The Restorative Justice Community Court, with Judge Colleen Sheehan presiding, is scheduled to hear its first North Lawndale case in August 2017. Victims, defendants, and all other interested parties will meet together under Judge Sheehan’s supervision to reach solutions to nonviolent crime, such as neighborhood drug dealing, theft, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, and so on. “This is truly the people's court,” Judge Sheehan announced. All parties will discuss restitution in a “peace circle” under the cloak of confidentiality,...

Authorities charged 16-year-old Landon Allen with first-degree murder and aggravated unlawful use of a weapon after he and another young man allegedly shot and killed a person in Washington Park; the state’s attorney said that Mr. Allen would be charged as an adult. Prosecutors claim that Mr. Allen and his friend approached 23-year-old Jermaine Brown and confronted him about a Facebook post that Mr. Allen considered derogatory. According to witnesses, the trio argued for a time before a fourth person...

Three Chicago police officers appeared in court to answer charges that they helped conceal the circumstances of a fatal police shooting involving Officer Jason Van Dyke and 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. As a result of the indictments, if Detective David March, Officer Joseph Walsh, and Officer Thomas Gaffney are called as witnesses at Officer Van Dyke’s trial, they will probably invoke their Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to testify, according to their lawyers. If so, Officer Van Dyke’s defense would suffer...

A trio of Vernon Hills residents are in police custody after officers used an obscure legal loophole to conduct a warrantless search of the premises. Officers approached the residence of 33-year-old Dmitry Kolesnikov to perform an unprompted wellness check, because they suspected that he was intoxicated. During the course of a subsequent search, they found an unspecified number of marijuana plants in the basement. Using that discovery to obtain a search warrant, officers returned some time later and recovered 17...

Grainy surveillance video, a stale eyewitness account, and a circumstantial DNA test were sufficient for authorities to charge 24-year-old Jeffery Freeman with an October 2014 murder. How will that evidence hold up in court? Police say that fellow gang members prompted Mr. Freeman to confront Torrence Pickens for allegedly violating gang territory. Video from a nearby apartment complex captured footage of a man who matches Mr. Freeman’s description wielding a pistol and smoking a cigarette as he approached Mr. Pickens....

The United States had only been a nation for about 30 years when, 205 years ago in June, John Kinzie killed Jean La Lime in what several contemporaries and witnesses described as an argument turned violent. A few historians still consider Mr. Kinzie, who opened a trading post on the current Tribune Tower site in 1779, to be the founder of Chicago. Mr. La Lime was a French trapper and interpreter. While the two were geographic neighbors, their relationship was...

Mediation is not for everyone. The former Chicago Bulls standout and the reality television star surprised almost everyone when their lawyers asked a Fort Lauderdale judge to postpone the case and give the two a chance to reconcile. In October of 2016, Mr. Pippen filed for divorce, alleging irreconcilable differences. At the time, rumors were circulating that Ms. Pippen was involved with hip-hop artist Future. In the pleadings, Mr. Pippen asked the court to overturn a previous marital agreement. Then,...

35 years ago, in June of 1982, a Washington, D.C. jury declared that John Hinckley Jr. was not guilty of wounding President Ronald Reagan and three other people, because he was legally insane. During his two-month trial, government attorneys spent about a half-million dollars, a staggering sum at the time, attempting to convince jurors that Mr. Hinckley was legally sane on March 30, 1981, the day of the shooting. But the jury concluded that the prosecutor did not prove sanity...

The 2016-17 Supreme Court term has been devoid of many headline-grabbing cases, but Packingham v. North Carolina is one of the few exceptions. This case is noteworthy because in it the Supreme Court has ruled that your right to use Facebook is protected under the first amendment. The Case The dispute centered around a North Carolina law which prohibits registered sex offenders from accessing “a commercial social networking Web site where the sex offender knows that the site permits minor...

26-year-old Marco Robertson was charged with second degree murder after he allegedly stabbed his stepfather multiple times following a family quarrel. Mr. Robertson stayed about three days a week at a home on West 54th Street where his mother and stepfather, 44-year-old James Rice, also resided. The two men argued because Mr. Rice insisted that Mr. Robertson should announce his presence and not simply walk into the house. According to a police report, Mr. Rice berated Mr. Robertson for several...

A 16-year-old girl from the Norwood Park area of Lincolnwood quietly slipped into the backseat of an Uber car and then

Rep. Elgie Sims (D-Chicago) proclaimed that the new Bail Reform Act would “make Illinois a national leader in bail reform.” The measure, which applies to most non-violent misdemeanors and felonies, such as DUI, theft, and drug possession, creates a presumption that monetary bail is inappropriate in these cases. Instead, judges are encouraged to order alternative measures, such as electronic monitoring, heightened reporting, and daily curfews. If a judge does order monetary bail, there must be a bail reduction hearing within...

Following an eight-month, multi-agency investigation that yielded little evidence, Kane County prosecutors charged six men with

A judge denied bail for 31-year-old Waddel Adams, who is charged with home invasion, first-degree murder, and unlawful possession of a firearm following a fatal argument with his neighbor. By all accounts, Mr. Adams got along reasonably well with 30-year-old Bobby Lloyd Sr. until one of Mr. Lloyd’s four young children apparently hit Mr. Adams’ car with a rock. According to witnesses, an angry Mr. Adams confronted the child and his mother with a baseball bat. That incident ended without...

A crowd of spectators at a pretrial hearing saw Judge Vincent Gaughan approve the murder charges against a Chicago police officer; the lead defense attorney also tipped his hand as to his trial strategy. In October of 2014, Officer Van Dyke was among the officers who responded to a disturbance call involving 17-year-old Laquan McDonald; according to a witness, Mr. McDonald had burglarized several trucks in a parking lot and threatened the owner with a knife. Officer Van Dyke fired...