When a county’s prime two legislation enforcement officers group up in a courtroom, it is often to place somebody behind bars.
So it was an uncommon twist final week when Kane County State’s Legal professional Jamie Mosser and Sheriff Ron Hain collaborated to set a person free — one going through critical drug expenses, no much less.
Mosser and Hain appeared collectively in courtroom within the case of Rick Swain, a 50-year-old Aurora man who’s been locked up within the county jail since 2019 awaiting trial on heroin-related expenses. They persuaded Choose John Barsanti — a former state’s lawyer himself — to launch Swain on digital residence monitoring.
The discharge is a reward of types for Swain’s dedication to a brand new addiction-treatment program on the jail that gives nonviolent defendants an opportunity to go free by committing to turning their lives round. He is the primary to be launched via this system.
Hain mentioned Swain has taken 16 lessons whereas in jail, together with one on profitable re-entry to society and one other to acquire an OSHA well being and security certification.
The sheriff additionally organized for Swain to work at Gents’s Parlour Hair Salon in Aurora, in its Second Likelihood Chair program. The salon is owned by a Cook dinner County sheriff’s deputy, Hain mentioned.
“I might undoubtedly be a tough employee on the market,” Swain testified.
And if Swain messes up?
“I might go discover him myself and convey him to the Kane County jail,” Hain mentioned.
Whereas out of jail, Swain shall be topic to random drug exams and residential and work visits. He’ll must take part in an outpatient addiction-recovery program and proceed trauma remedy. And he’ll stay with a sister, in Sugar Grove.
Jamie Mosser, Kane County state’s lawyer
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Each Mosser and Swain lawyer Alex Bederka argued for his launch.
“This (Lighthouse) is a program that I imagine in,” Mosser mentioned.
Barsanti ordered month-to-month stories about Swain’s work, education and coaching, and warned him there is not any room for error — he is an instance for this system, good or unhealthy.
“These folks all imagine in you, and that is a tremendous factor,” Barsanti mentioned, as a tearful Swain shook his head in settlement.
Sound acquainted?
We first launched you to the connection between Hain and Swain in October, when we wrote about the sheriff’s launch of a podcast on which he interviews jail inmates. Swain was one of many first friends on the “A Sheriff and His Inmates” sequence.
Swain, who mentioned he began utilizing medication when he was 11, informed Hain that if restoration packages had been accessible when he was first locked up, he might need averted being imprisoned thrice later in life.
Snap(shot) resolution
Do you’ve a constitutional proper to snap a photograph of somebody in a public place? What if that somebody is a baby? And the photographer a convicted intercourse offender?
These have been the questions earlier than a state appeals courtroom just lately because it weighed — and in the end rejected — the attraction of a suburban man arrested, convicted and despatched to jail for taking pictures of two teenage boys at a Buffalo Grove enterprise in 2016.
Gregory A. Rollins
Gregory A. Rollins, 39, was asking the courtroom to toss out his conviction and five-year jail time period on a cost of kid pictures by a intercourse offender. A former Woodridge resident, Rollins argued that the legislation was unconstitutional and his pictures of the 15- and 13-year-old boys was protected by the First Modification.
The Second District Illinois Appellate Courtroom disagreed. In a unanimous ruling handed down final Friday, the courtroom dominated that the state legislation making it unlawful for intercourse offenders to {photograph} kids and not using a guardian’s consent just isn’t aimed on the content material of the photographs however relatively at serving an essential public curiosity.
“As a preliminary matter, it’s past query that the federal government’s curiosity in defending kids from intercourse offenders is substantial, compelling even,” Justice Donald Hudson wrote within the 22-page ruling. “Thus, the federal government was clearly performing to advance an curiosity of enough magnitude when it enacted (the legislation).”
Rollins beforehand was convicted of predatory felony sexual assault of a kid in Cook dinner County in 1999. He is serving his sentence on the pictures cost mixed with an unrelated possession of kid pornography conviction out of DuPage County in 2020, and he isn’t eligible for parole till 2025.
Reptile return?
A Villa Park girl is suing DuPage County, its state’s lawyer’s workplace and the Chicago Herpetological Society to get again practically 60 snakes — principally boas and kingsnakes — and a couple of dozen different reptiles seized throughout a raid on an Addison storage in February.
Federal brokers got here throughout the animals whereas looking the property of Michael Frobouck, who they allege wished to lift a military “to take the nation again” and offered an unregistered “harmful system” to an spy.
An informant informed authorities he noticed a number of rifles and tens of 1000’s of rounds of assorted ammunition within the basement of Frobouck’s residence in late November, courtroom paperwork state. The following month, the informant launched Frobouck to an undercover federal agent who, authorities allege, purchased ammunition, explosive supplies and explosive precursor chemical substances from the Addison man.
Frobouck lawyer Timothy Whelan can be representing the reptiles’ proprietor, Shelby Becci. He says Becci’s solely connection to Frobouck was renting house from him after a fireplace in her Villa Park residence.
Becci runs a enterprise referred to as Scales and Tails, and might be employed to deliver the animals out for academic demonstrations. Her go well with estimates they’re valued at about $26,000.
In accordance with DuPage County Animal Management, the snakes are being cared for by the herpetological society.
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