State’s attorney candidate Tommy Brewer started off the week of January 14 by absorbing some bad news. “I just found out that the Sun-Times endorsed Larry Suffredin,” he told me by cell phone as he drove to the Cook County courthouse at 26th and California.
And arguably more, especially in a year when independence and change are leading campaign themes. For the first time in decades, there’s no incumbent in the race for state’s attorney. After three terms Richard Devine is stepping down, and all six Democrats vying to replace him are talking about how they’d improve and reform an office with about 900 attorneys, a $100 million budget, and extraordinary power in deciding how to charge and prosecute crimes.
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Suffredin has promised to aggressively fight public corruption and crack down on gun violence. Aldermen Howard Brookins Jr. and Tom Allen have ripped Devine’s office for not making it a priority to go after bad cops. Even the two veteran prosecutors fighting for the Democratic nomination are talking about change: Robert Milan, Devine’s top deputy, and Anita Alvarez, the county’s third-ranking prosecutor, both say they would improve community outreach. “I recognize that changes need to be made,” Alvarez said. “I don’t have the last word in my position now. That’s why I need this position—so I can have the last word.”
In 1996 he went into private practice to specialize in criminal defense. While he believes most police are on the up-and-up, Brewer says he’s amazed at how many of his clients have been charged on flimsy, even concocted, evidence. Even in the cases where his clients have clearly been guilty, Brewer’s grown frustrated watching them go to jail and then get sent back to their old communities with little chance of finding work. He’s concluded that the county should set up alternative programs to keep nonviolent offenders out of jail—perhaps with a new bond system—and that state laws should be changed to expunge their records.
Brewer says he loves to campaign, but denies he’s running just for the sake of it. If he really were a “perennial candidate” desperate to hold any office at all, he says, he would have worked his legal connections and won nomination for a judgeship.
But Brewer was well aware that he needed to find some way to raise his profile for people outside the tight-knit legal circles of the criminal courthouse. A little before 10 AM, a cluster of TV cameras and photographers burst out of the building, followed shortly by two bodyguards flanking R & B singer R. Kelly, in court for a hearing on child pornography charges. An SUV rolled up to the sidewalk in front, and Kelly and his entourage moved hastily toward it with the pack of media scurrying alongside them.
