Crime & Law

U.S. Attorney Announces ‘Sweeping’ Changes to Grand Jury Policies After Misconduct Allegations Rocked ‘Broadview Six’ Case

Chicago’s U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros announced “sweeping” reforms to his office’s grand jury procedures, days after allegations of prosecutorial misconduct by his staff tanked the “Broadview Six” case and sparked widespread blowback against his office.

Boutros said the new internal reforms, which took effect Tuesday, will improve transparency and effectiveness while “greatly reducing the likelihood of mistakes and errors.”

“These remediations should also be deeply curative and put to rest once and for all the divergent practices that have existed across the Office for decades, including from one Assistant U.S. Attorney to another as well as from one generation to the next,” he said in a statement. “That’s because these are clear, bright line rules that everyone must abide by, which should streamline and simplify the decision-making and disclosure process, as opposed to bedevil it.”

The new procedures establish “clear and unequivocal expectations and rules” for federal prosecutors relating to grand jury disclosures and the timing of those disclosures, Boutros’ office said. It also includes an expanded education about grand jury presentations and additional training from national experts.

Boutros’ office also said he and the Department of Justice have taken “swift action related to internal personnel matters.”

The announcement comes less than a week after Boutros personally dismissed all charges against the “Broadview Six” and apologized in open court for his prosecutors’ conduct in securing charges in the politically-charged case.

While the criminal charges are gone, the fallout from the bombshell developments continue after U.S. District Judge April Perry last week revealed the substantial misconduct government prosecutors allegedly engaged in and covered up in redacted grand jury transcripts.

Perry found the assistant U.S. attorneys handling the case engaged in “vouching,” held improper communications with grand jurors outside of the court proceedings and excused some jurors who disagreed with the government’s theory of the case.

According to Boutros, after doing so, his office launched a review of other grand jury presentations that could have been “impacted in a similar fashion.” He said that process is “far along” but also remains ongoing.

Chris Parente, a defense attorney in the Broadview case, also said this week he has reason to believe Boutros himself had some sort of “personal contact” with the grand jury, though the U.S. Attorney’s Office has denied that claim.

The Broadview charges stemmed from a confrontation between protesters and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent driving a vehicle outside the agency’s west suburban processing facility in September. Prosecutors initially alleged the group “banged aggressively” on the vehicle and crowded together and pushed against the vehicle in order to “hinder and impede its movement.”

The alleged prosecutorial misconduct has already bled into at least one other high-profile case. Attorneys for Mahmood Sami Khan, who is charged as part of an alleged fraud scheme at Loretto Hospital, filed a motion to dismiss his case this week, citing “blatant, repeated” misconduct by the same prosecutors before the same grand jury that indicted the “Broadview Six.”

“The government has received every benefit, to date, from a presumption of regularity that was clearly unearned because we now know that the process was infected with misconduct,” Khan’s attorneys wrote.

That motion does not name any specific prosecutor, but the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg was the only prosecutor involved in both cases. She had a lead role in the Broadview case until she took a role with the Senate Judiciary Committee under U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin. 

Mecklenburg has since been terminated from that position after the alleged misconduct in the Broadview became publicly known.

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