Los Angeles show that it's actually quite hard to create effective tools of domestic repression. Executing on his threats requires a level of legal and tactical acumen that it's not obvious the Trump administration possesses. Or, put differently: The power they're claiming is scary in the abstract, but the way they're currently wielding it is too incompetent to do meaningful damage to democracy. The key question going forward — not just for DC, but the nation — is whether they get better with practice. The DC crackdown has been impotent so far Carl Schmitt, a reactionary German legal theorist who would later become a Nazi jurist, famously claimed that emergency powers create an insuperable problem for the liberal-democratic ideal of the rule of law. In theory, the law can limit how and when a person in government can wield emergency powers. But in practice, it all comes down to who has the power to give those words meaning. Who says what an emergency is, and when it ends? That person, and not the legal text or its underlying intent, is what determines what the law means — and thus has the real power. Schmitt expressed this idea in a famous dictum: 'Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.' And while Trump has surely never heard of Schmitt, let alone read him, this is basically the way his administration has operated. On issues ranging from trade to federalizing DC law enforcement, Trump has decided that ordinary problems — job losses from trade, crime — are emergencies that justify him invoking powers designed for times of war, natural disaster, or rebellion. And so far, he's mostly gotten away with it. His federalization of DC will test the limits of Trump's Schmittian approach. By law, Trump's emergency power only allows him to federalize control over city police — the Metropolitan Police Department, or MPD — for 30 days. And federal agents, be they National Guard or the DEA or Homeland Security, have circumscribed legal responsibilities and personnel limitations that prevent them from fully replacing MPD as ultimate authority in the capital city. This is the first thing to watch in DC: Will Trump go full Schmitt, and simply declare that these constraints on his power are moot? And if so, who — if anyone — will try and stop him? It's important to emphasize that we don't know the answers to these questions. While Trump has claimed the power to maintain federal control over MPD beyond the 30-day limit, Trump is constantly claiming all sorts of things that aren't true. It is entirely possible that, next month, MPD reverts to local control with basically no long-term ill effects. But even if Trump does defy a court order to release the MPD back to DC, or otherwise maintain some kind of long-term federal presence on the streets of DC, there's a question of what exactly he is accomplishing. Here, we have to separate damage to democracy from other concrete harms. Trump's crackdown may already be producing unjust arrests of many unhoused people in DC. That is bad and worthy of condemnation. Such arrests do not, however, help Trump consolidate the kind of controls a would-be dictator wants from law enforcement: the ability to suppress critical speech and opposition political activity through force of arms. The mere fact that federal troops are on the street, or that MPD is technically under federal control, does not mean that they're arresting Democrats or raiding the Washington Post or opening fire on protesters. Of course, the fact that something isn't yet happening doesn't mean it won't. But the current deployments, for all their fascist aesthetics, are quite far from that — in fact, they appear to be doing a lot of impotent, haphazard traffic stops. In the U Street area, home to mixed populations of longtime residents and more recent gentrifiers, locals have confronted the cops and jeered at them — with no reports of serious retaliatory injury. Trump is doing something that has an authoritarian intent and appearance that galvanizes resistance, without any kind of plan for turning it into an effective repressive tool. One could tell a similar story about the National Guard deployment to LA. Back then, Trump sent in the troops with a big show, claiming they were necessary to get (overhyped) riots under control. In reality, they showed up and went on a few drug and immigration raids, and then almost all of them quietly slinked off without scaring the LA population into political submission. Courts are currently hearing arguments on the deployment's legality. Ad hoc authoritarianism None of this is to say that Trump's deployments are harmless. As Walter points out, he is creating legal and political precedents that could — at least in theory — be used toward repressive ends if they so desire. If Trump does something to mess with the fairness of the midterm elections, and large cities erupt with protest, he's already somewhat normalized a militarized response. From a health-of-democracy standpoint, then, what's worrying about recent events in DC is not the developments on the ground. It's the precedent they set — the powers that Trump is claiming that could be all too easily abused. The question is whether such abuse will occur. So far, there is very little evidence that the Trump administration has anything like a systematic plan for suborning American democracy. He isn't doing what someone like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán did in 2010 — come in with a blueprint for destroying the political opposition and executing on it as efficiently as possible. Rather, he's simply asserting powers whenever it's convenient to do what he wants to do at the moment. Can't get Congress to raise tariffs? Use emergency powers to impose them. Want to impose an unconstitutional export tax on Nvidia? Just make an extortionate 'deal' with its CEO. Want to stop seeing images of protesters with Mexican flags in LA? Send in the National Guard. To be clear: This ad hoc authoritarianism is still dangerous. It's just comparatively less effective than its deliberate cousin. Trump hasn't silenced the Democratic opposition or the American press or shuttered civil rights groups. He's taken steps in all of those directions, but they fit the ad hoc pattern: each troubling, but not (yet!) systematic or successful enough to fundamentally compromise the fairness of elections or Americans' rights to dissent and free speech. Where we're at, in short, is a place where the building blocks for constructing an authoritarian state are all in a row. The question is whether Trump has the will and the vision to put them together in a way that could durably compromise the viability of American democracy. This context helps us understand why the DC deployment is both absurd and dangerous. It is absurd in the sense that it does nothing, on its own, to advance an authoritarian agenda — and, if anything, compromises it by creating images of uniformed thugs on American streets that galvanize his opponents. It is dangerous in that it could normalize abuses of power that, down the line, could be wielded as part of an actually serious campaign of repression. And at this point, I don't know which scenario is more likely: that Trump's ad hoc efforts to seize control founder and ultimately amount to little, or that he follows his Schmittian logic to its dictatorial terminus.
Fox News
2 hours ago
- Fox News
Florida to open ‘Deportation Depot' at shuttered prison weeks after launching ‘Alligator Alcatraz' facility
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San Francisco Chronicle
4 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Unearthing the ‘peace riots': ‘An Unlikely Prospect' turns historical silence into a story of resistance
California, says author Shelley Blanton-Stroud, 'is everything for me.' The historical thriller writer is best known for a series of noir novels about Jane Benjamin, 'a tomato-picking, cross-dressing gossip columnist' working in the 1930s. Though Jane's 'a dust-bowl Okie immigrant to California,' Blanton-Stroud describes her as 'extremely ambitious, willing to do almost anything to achieve what she wants.' More Information But Blanton-Stroud's latest book, 'An Unlikely Prospect,' focuses on a new protagonist — though Jane does reappear — whose narrative arc represents a different kind of female empowerment. Sandy Zimmer is a young widow living in San Francisco who, after her husband's death, transitions from being his secretary to the publisher of the newspaper. 'She's been successful at using her estimable feminine wiles to achieve what she needs,' explains Blanton-Stroud, 'and she now feels somewhat trapped by those roles. I wanted to learn what it might be like for a woman like that to push her way out of the rules that have governed her interactions to date and to see how far she might go.' The Chronicle spoke to the Bakersfield native about the dark and relatively unknown chapter of San Francisco history that became a bit of an obsession — and inspired the new book. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Q: 'An Unlikely Prospect' is centered on the 1945 'peace riot' in San Francisco, an incident that involved multiple deaths and numerous rapes — yet no punishment for the perpetrators. Can you tell us about it? A: On Aug. 14, 1945, Japan unconditionally surrendered, ending World War II. Though celebrations broke out everywhere, San Francisco's Market Street celebration shifted into a wilding, what the newspapers called 'peace riots.' A mob of drunken sailors launched into a three-night spree, leaving 13 people dead, more than 1,000 injured and at least six women raped. Witnesses described the police and Navy Shore Patrol as failing to take control, including claims that five sailors sexually assaulted a woman while police neglected to respond. When the dust settled, no officials were held accountable, police never filed even one rape report, despite hospital evidence, and a two-week grand jury investigation concluded with commendations praising Police Chief (Charles) Dullea and other officials and dismissing the riots as the work of 'servicemen who didn't want to be in the service.' The city's establishment chose a kind of willful blindness rather than justice, whitewashing a disgraceful chapter in the city's history. Q: How did you uncover primary sources or oral histories on this incident? Were there firsthand accounts of the sort you include in the book? A: Because no rape victims were named, I couldn't mine their real stories. So I fixated on finding the grand jury report, completed Aug. 30, 1945. It should have been possible to find that record in the Digital Reel, the archive resource at the Public Viewing room of the San Francisco Courthouse, but not in this case for this particular year. Even when I've spoken to a handful of people who were on Market Street on (Victory over Japan) Day, they had no idea any of this had happened. The absence of this document made me wonder whether this was not just bureaucratic oversight but deliberate institutional silence. The gap in the historical record began to seem like a gift that actually gave me room to fictionalize more completely, so long as I made it clear that this was historical fiction. That's what I did. The absence of evidence gave me my direction — to imagine what if? Q: You mention in your afterword that the character of Sandy was inspired by figures like Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post who took over after her father and husband both died, and Cissy Patterson, one of the first women to lead a daily newspaper. I was not familiar with her! A: I wish I'd had room for more Cissy. She was a flamboyant and controversial publisher, one of the first women to head a major daily newspaper, the Washington Times Herald. Born into newspaper royalty as granddaughter of Chicago Tribune owner Joseph Medill and sister to New York Daily News founder Joseph Medill Patterson, she was both celebrated as a pioneering female press baron and reviled for her feuds, political stances, and tumultuous personal life that included affairs, bitter rivalries and estrangement from her own daughter. She claimed her family's journalism motto was, 'When your grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page.' It seems likely this was her motto and not that of the Medill family. I think her role in the novel is to be a foil to Sandy, who is far less cantankerous. I wanted her to urge Sandy to be a little braver, and less thin-skinned, in order to survive in the publishing world. Q: Sandy and Jane, her colleague at the newspaper, have what feel like very contemporary views around rape and women's rights. How did you figure out the best way to balance contemporary attitudes with historical ones? A: I love this question. Recently I participated in a panel on the difficulty for historical fiction authors of striking a balance between historical authenticity and accuracy and modern readability. It's mainly the difficulty of creating characters who feel relatable without being anachronistic. I definitely fall into the camp of writers who want their characters to be both authentic to their time and place and also to possess universal qualities that readers today will recognize. A: I won't pretend to have suffered many obstacles in my life. But also, I was one of 25 women to enroll in the first freshman cohort of what was then called Claremont Men's College. (It was renamed Claremont McKenna College in my sophomore year.) It was an honor to be part of that group. But not every day was delightful. Most of us ran into some pretty naked misogyny (often) delivering the message that we didn't really belong. I think that experience developed a little defensiveness in me. I see that defensiveness in Jane and Sandy. And I understand from my own life that their desire to 'prove' themselves sometimes gets in the way of doing it. Q: What parallels do you see between Sandy's post-World War II fight for journalistic integrity and today's media environment? A: What's happening to the world of journalism is heartbreaking, the buckling, the promising not to report on what might offend readership or government. Clearly there's no linear progression toward the ideal circumstances we might expect.
