Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2019 March 22

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March 22

U.S. Supreme Court and Illinois S.C. questions.

What are some examples of cases in the U.S. or Illinois Supreme Court, where.

-All the voters on 1 side, and the other, were either all former prosecutors (predominantly) and former defenders/lawyers.
-All the voters on 1 side, and the other, were all Republicans or Democrats (for preferably criminal cases).
-And divided by race.

Anyways, I'm from Chicago and recently, there was a White cop shooting a Black teen 17 times killing him Shooting of Laquan McDonald, and he got 2nd degree murder, but only 6.75 years. The Illinois Attorney General is appealing it directly for some kind of a new trial, as the lower judge cited a ruling (but on the minority side of that ruling, not majority), for why he chose to give the lesser charge. 4 judges denied that motion, with 1 both for and against, 1 against, and 1 unvoted. The only judge that was against, was the only Black judge on the court. And all the judges that were Republican were on the denying side. And the 1 judge that remained unvoted was a former public defender and everyone else former prosecutors (though the Black judge was a former civil lawyer). 67.175.224.138 (talk) 02:11, 22 March 2019 (UTC).

Some organization like the ACLU or SPLC might have stats like that about judges. FWIW I was surprised at the notion of retrying the shooter for a higher charge, since that would be double jeopardy. But the article says he was tried and convicted of 2nd degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery (one for each shot fired at Laquan McDonald), but sentenced only for the 2nd degree murder. The court case was over a request to vacate the murder conviction and sentence for the aggravated battery counts. Presumably that would be a longer total sentence. If that was the goal, though, I don't know why they wanted to vacate the murder conviction. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 20:39, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Reading the source our article cited provided a clue and a quick search seemingly confirmed that the reason it's surprising is because the source is simply wrong. There was no request to vacate the conviction. Just the sentence. I've updated our article with a new source which also mentions what the OP mentioned i.e. that the request was denied. Other sources say the same thing e.g. [1], that the request was only to vacate the sentence. Vacating the sentence was necessary since Illinois law only allow a person to be sentenced on the more serious conviction. The dispute was over whether aggravated battery convictions or second-degree murder conviction were the more serious conviction. While aggravated battery may seem to be a less serious crime, this isn't reflected in the sentence ranges allowed under law. (There was an additional complication because there were multiple aggravated battery convictions and some may have been more serious than others, possibly allowing consecutive sentences but I'm not sure there was precedent or legal argument that the multiple counts meant it was more serious. I think was separate.) Nominally, vacating the conviction may have also helped ensure a better sentence but would likely have been unpopular with many. And more to the point, I don't think 'we want to vacate the conviction because although we think the person is fully guilty and deserves the conviction which was properly established in a court of law in accordance with the law, we think he'll have a higher sentence if he wasn't convicted' is a good legal argument. Nil Einne (talk) 15:03, 24 March 2019 (UTC)