Tears, laughter and embraces in the courtroom marked the end to months of “torture,” for Oak Park Trustee Brian Straw and his “Broadview 6” protest co-defendants just days before their trial was set to start in federal court.
After seven months, the criminal prosecution against Straw and several other local progressive political figures collapsed Thursday afternoon after newly unredacted transcripts revealed that the case had been “tainted” by federal prosecutors’ actions in the case’s initial grand jury proceedings. The case stemmed from allegations that the defendants were part of a crowd that had illegally blocked an ICE agent from driving into the federal immigration agency’s detention facility in Broadview last September.
Oak Park’s Straw, 45th ward Democratic committeeman Michael Rabbit, Katherine “Kat” Abughazaleh, who fell four points shy of winning Illinois’ 9th district congressional primary last month, and Andre Martin, who worked on Abughazaleh’s campaign staff, are all now free from criminal prosecution. The case has served as the highest profile instance of federal charges falling upon protestors who opposed the intensified “Operation Midway Blitz” immigration enforcement effort that led to a surge in deportations in Chicagoland last year.
Straw said the prosecution had brought massive financial and personal consequences for him and his family and that he would “never get the last seven months of my life back,” but that Thursday’s victory had proved the value of fighting.
“I’m relieved to be exonerated today, but I want to state clearly that fighting these unjust federal charges these last seven months was never just about me or my co-defendants in this case,” Straw said. “It was about our collective first amendment rights. It was about fighting for a justice system that actually serves the interests of justice and the public, not the whims of those who are in power. It was about our neighbors, more vulnerable than us who’ve been targeted by this administration and who deserve peaceful dignified lives alongside us.”
“Despite the risks and personal toll of this experience, I wanted to show my kids and yours that our country and our future is worth fighting for.”
After reviewing the unredacted grand jury transcripts, Judge April Perry ordered the U.S. Attorneys on the case and their supervisors into her courtroom for an emergency closed door conference Thursday morning. Assistant U.S. Attorneys had polluted the case by impermissibly “vouching” for the strength of evidence during the grand jury process, communicating with grand jurors outside of the sessions and dismissing grand jurors who dissented from the government’s narrative, according to defense attorneys.
The transcript of that session will be made public.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros told the court that the remaining criminal charges against Straw and the other three protest co-defendants will be dismissed with prejudice in light of the prosecutor’s conduct.
The defendants were originally charged under a felony conspiracy statute that carried the potential for a decade-long prison sentence.
That original felony conspiracy charge had been dropped earlier this month, and the government had already abandoned its case against two of the original defendants. The high profile trial for the four remaining defendants on misdemeanor charges had been expected to begin Tuesday, May 26.
Defense counsel had been seeking unredacted copies of the grand jury transcripts since last December, they said. While it had been said previously in court that only about 30 lines of transcript had been redacted, pages worth of proceedings had been left out of the record.
Straw’s attorney Chirs Parente said that the omissions amounted to a “cover up.”
“I’m sick to my stomach,” he said. “When I was a federal prosecutor, your job was to always do the right thing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case where the wrong thing was done by prosecutors from the beginning.”
During Thursday’s public hearing, Boutros said prosecutors didn’t intentionally mislead the court and stood by the original criminal charges. He said the defendants were “lucky” that their actions during the September protest hadn’t caused the federal agent to accelerate through the crowd or fire on protestors.
Perry chastised Boutros for doubling down on “vilifying” the defendants.
“You are significantly undercutting your mea culpa by standing by the charges and continuing to vilify these defendants,” Perry said. “What matters here isn’t the defense attorneys, the prosecutors or Mr. Boutros. It’s the four defendants who don’t have to come to trial on Tuesday.”
The defense will be seeking sanctions against the government that could allow the defendants to recoup the cost of their attorney fees. Hearings on the prosecutors’ conduct are expected to be held in the coming weeks.
Abughazaleh, who’s also a popular social media influencer considered a potential rising star in national Democratic politics, said the case showed how the Department of Justice has been used to try and wreck the lives of the Trump administration’s political enemies.
“The point of cases like this is psychological and financial torture,” she said. “We didn’t deserve this, no one deserves this and there are going to be more cases like this unless sanctions are actually given. The reason we were out there in the first place is because we were protesting this administration’s unlawful behavior and how they treat our communities.”
“We were saying enough is enough. The administration does things like this because it thinks it can silence us, but it’s not going to work. We fought back and won.”
The so-called “Broadview 6” are among 32 known defendants to have been charged with nonimmigration crimes tied to Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago’s federal court, with only two cases having thus far ended in a conviction.