Judges Warned of CTA Attacker

Knew he was a multiple offender, knew he was a ticking time bomb, and still, they released him AND failed to monitor him:

• The man accused of setting a woman on fire aboard a Blue Line train this week repeatedly violated his electronic monitoring program by leaving his home without permission for extended periods, CWBChicago has learned. And, records show, when Lawrence Reed randomly poured gasoline on the 26-year-old woman and set her ablaze on Monday night, he had been out of his home without permission for more than 12 hours.

  Despite repeated, sometimes lengthy violations, he was never apprehended by personnel from the office of Chief Judge Timothy Evans, who are responsible for operating the program. A spokesperson for the office declined to comment on what efforts, if any, were taken to locate Reed, saying “This information would likely also be protected as part of the pretrial record, so we would not release it without the defendant’s express permission.”

So Evans' office fucked up....and this was after numerous releases:

• “I can’t keep everybody in jail because the State’s Attorney wants me to.”
  
  Those 13 words may linger in the mind of Cook County Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez for a long, long time. Because that’s what she told a Cook County assistant state’s attorney on August 22 when the prosecutor objected to the judge releasing Lawrence Reed, the man accused of setting a woman on fire aboard a Blue Line train this week, on an ankle monitor, a court transcript shows.

  She released Reed on the ankle monitor after a prosecutor, hauntingly, in retrospect, warned that electronic monitoring “could not protect the victim or the community from another vicious, random, and spontaneous attack.”

CWB is naming every single judge they find who released this criminal, doing the job that the regular media won't do because they're part-and-parcel of a corrupt system. 

Hopefully, it pays off at election time, but we have nearly sixty years of cynicism in our past.