In July, after the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the state’s controversial law eliminating cash bail, Chris Southwood predicted that the so-called SAFE-T Act would “put dangerous criminals back on the street instead of keeping them in jail or forcing them to post cash bail as they await trial.”
“Many of those offenders will commit crimes again within hours of their release,” said Southwood, the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police’s president.
He was right.
But Southwood would be the first to admit it didn’t take a soothsayer to see the looming criminal justice disaster that critics of the SAFE-T Act — officially known as the Illinois Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today (SAFE-T) Act — say is only getting worse.
Chicago Alderman Raymond Lopez, a rare Democrat speaking out against the end of cash bail in the Land of Lincoln, told Fox News’ “America Reports” in October that innocent people are being “hunted down like prey.”
“[T]hings like robbery, burglary, arson, assault, even threatening elected officials like myself, do not warrant you being held on bond anymore in the state of Illinois, and criminals are taking note,” Lopez told the cable news outlet.
Exhibit A: the transgender-identified Jason Lee Willie, who goes by Alexia Willie.
Two Systems of Justice
The 47-year-old man from Nashville, Illinois, was charged last month with 14 federal felony counts of interstate communication of a threat to injure. Willie, according to the criminal complaint, allegedly declared while on video in online chatrooms that he would walk into schools or public restrooms
