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Notes -
The US (including Illinois) already has in place the felony-murder rule which can be used as a very broad penumbra to charge any participants of a crime with murder, regardless of their direct action or intent to kill. This was used to nail Roddie Bryan with life in prison in the Arbery case, even though he was far away from the shooting that killed Arbery. So it seems to me there are already well established laws that can punish people, even if they are only tangentially involved in someone's death. Do you disagree?
Illinois already has a 25 years to life prison sentence for felony murder. To @vpn 's credit, they included a link about the 2009 incident and what the prosecutor said about that case:
According to the prosecutor, the issue was lack of evidence, but it's plausible the prosecutor is now either lying or being misleading to cover their ass. Do you find their justification credible?
Since the law on the books already has the prison sentence you desire, what would you want to see change to make it easier to get convictions? Are there any downsides to making it easier to get convictions?
[tagging @Hoffmeister25 for similar reply]
I mean, I feel like I made it pretty clear that I do not consider 25 to life a just sentence, insofar as he is still alive. I want him to no longer be alive anymore. I want not a single penny of Illinois taxpayer money to be used to keep this man alive. I have no idea why you or anyone else would actually care if he himself was the one who pulled the trigger in the death of those two people. He was invading an innocent person’s home with the intent to burglarize it. The appropriate penalty for that crime should be death.
The article in question also mentions that five years after the original home invasion which resulted in the murder of two people, Salas then plead guilty to a second home invasion in which yet another person was murdered. Surely even if you believe he deserved a second chance after his first deadly home invasion, the fact that he did it a second time should make it abundantly clear what kind of person we’re dealing with, and the right and proper steps should be taken to end his life, publicly and without delay.
I agree the article is worded ambiguously but I didn't read that as describing two separate incidents but the article was repeating itself when describing the charging timeline. Either way, the prosecutor's statement for why they offered home invasion plea deal is that they lacked evidence to proceed with murder charges. I understand what you desire in terms of punishment, but how do you deal with the evidence issue?
To me this obviously seems to refer to two separate crimes. He was charged with murder for the 2009 case, but pled down to home invasion and served an unspecified amount of time for that. Then in 2016 he was charged with murder, then pled down to home invasion and sentenced to eight years. Are you suggesting that he was tried twice for the same crime, five years apart, pled down to home invasion twice for the same crime, and served two different prison sentences for that same crime?
This where obviously I need more information - information which the article does not provide - in order to comment on the evidence issue in this particular situation. There’s a big difference between these two scenarios: 1. Salas and one or more accomplices invaded someone’s home, and in the commission of that home invasion somebody was shot. Police couldn’t determine, given the evidence at their disposal, which one of the home invaders fired the shot, so they couldn’t pin the murder on Salas specifically. 2. Police could not muster the evidence to actually place Salas at the scene of the home invasion.
In scenario 2 I obviously don’t want him executed, but scenario 2 seems wildly implausible given that Salas did in fact plead guilty to the home invasion. (I’m aware that there is the possibility that he took a plea deal for a crime which he didn’t commit in order to avoid the possibility of being convicted of an even worse crime that he also didn’t commit. The probability of this just seems far lower than I think you believe that it is.)
In scenario 1, again, it makes no difference whatsoever to me who actually directly committed the murder. If Salas committed a home invasion and nobody died, he should be executed. Don’t commit home invasions, or it’s curtains for you. I genuinely do believe this. Yes, there are edge cases; divorced couple, nasty custody battle, husband technically isn’t supposed to be in the home even though he lived there for twenty years, he still has a key, lets himself in to see his kids while ex-wife isn’t home, overzealous prosecutor charges him with home invasion. This is the sort of non-central case that is so far from what I guarantee that Salas did, I don’t think it’s worth discussing them in the same conversation.
With felony-murder rule, they wouldn't need to prove who actually fired the shot at all, only that 1. someone died 2. while Salas was intending to commit a felony 3. the felony had the likelihood of getting someone killed. Given that someone died and that home invasions are inherently risky, the weakest link in that chain seems to be whether Salas was "intent on committing a felony" when the people were killed. So the reason they lacked evidence could also be "3. Police could not muster the evidence to indicate that Salas was at the home with the intent of committing a felony." There are a number of ways this could be the case, and I'm happy to rattle off some hypothetical examples if you're interested. Also, even plain vanilla murder charges don't need proof about who specifically fired the shot. More than one person can be convicted of committing a murder and if you're interested I can look up some real life cases.
This is a possibility, yes. What probability do you place on it? My anecdotal experience from my work is that the "factually innocent" client exists but is extremely rare. What probability did you think I placed on it?
Setting aside the questions above about evidence for the moment, if I was to summarize your position it would be: you agree with the felony-murder rule as it is but that you'd rather see the death penalty rather than the current "25 to life" sentence. Is that a fair characterization?
I apologize, I believe I probably imputed to your beliefs that you don’t actually hold. I’m aware of your choice of career and of your left-libertarian/anarchist-adjacent worldview, and I extrapolated that to assume that you’re more pro-defendant/anti-justice-system than you may actually be.
Yes, it is fair, although again I want to stress that my support of the death penalty in Salas’ case is independent of felony murder jurisprudence, and that I would like to see the death penalty expanded to a significantly broader range of crimes than that to which it is currently applied.
No worries, you were at least correct about my worldview and how that might extrapolate to "pro-defendant/anti-justice-system", so that was at least a reasonable assumption. Very very few of my clients are innocent. The main grey area is usually "yes they did the thing, but is it a crime?" scenario, most often self-defense cases. I wrote about how useless I generally am for my cases if you're interested: Eleven Magic Words
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Do note that the IL SAFE-T act referenced above does in part limit the effective umbrella of the felony-murder rule.
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I know about felony murder. I'm wishing that the prosecution made use of it, rather than letting him admit to the relatively minor crime of home invasion and dropping everything related to his complicity in a double homicide.
As you correctly point out: lack of evidence of him directly committing the double homicide is no defense against felony murder charges. Based on my non-lawyer understanding he is indeed guilty of that crime. I don't think that the prosecutors had to let him off on that.
But now we are just getting into prosecutorial discretion. If your local DA's office declines to press charges even when it appears they could , then there is no law or reform that will help. I don't have a solution to that other than to recommend choosing DAs who choose to prosecute murderers.
And I'm not some tough-on-crime hardass. But on the edge case of a home invading double murderer getting 4 years with no attempt at felony murder charges, I'm going to start advocating for tougher prosecutors.
Given we seem to have equivalent understanding of this issue: what reform do you think I would recommend?
To get a felony-murder conviction, you have to prove (paraphrasing) that someone was trying to commit a felony crime and did so in a way that made it very likely someone would get killed or seriously hurt. I don't know anything about this case but if the prosecutors were pursuing murder charges on a felony-murder theory, the lack of evidence described could have been as far upstream as unable to prove he was even at the house (let alone that he was there to commit a felony, let alone that he pulled the trigger, etc.).
Based on the objectives you outline, electing tougher prosecutors who are more enthusiastic about pursuing even edge case charges would likely get you what you want. But this might be a risky gambit which could result in more acquittals if prosecutors are pressing their luck by overcharging or pursuing cases with bad evidence. Would you agree that's a concern? Separate from overplaying their hand, would you have any other concerns about tougher prosecutors?
Bad phasing on my part. This isn't an edge case in that it is some wobbler they would have to really reach to try to convict. I don't want extremely aggressive prosecutors throwing charges at the wall and seeing what sticks.
How I should have phrased it is: this looks like an extreme case of prosecutors letting a hard-core criminal plea out to very minor crimes. Reading some news articles it looks like no one disputes that he is a multi-time home invader. And either he or his partner in than one invasion killed two people. So where's the felony murder charges?
Also he may be a long time murderer with a pile of dead people he personally killed:
https://wgntv.com/news/chicagocrime/no-bail-for-man-charged-in-portage-park-triple-murder/amp/
And maybe the prosecutors had good reason not to go to trial on this amazing list of very serious crimes. But they didn't bother pushing for felony murder when he admits to breaking and entering with his accomplice. So I'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt here. I accept the video of his casual execution of multiple people as evidence that he may have done this before.
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