Bacino’s Parole Bid Meets Brass-Knuckles Politics, Updated X1
1 comment May 31st, 2008
In my Saturday column, I looked at how prosecutors are concerned about what they view as an effort by powerful Democrats to make the state’s parole board more liberal.
The fate of local cop-killer Theodore Bacino met brass-knuckles Illinois politics this week, leaving Capitol insiders wondering why powerful Democrats want to remove a tough-on-crime former cop from the state’s parole board.
It’s not entirely clear why Sen. Rickey Hendon, a top lieutenant of Senate President Emil Jones Jr., led the fight Thursday to block Salvador Diaz from another term on the Prisoner Review Board.
What is clear is that Hendon reignited concern among prosecutors that he and fellow Democrats are attempting to push the board to the left by removing members viewed as unsympathetic to the pleas of prisoners seeking freedom.
On June 19, the board is expected to vote on Bacino’s latest request for parole.
I also reported on this stunning claim:
The prosecutors who challenged Hendon — and by extension, Senate President Jones, a fellow Chicago Democrat — reportedly paid dearly.
After the vote, Jones ordered $3 million removed from the state budget for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, according to John Gorman, a spokesman for that office.
This money is intended to help Cook County prosecutors cover the cost of videotaping interrogations in murder investigations, Gorman said. He said the cut appeared to be in retaliation for his office’s lobbying effort to keep Diaz on the board. […]
Jones spokeswoman Cindy Davidsmeyer disputed Gorman’s account.
“The budget that passed the Senate a week ago did not include that money,” she said Friday. “Secondly, the budget is not even final yet. It’s still being negotiated.”
Davidsmeyer also made this comment, which did not appear in the column: “In the previous year and years before, we have sent the funding over to the House and it’s been cut over there. So this year when we sent our budget over last week, we did not include it. That’s the history.”
For more background on the effort to oust Diaz, just weeks before the parole board’s Bacino vote, go here. (This story is slightly dated. The Register Star supposedly ran an updated version of this news story today, but I can’t find it on the Web site.)
Now, let’s look at some of the politics I couldn’t squeeze into today’s column.
Salvador Diaz is a former Chicago police officer allied with U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a prominent Chicago Democrat. Gutierrez, in turn, is a close ally of Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Blagojevich, of course, has long been in lockstep with Senate President Emil Jones Jr. And Jones, in turn, is Hendon’s boss in the Senate.
So, why were Hendon and Jones working to oust a Gutierrez ally whom Blagojevich nominated for another term on the parole board? As I indicated in my column, it’s not entirely clear. However, Capitol insiders posed lots of questions and I did my best to get some answers.
Let’s begin with the Senate’s four Latinos — the “Latino Caucus,” as they call themselves. They are Sens. Willie Delgado, Tony Munoz and Iris Martinez of Chicago, and Marty Sandoval of Cicero.
On Thursday, Delgado and Martinez voted to keep Diaz on the parole board, while Munoz and Sandoval voted to reject him.
I asked Delgado whether a division within the Latino Caucus informed the vote on Diaz.
“Once upon a time when the Latino Caucus was created and Rod Blagojevich gets elected, he felt that the only one he had to be accountable to in the Latino community was his good friend and congressman Luis Gutierrez,” Delgado said. “So therefore, anything that we submitted that we thought were good recommendations for government, he ignored. He took Luis Gutierrez’s recommendations, and Sal Diaz was one of them.
“I’ve known Sal 20 years. He’s a personal friend of mine and a former police officer. So then of course he works all those year uninterrupted by me or anyone else. I want justice. I back issues, not individuals. But in retrospect over the years, keeping in mind there’s two other vacancies (on the Prisoner Review Board), (Senate) leadership had knowledge, or I guess Emil or someone else had knowledge, that this guy was pretty biased as an officer on this PRB.”
Delgado added, “There are some politics in there, but I don’t play that here. Quite the contrary. I’m a policy builder.”
Delgado also said he would like to fill one of the parole board’s two vacancies with former Sen. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, another Latino and liberal Democrat from Chicago.
But while Martinez supported Diaz on Thurday, she subsequently filed a motion for the Senate to reconsider the vote. She therefore attempted to enable the Senate to vote again — and to possibly reject Diaz. On Friday, she said she withdrew her motion to reconsider the vote, though she refused to label her retreat as a surrender to pro-Diaz forces.
“They voted me ‘yes,’” Martinez said, though it’s not clear who “they” was. “I voted opposite of Hendon, but that was because that was a mistake because I intended … my intent was to vote ‘no.’”
Martinez is a member of Jones’ leadership team and therefore is under pressure to do his bidding. I suspect her vote for Diaz — a vote against Hendon and, by extension, Jones — didn’t go over so well.
She echoed Hendon’s postion that Diaz should have been rejected because he violated Senate protocol when he failed to personally ask Hendon for his blessing. “It’s about the procedure,” she said.
Munoz told me he was not in the Senate at the time of the vote, and that somebody else voted for him. Had he been in the chamber, he told me, he would have supported Diaz. Munoz is a Chicago police officer; Diaz is a former Chicago cop.
Sandoval told me he too would vote “differently” if he had another chance.
Even as I explored any connection between the anti-Diaz push and the parole board’s upcoming vote on Bacino, I learned of another case pending before the board that arguably is closer to the Senate’s beating heart.
Like Bacino, Joseph Bigsby is a cop-killer. Bigsby murdered a Chicago police officer in 1973. His public defenders at the time were John Cullerton, now a state senator, and Larry Suffredin, now a Cook County board commissioner and Statehouse lobbyist.
To this day, Cullerton and Suffredin closely follow Bigsby’s case. They show up at his parole hearings to express their support for his plea for freedom. They argue the time Bigsby has already served in prison is greater than sentences served by other individuals who committed similar crimes.
On May 15, the Prisoner Review Board voted 8-5 to keep Bigsby in prison. Diaz was among the eight members voting to reject Bigsby’s request for parole.
On Thursday, Cullerton voted to reject Diaz. I asked him whether the push to oust Diaz was motivated by his desire to see Bigsby free.
“It’s not,” Cullerton said. “Absolutely not. I made that very clear. Absolutely not. I think that would be improper. I care about Bigsby, but from what I understand, (Diaz) is a decent guy and he’s voting his conscience.”
Cullerton added, “I perceive this as being a political issue — not for any of his votes but rather, you know, the political supporter. It could be a number of things. Maybe Gutierrez didn’t properly communicate his concern. Maybe he didn’t call the (Senate) president. Politics, you know. I don’t think it has anything to do with the guy’s qualifications.”
UPDATE 1
Jorge Montes, the Prisoner Review Board’s chairman, told me Diaz is not the board’s most conservative member.
“We deem him to be an extremely moderate, conservative board member. As far as I’m concerned, he has been nothing but fair and balanced, not to sound like Fox news — ‘fair and balanced.’ He is a former law enforcement officer who certainly brings his own perspective to the board and is valuable to the board. The board has historically been an extremely conservative board and it continues to be an extremely conservative board. And Mr. Diaz represents probably a very moderate force on the board. If anything, he would be a moderate force.”
Montes added, “Historically, as far back as I can remember, and I’ve been on the board almost 15 years, politics has never, believe it or not, has never played a role in our deliberations. And we’ve never made any effort to engineer any political shift. All I can say at this juncture is I am delighted that we will get the opportunity to continue to work with Sal Diaz, who was reappointed by Gov. Blagojevich, and that we have nothing but excellent things to say about Mr. Diaz and his performance on the board. He is an extremely fair individual. And all these conjectures about any connection to a particular case are very strange.”
State law does not require the board to include a police officer as a member.
The Board shall consist of 15 persons appointed by the Governor by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. One member of the Board shall be designated by the Governor to be Chairman and shall serve as Chairman at the pleasure of the Governor. The members of the Board shall have had at least 5 years of actual experience in the fields of penology, corrections work, law enforcement, sociology, law, education, social work, medicine, psychology, other behavioral sciences, or a combination thereof. At least 6 members so appointed must have had at least 3 years experience in the field of juvenile matters. No more than 8 Board members may be members of the same political party.
However, Montes said having a police officer on board is valuable.
“There’s no question that having a former police officer on the board adds a lot of important intelligence, or ability to understand intelligence, for the board,” he said. “There’s no question they make an important contribution to the board.”
