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Two attorneys from Cook County Lawyer Kim Foxx, whose Ethics Officer wrote a note announcing that Foxx had withdrawn from Jussie Smollett's charge, will leave the office in the coming weeks, learned the Chicago Sun-Times.
April Perry, whom Foxx named two years ago as chief ethics officer, and Mark Rotert, senior prosecutor and prosecutor who reorganized the process used by the bureau to review wrongful conviction statements, will leave the staff Foxx on May 3, according to letters obtained through a public registration application.
Perry submitted her resignation Wednesday and an email sent to staff says she's holding a position as general counsel in a tech start-up. Rotert filed a letter of resignation on March 27. The previous day, the bureau had dropped 16 charges for disorderly conduct blamed on the "Empire" actor, Rotert told the Chicago Sun-Times.
"(The Smollett case) has absolutely nothing to do with my decision," Rotert said in a phone interview.
Perry, Rotert's supervisor, did not respond to requests for comment. Thursday night, Foxx sent a notice to employees about a May 1st farewell party for Rotert and Perry, congratulating them for their work in the office.
Perry, a former federal prosecutor, announced in a note to the office in February that Foxx would recuse itself from the decision-making process in the Smollett case. His name appears on many e-mails – mostly redacted – exchanged between Foxx's main collaborators before Smollett was charged and in the days following the abrupt end of the case, when all the charges were dropped against him. accused of organizing a hate crime attack. himself.
Rotert stated that he had not played any role in this case until recently, when he liaised between Foxx and Inspector General Patrick Blanchard in order organize an independent review of how the Smollett case had been handled.
"It was precisely because I had no involvement in the case," Rotert said.
The departures mark an almost complete turnover among senior staff of Foxx since she took office in 2016, when she held the highest positions of senior lawyers recruited from outside the office. Foxx presented the new positions of Integrity Unit on the Conviction and the Office of Ethics in its office reform project.
Rotert marked a dramatic change in the way the office handled the wrongful conviction applications, with the state attorney's office having accepted last year the first "massive exemption" in the county. Cook, overturning the criminal convictions of 15 defendants whose cases were stained by the involvement of Chicago police officers under the command of the former Sgt. Ronald Watts. Some 70 people had their convictions overturned or their prosecutions dropped after the IDF investigated the revealed loopholes.
After two years in the role, Rotert said his decision to leave this spring coincided with the date of an anticipated international trip with his wife and the start of the fishing season.
"I really felt that I was in a unique position because I had been a prosecutor and that I had worked in defense … and at the end of the day, when all was over, I was I would go fishing, "said Rotert. "I am incredibly proud of the work we have done. I think we have one (unit) that really should be a national model. "
Josh Tepfer, a lawyer who represented dozens of defendants seeking to overturn their tainted convictions of Watts, paid tribute to Rotert for his fairness and "devotion to the search for the truth". Tepfer, who works for the Exoneration Project at the Law School of the University of Chicago, acknowledged the unorthodox outcome of the criminal case Smollett opened to criticism Foxx and his office.
"There are people who say recently that the office addresses the rich and the powerful, as well as the influential people," Tepfer said. "But I can tell you that my clients do not have money, no power and no influence at all, and these cases were canceled because the office employees knew that 39 was the right thing to do. "
In a statement on Thursday night, Foxx congratulated her two key MPs.
"I am deeply grateful for Mark's work to make the Cook County Conviction Integrity Unit a national model. … The people of Cook County have been well served by his leadership and he has well deserved his retirement.
"I am also grateful for April Perry's mandate as the first ever Chief Ethics Officer for the Cook County Attorney's Office. … I wish him good luck in his new ventures.
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