Corruption, death penalty key in Cook Co. state's attorney race

At first glance, the two major party candidates for Cook County State's Attorney have a lot in common.

Both Democrat Anita Alvarez and Republican Tony Peraica have strong immigrant backgrounds. Alvarez' parents were immigrants, and Peraica came to America from Croatia after being orphaned.

Both are currently West Suburban residents who grew up in the city and both put themselves through law school in Chicago - Alvarez at Chicago-Kent College of Law and Peraica at John Marshall Law School.

Both gambled heavily in recent local political races, putting a good amount of their personal fortunes into advertising for their political races.

But that's about where the similarities end.

For Alvarez, the political gamble paid off. The $600,000 her husband put into her primary run allowed her to buy television commercials and stay competitive in a six-person race. She then eked out a win by about 1 percent of the vote over her nearest challenger, Chicago Alderman Tom Allen.

Peraica was not as fortunate. Mortgaging his home, he loaned himself over $540,000 in his 2006 race for Cook County Board President, only to lose by a narrow margin to Democrat Todd Stroger.

But Alvarez and Peraica are also separated by more than just success or failure in personal financial gambles in politics. The two - and third-party challenger Thomas O'Brien of the Green Party - are miles apart in their backgrounds and on philosophical positions when it comes to the office they want to hold.

Alvarez, of River Forest, has worked in the state's attorney's office for 22 years and is currently the No. 3 in command under retiring state's attorney Dick Devine.

O'Brien, of Chicago, grew up in Evanston and went to Loyola University before moving to San Antonio, Texas, where he served as a Catholic Worker in a soup kitchen serving drug addicts and those suffering from HIV. There, he attended St. Mary's University School of Law before returning to Chicago to work for the Cook County State's Attorney's Office for two decades. He's still there, working in the juvenile department.

Peraica, of Riverside, is a private attorney who also serves as a representative to the Cook County Board, and has repeatedly and vocally battled both President Todd Stroger and his late father John H. Stroger, when he was president.

In a nutshell, the candidates' core issues are these:

Alvarez says she's the only one of the three with the experience needed to run the office.

Peraica says he's the only one willing to take on political and police corruption.

O'Brien says he's the only candidate who will stop enforcing the death penalty.

For most of the campaign, O'Brien has been excluded from debates, not seen as a serious enough challenger by moderators, and so has largely escaped the attacks of his fellow candidates.

But Peraica - running at a disadvantage as a Republican in a Democratic county - began gunning for Alvarez the day after she won the primary, and the two have had three head-to-head debates and plenty of chances to sling mud at one another.

Peraica offers several ideas for change in the office, such as diverting most nonviolent drug offenders from prosecution into rehab or station adjustments. But his basic premise is that Alvarez, as a prosecutor in the office for 22 years, cannot be independent enough to take on the corruption that is rampant in Cook County.

For decades, the office (and Alvarez, by extension) has sat back, he says, letting the U.S. attorney's office do what it should have done: indicting and prosecuting crooked cops and politicians in both Chicago and Cook County at large.

"This office has been a complete failure," said Peraica at the candidates' last debate on ABC 7

Peraica says Alvarez will be too cozy with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Cook County Board President Todd Stroger, and says she is the machine's candidate.

If she was the machine candidate, Alvarez asks, why was she largely ignored by Democratic Party bigwigs in the primary? Alvarez says the broad brush Peraica paints shows why he shouldn't be prosecutor: he simply has no idea how the office runs.

"Mr. Peraica, again [is] showing his ignorance of this office and the work that we do," said Alvarez in the race's last debate.

If he knew the office, she said, he would know that many of the federal prosecutions started in the Cook County office and then were handed over to federal investigators because they had more resources to tackle the job. She notes she prosecuted many corrupt Chicago police officers on the now-disbanded SOS squad, and says taking the office's eye off of violent crime would be a disaster. To improve the fight against crime, she says, she'd bring back the community prosecution offices, which produced good results before they were closed due to budget constraints.

O'Brien doesn't take many shots at his opponents. Instead, he spends most of his time talking about how he would repair what he sees as the office's dismal relationship with poor and high-crime areas in the city and suburbs.

The biggest step he would take, both as a bridge-repairing measure and one of morality, would be to stop enforcing the death penalty. With a horrible rate of death row conviction reversals, and an overwhelming imbalance against black and Hispanics, the death penalty is "racist" and irrevocably broken, aside from being ineffective as a deterrent, he says.

The millions the state now spends on prosecuting death cases, he says, could go to drug rehab programs, violence prevention programs and other prophylactic measures to prevent crime before it starts.

"What do we tell our grandchildren when they ask us why did you let children kill children on the streets of Chicago?" O'Brien said.

In the closing weeks of the campaign, Peraica has been his usual ceaseless and tireless campaigner, hitting every event that he could. However, that brash style may have hurt him recently at a South-Side event, where his van blared slogans for him over loudspeakers late into the evening in a residential area.

Alvarez, enjoying the juggernaut of Democratic support has attended events, too, but has eschewed head-to-head events with Peraica in an effort to avoid giving him extra publicity. Recently, citing a prior engagement, she skipped an Urban League forum that could hurt her support among blacks, either this election or next, if she is seen as taking their vote for granted.

For his part, O'Brien has simply been trying to get into the picture, and has noted his frustration at being locked out of debates, such as WTTW's forum.