Aside from being bizarre as a matter of statutory interpretation, a Friday opinion rendered by the Illinois Supreme Court provides a frightening warning about how courts may misapply the new SAFE-T Act.
The high court applied the Act’s new, more lenient sentencing standards that only became law last year to resolve a five-year old criminal sentencing matter for a crime committed six years ago based on a law that’s 35-years old.
In effect, the court applied the SAFE-T Act retroactively. Its majority decided that, somehow, the new law tells us what lawmakers intended decades ago.
The majority decision by Justice Anne M. Burke was joined by her fellow Democratic Justices Mary Jane Theis, P. Scott Neville and Robert L. Carter. Two Republican justices dissented, David Overstreet and Michael J. Burke. The full opinion is here and is described in a report published by The Cook County Record.
I’ll try to summarize the case in plain English.
In 2017, Denzal Stewart was convicted of possession of a stolen motor vehicle. The offense occurred in 2016. At the sentencing, prosecutors introduced evidence of prior crimes by Stewart, including a 2013 residential burglary conviction and a 2014 conviction for possession of a stolen motor vehicle.
Those prior convictions meant that Stewart was subject to Class X felony sentencing rules, which are tougher than he would have otherwise faced. He was sentenced to imprisonment for the statutory minimum of six years.
But Stewart appealed, claiming those prior convictions should have been ignored because he was a juvenile at the time and therefore should have been sentenced under more lenient standards for juveniles. The high court said the law was unclear on that point, so they needed to figure out what lawmakers intended.
How should the supposed confusion in the earlier law be cleared up?
That’s where the Supreme Court’s answer gets weird: Look at the SAFE-T Act, the majority said, a law that was only passed last year, the relevant part of which became effective in July 2021.
The SAFE-T Act, you see, forbids judges from considering offenses committed prior to the age of 21 when sentencing people for crimes committed after age 21. And the court somehow reasoned that the new SAFE-T Act should be regarded as what lawmakers intended the earlier law to be, even though the earlier law is the Juvenile Court Act of 1987, as the dissent points out.
The dissenting judges thought the old law was clear and unambiguous, which they explained in their opinion.
More importantly, even if the old law is ambiguous, the dissent says, there’s no way the new SAFE-T Act should tell us anything about what was intended years ago. There’s nothing whatsoever in the SAFE-T Act that indicates it was intended as a mere clarification of old law, they wrote. On the contrary, they quoted its House sponsor, Rep. Justin Slaughter, (D-Chicago) who described the bill as “a robust, transformative, bold, and vicious initiative to comprehensively reform our criminal justice system.” (Emphasis theirs.)
I admit to being only a rusty, former lawyer, but the dissenting opinion sure makes sense to me. The majority opinion defies everything I understand the rules to be about statutory interpretation.
I also fear that this is a taste of what’s to come. Courts will have to give meaning to countless items in the 700-page SAFE-T Act and we can expect it to be liberally construed in favor of defendants. Even when it comes to events prior to SAFE-T’s effective dates, we can expect the Act to work in favor of defendants, no matter how irrational that may be, as this case showed.
Editor's note: This op-ed column was originally published at Wirepoints.org.