CHICAGO (CN) — The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday issued a ruling that could effectively legalize arrests without warrants.
Instead, the court said, such arrests could be based solely on intradepartmental police alerts.
The majority opinion relied heavily on the U.S. Supreme Court case United States v. Watson, which held that warrantless arrests based on probable cause comply with the Fourth Amendment even if there had been time to obtain a warrant.
In the 1976 ruling, the court explained that “there is nothing in the Court’s prior cases indicating that under the Fourth Amendment a warrant is required to make a valid arrest for a felony.”
In Illinois on Thursday, Justice David Overstreet penned the majority opinion. Chief Justice Mary Theis and Justices Lisa White, Joy Cunningham, Elizabeth Rochford and Mary O’Brien all concurred.
In the sole dissenting opinion, Justice Scott Neville Jr. argued the Watson decision eviscerated Fourth Amendment protections. He warned the court’s ruling could push communities of color back to the days before crucial civil rights decisions like Dred Scott and Plessy.
Justice advocacy groups, including the state’s chapter of the ACLU, the Chicago Appleseed Center and the Chicago Council of Lawyers, echoed Neville’s sentiments in a joint amicus brief.
Illinois’ high court “doesn’t need to be beholden to bad federal court decisions interpreting the Fourth Amendment,” said Alexandra Block, director of the Criminal Legal Systems and Policing Project at the ACLU of Illinois.
Thursday’s ruling stemmed from a sentencing appeal in a 2013 gang-related shooting in which two people were killed. Defendant Angelo Clark was convicted and initially sentenced to two consecutive terms of 23 years in prison.
Ahead of his trial, Clark filed a motion to quash his arrest, arguing it was made without probable cause or a valid arrest warrant. Clark’s mother, who witnessed the arrest, contradicted police accounts — but the court ultimately denied his motion.
After he was convicted, Clark filed a motion for reconsideration on his sentence. The Cook County Circuit Court reduced the aggregate sentence from 46 years to 32 years. He appealed first to the First District Appellate Court, then to Illinois’ high court.
Clark argued that his arrest was unlawful because the Chicago Police Department issued an investigative alert rather than a warrant. Such alerts go out to patrol officers, telling them detectives have found probable cause.
The investigative alert system, Clark argued, was unconstitutional because it functioned like a warrant without the need for legal requirements like an affidavit.
The system, he said, offered no certainty that officers were making arrests based on trustworthy information. He cited the 2019 Illinois case People v. Bass, which found that although the alerts did not violate the Fourth Amendment, they did violate the Illinois Constitution.
In his majority opinion, Overstreet noted that because Clark didn’t raise that issue in the Cook County Circuit Court, he forfeited it for purposes of review.
And yet justices did opt to review the legal arguments of the case. Justices then opted to vacate that portion of the Bass ruling, noting it had already been rejected by a panel of the First District.
In his lone dissenting opinion, Neville said he could not concur with a majority decision that “legalizes a systemic, racial policy or practice that authorizes the Chicago Police to make warrantless arrests based on race.”
Reviewing 200 alerts from Cook County, he noted that 154 involved Black people. He argued the alerts violate a 2019 consent decree requiring Chicago PD to reform policies, practices and training.
ACLU director Block reiterated Neville’s concerns regarding the federal consent decree. She argued the department had not improved much since the decree was implemented.
“It’s very frustrating because one of the main goals of the consent decree is to reduce racial disparities in CPD’s practices. It’s not happened yet,” Block said. “It doesn’t seem that CPD even really takes that goal seriously and it’s something that the community is immensely frustrated about.”