For those of us with common sense and a basic understanding of Constitutional law, there is no question that Illinois’ Draconian eavesdropping law should be struck down as unconstitutional.
After all, it is the only state in the union that makes it a felony to openly record police in public, even when they don’t have an expectation of privacy; activity that is protected by the First Amendment anywhere else in the country (as much as police like to pretend otherwise).
Making the Illinois eavesdropping law even more Stalinist is the fact that police are exempt from the law, allowing them to record citizens while arresting those citizens for recording back.
Even Chicago’s top cop Garry McCarthy believes the law should be abolished.
But then you have Cook County State Attorney Anita Alvarez – an ambitious career prosecutor with a history of selective prosecution – who is doing everything she can to keep the law in place, even after the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in May that it “likely violates” the Constitution, sending it back down to the lower court to be tried.
Undeterred by that ruling, Alvarez halted the lower court’s proceedings to allow her to petition the 7th Circuit to review the case en banc; Latin Legalese meaning all ten appellate judges would have had to rule on it instead of the three that did.
When that was laughed down, she petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in the hopes it would overrule the 7th Circuit’s decision.
I imagine the Supreme Court could have settled the issue once and for all and that would not have been such a bad thing considering it has never addressed the issue of citizens having the right to openly record cops in public.
But the Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the case because it agreed with the 7th Circuit, which is even a bigger slap in the face to Alvarez, sending it back down to the lower court where the debate began in 2010 after the ACLU filed a preliminary injunction to stop these absurd arrests; fourteen which had been prosecuted during the previous eight years, including three by Alvarez.
