Former Judge Charged In Illinois

The Illinois Administrator has filed a complaint alleging that the attorney (then a judge) provided false information to police investigating a murder and false testimony to a judicial inquiry tribunal

 Respondent met David Fields in 2013, and thereafter developed and maintained a close personal relationship with Fields. In the summer of 2015, Fields pled guilty to aggravated assault on a pregnant person and was sentenced to a period of incarceration, which he began to serve in August of that year.

Respondent and Fields remained in contact during Fields’s incarceration, including through telephone calls, written correspondence, and Respondent’s personal visits and attorney visits to Fields. On October 24, 2016 Fields was released from incarceration on mandatory supervised release.

Beginning during the period when Fields was incarcerated, Respondent submitted applications to the Illinois Department of Corrections seeking approval for Fields to reside in Respondent’s home in Belleville upon Fields’s release from incarceration. These applications were initially denied based on the presence of firearms in Respondent’s home, and upon his release Fields went to live at his mother’s home in Shiloh, Illinois.

Respondent subsequently agreed to remove certain firearms from his home so that Fields could move in with him. On or about November 4, 2016, Fields moved from his mother’s residence to Respondent’s residence in Belleville. On or about December 2, 2016, Fields moved from Respondent’s home back to his mother’s home in Shiloh.

At issue was the possession of a phone

After Fields was released from custody in 2016, Respondent allowed Fields to regain possession of and use the 650 phone. Fields kept and used the phone for several weeks thereafter, including during the period when Fields lived in Respondent’s home in November and December of 2016. In or about mid-December 2016, Respondent retook possession of the 650 phone, which had previously been in Fields’s possession.

At some later point prior to December 29, 2016, Fields contacted Respondent and requested that Respondent return the 650 phone to Fields.

On the night of December 29, 2016, Respondent met Fields in a gas station parking lot in Belleville. At that meeting, Respondent gave Fields a bag containing various personal effects belonging to Fields that had been stored at Respondent’s home. Prior to or during this meeting, Respondent also returned the 650 phone to Fields.

Respondent and Fields subsequently communicated during the night of December 29, 2016, through text messages exchanged between the 117 phone, which was in Respondent’s possession, and the 650 phone, which was in Fields’s possession.

Early the next morning, at or about 5:00 a.m. on December 30, 2016, Carl Silas was killed. The police investigating the killing identified Fields as a suspect in the killing soon thereafter.

Later that morning of December 30, 2016, Respondent received a call from a woman who was an acquaintance of Fields, and she informed Respondent that she had heard reports that Fields was involved in a possible murder. Shortly after Respondent’s call with Fields’s acquaintance, Fields himself called Respondent from a phone belonging to a different female acquaintance of Fields. Respondent and Fields had a conversation lasting just over three minutes. By no later than noon on December 30, 2016, Respondent was aware that Fields was a suspect in a homicide investigation.

The police contacted him.

Allegedly

During all of his meetings with the police on December 30, 2016, Respondent did not disclose facts that he knew were relevant to the homicide investigation the officers were conducting: for example, Respondent did not tell the police officers that Fields had regained possession of the 650 phone at or around the time of Respondent’s meeting with Fields on December 29, 2016, at the gas station, nor did Respondent tell the police officers that Fields had communicated with Respondent via text message from the 650 phone on the night of December 29, 2016, or that Respondent had spoken to Fields on the telephone earlier that same day.

Count II

In May 12, 2017, Respondent (who was a circuit court judge at the time if the police interview alleged in Count I, above) appeared before the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board (“the Board”) and testified under oath about events at issue in the Board’s investigation of his alleged misconduct, including his interview with the police on December 30, 2016. Respondent returned on June 9, 2017, and completed his sworn testimony before the Board about the same investigation.

Respondent testified before the Board that, at the time of the December 30, 2016 interview with the police investigators, he believed the 650 phone was in Fields’s possession, and that he told the officers during the interview that the phone was then in Fields’s possession. Respondent also testified before the Board that soon after his initial interview with the police, he discovered the 650 phone was sitting in his garage, that he was “totally and utterly in shock and stunned” to find the phone, and that he thought “this is surreal. This is like a bad nightmare.” When asked why he felt that way, Respondent answered: “Because it couldn’t be there because I had given him [Fields] the phone before.”

Respondent’s testimony to the Board was false, because Respondent had actually told the police that he or his sister had had possession of the 650 phone since late November or early December of 2016, and he did not tell the investigators that Fields had possessed the phone on December 29, 2016.

St. Louis Public Radio reported that Respondent was removed from the bench.

Fields was acquitted of the murder, as recounted by the Bellevue News-Democrat. (Mike Frisch)