Supreme Court chooses Kane County judge to head up electronic monitoring fix
In the wake of several high-profile electronic monitoring failures — the most recent leading to the killing of a Chicago police officer — the Illinois Supreme Court is launching a new task force to fix the system.
And it’ll be a suburban judge leading the way.
Judge Robert K. Villa, chief judge of Kane County’s 16th Judicial Circuit, will chair the new Pretrial Accountability Task Force. The panel will examine the use of pretrial electronic monitoring and how violations are addressed.
We reached out to Villa to discuss his new role, but he declined to comment because the work is just getting started.
The task force’s launch comes a little more than a month after Chicago police officer John Bartholomew was shot to death, and his partner seriously wounded, on April 25 while escorting an armed robbery suspect to Swedish Hospital on the city’s North Side.
The suspect, Alphanso Talley, was on electronic monitoring when he skipped court in March while facing carjacking and armed robbery charges. Talley is now charged with first-degree murder.
The officers’ shooting occurred about five months after another man who had violated his electronic monitoring was accused of setting a woman on fire aboard a CTA Blue Line train. That suspect, Lawrence Reed, had violated his electronic monitoring at least five times in the days before the unprovoked Nov. 17 attack, officials said.
Besides Villa, task force members include Cook County Chief Judge Charles S. Beach; 7th Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Ryan M. Cadigan; 20th Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Andrew Gleeson; Illinois State Police Director Brendan F. Kelly; 12th Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Daniel Kennedy; Loyola University Professor David Olson; Counselor to the Chief Justice Dartesia Pitts; and Cara LeFevour Smith, director of the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services. Additional judges will be appointed in the future, as well as some sheriffs.
The task force will hold its inaugural meeting next week and issue a report of its findings and recommendations to the Supreme Court within 45 days.
A spokesman for the Supreme Court also declined to comment Thursday.
Second crack at detention
DuPage County prosecutors are taking another run at having an Oak Brook teen accused of killing a married couple in a high-speed crash detained while awaiting trial.
In a motion filed May 21, prosecutors argue that the judge who released 17-year-old Francesco Rendina erred by not finding him a threat to the community if allowed free.
Rendina is charged with reckless homicide in the deaths of Ried Jacobsen, 72, and his wife, Katherine, 67. The couple was killed in a March 27 crash on Highland Avenue in Downers Grove. Authorities say Rendina was driving 104 mph five seconds before his vehicle hit the couple’s car as they were turning left on to Highland. The speed limit there is 45 mph.
Just three days earlier, Rendina had pleaded guilty to driving too fast for conditions/failure to reduce speed to avoid an accident, which happened in January in Lisle Township, according to court records.
In September 2022, when he was 14 years old, Rendina was ticketed for driving without a valid permit and speeding in Oak Brook (prosecutors say he was doing more than 100 mph in a 35 mph zone that time.)
In the May 21 motion, prosecutors say that witnesses reported Rendina was weaving between lanes and racing another car at the time of the deadly April crash.
“It is confounding the defendant was found to not pose a real and present threat to the safety of the community,” the motion states.
According to a transcript of the May 11 detention hearing, the judge said “his actions, while certainly reckless, were unintentional in this case.”
Rendina’s attorney said, according to the transcript, that the teen no longer has access to vehicles because of the crash. Rendina met with a Catholic priest after the crash and has been undergoing counseling, the attorney said.
Another tidbit in the motion: Rendina was taken to a hospital after the crash, but his parents checked him out before he was seen by a doctor or had blood or urine drawn for alcohol and drug testing.
A different judge will hear the request for reconsideration of the detention ruling on June 10.
Hero’s welcome
Props to Glendale Heights police officers Kenneth Lansdell and Shay Afrazi, who received awards from the village last week for saving a woman’s life in April.
According to the village, the officers were dispatched April 11 to a Smoothie King on Army Trail Road for reports of a person in full cardiac arrest. Lansdell arrived first and began resuscitation efforts, including use of an automated external defibrillator.
Afrazi got there next and performed additional chest compressions and resuscitation efforts, until Bloomingdale firefighters arrived and took the woman to a hospital. She regained consciousness at the hospital and now is expected to make a full recovery, officials said.
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