On a recent Monday morning, in a courtroom in Bridgeview, Nakia Smith pleaded guilty to a felony. His crime: walking into the Calumet District police station on East 111th Street carrying a gun he intended to hand over to police. One of his workers had found the weapon cleaning out a property, and Smith — who has spent the 13 years since his release from prison mentoring young people, tending community gardens in Roseland and volunteering with the anti-violence organization Chicago CRED — did what we tell our neighbors to do. He turned the gun in to the authorities.
For that, Smith was arrested, spent seven months in Cook County Jail, wore an ankle monitor and, facing six to 30 years in prison in the event of a conviction, accepted a deal. He pleaded guilty, accepted “time served” and went home.
Some will see this outcome, a deal for time served, as mercy. Look closer: A man whose only intention was to protect public safety now carries a fresh felony conviction — because the price of insisting on his innocence at trial was the risk of dying in prison. That is not mercy. Neither is it justice. Instead, this is the machine working as designed.
The overwhelming majority of criminal cases in this country never reach a jury; they end in pleas, and the decision to plead out turns less on truth than on what a defendant can afford to risk. There is an old saying in our neighborhoods, and the Smith case once more proved it true: You are better off being guilty and rich than poor and innocent.
The Book of Deuteronomy, sacred to the traditions we serve, lays out a divine blueprint for the justice system. Judges must “show no partiality” and take no bribe, “for bribes blind the eyes of the discerning.” Those empowered by the system must “hear out low and high alike,” and should harbor neither fear nor awe for any party.
Most importantly, Deuteronomy charges: “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” Scripture does not repeat itself idly. Justice named twice is justice that must be the same twice over — the same on the North Shore as in Roseland, the same for the defendant in a tailored suit as for the one in a work coat. A court that weighs ZIP code, income and complexion has already accepted a bribe; it has collected payment in something other than cash.
Consider other cases. Ivy Kelly has insisted for more than two decades that he is innocent of the 1999 killing of the man he called his best friend. After an appeals court found his trial flawed, prosecutors offered him immediate freedom — if he would confess. He refused to buy liberty with a lie, so this 51-year-old man sits today in a maximum security division of Cook County Jail, punished for telling the truth.
And consider Jaime Rios, convicted at 20 of a 1989 murder after being investigated by Reynaldo Guevara, the disgraced now-former detective accused of framing dozens of Chicagoans. Rios spent 17 years in prison; in February, a federal jury awarded him $750,000 — roughly $44,000 per stolen year. The detective whose misconduct put him there collects a pension of more than $91,000 a year. In this county, framing a man pays better, annually, than having been framed.
Remuneration is becoming rarer. Whereas the previous state’s attorney’s office objected to about 1 in 4 certificates of innocence sought by the exonerated, the current office fights 4 out of 5, forcing people who already lost decades to spend months more proving what judges have already found.
Two years ago in these pages, after current State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke won her primary by fewer than 1,600 votes, we wrote about the puzzle of her candidacy — a promise to preserve reform wrapped in tough-on-crime packaging.
The puzzle has been answered. Detention requests are up, and the jail holds hundreds more people than before she took office. The exonerated are contested. Kelly waits. And Smith, warrior for peace, is a felon once more. From our perspective, it seems as if politics are being pursued, not justice.
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We do not write to condemn one official; we write because Deuteronomy commands the whole community to pursue justice. In Chicago, pursuit of justice today means correction. Correction, in this case, is not complicated. It does not require new courts or new laws to begin, only a change of practice by the people already empowered to act.
So let the state’s attorney remember that prosecutorial discretion exists precisely for cases such as these. The law that charged Smith as an armed habitual criminal did not require that charge; a prosecutor chose it, and a prosecutor could as easily have not chosen it. The same is true regarding Kelly: Nothing in the statute forces the office to keep contesting a case an appellate court has already called into doubt, nor to treat a refusal to falsely confess as evidence of danger. Let our justice system cease fighting the innocent and the honest alike, and let mercy become policy rather than an accident that depends on the political proclivities of a prosecutor.
May we pursue justice doubled: the same for rich and poor, the same for low and high, so that the doubling Deuteronomy commands are no longer just words we read but a practice our county lives. May we protect those who do good rather than prosecute them. May we tell the truth about our courts, and having told it, repair them.
And may the day come soon when doing right in Cook County costs nothing at all.
Chicago faith leaders Rabbi Seth Limmer, the Rev. Otis Moss III, the Rev. Ciera Bates-Chamberlain and the Rev. Michael Pfleger joined the Tribune’s opinion section in summer 2022 for a series of columns on potential solutions to Chicago’s chronic gun violence problem. The column continues on an occasional basis.
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