Crime & Law

Judge Sets Hearing Date as ‘Broadview Six’ Want Further Investigation Into Prosecutors’ Misconduct Allegations

A federal judge will hear oral arguments and could rule as early as next week on a request from the former “Broadview Six” defendants as they seek a special prosecutor to investigate potential wrongdoing that led to the collapse of the high-profile case against them earlier this year.

U.S. District Judge April Perry set a hearing for Oct. 1 to hear arguments both from attorneys for the six former defendants, as well as federal prosecutors within Chicago’s U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros’ office.

Next week’s hearing comes more than four months after Boutros personally appeared in Perry’s courtroom to apologize to the judge and formally dismiss the case after Perry and defense attorneys learned of alleged misconduct by one of Boutros’ prosecutors before the grand jury that brought charges in the case.

Oak Park Village Board Trustee Brian Straw, former 9th District congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, her campaign staffer Andre Martin, Democratic Committeeperson Michael Rabbitt, ex-Cook County Board candidate Catherine Sharp and musician Joselyn Walsh, were charged following a confrontation on Sept. 26, 2025, between protesters and federal agents outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s processing facility in west suburban Broadview.

Prosecutors alleged the defendants were part of a group that surrounded a government vehicle, “with the intent to hinder and impede” a federal agent from proceeding to the facility and “discharging the duties of his office.” According to the initial indictment, the protesters “banged aggressively” on the vehicle’s windows and hood and broke one of its mirrors and a rear windshield wiper.

But unsealed transcripts from the grand jury proceedings in that case revealed Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg allegedly excused skeptical grand jurors, admitted speaking with grand jurors outside of the hearings and “vouched” for the merits of the allegations against the defendants.

Perry at the time said she had never seen the “types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” adding that while she does “believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing … That trust has been broken.”

Boutros denied knowing of that alleged misconduct until late April, but defense attorneys have since accused the U.S. attorney of a cover-up amid their longstanding belief that the charges were politically motivated. They’re now asking Perry to assign a special prosecutor to investigate.

Both sides have spent recent months filing briefs on that request, and will now have the opportunity to lay out their arguments directly to Perry next week.

Boutros has pushed back against those efforts, stating that although there “can be no doubt that mistakes were made in the prosecution of this case,” he wrote in a filing last month that his office has worked to rectify those issues by dismissing the case and declining to contest the former defendants’ efforts to recoup legal fees.

He also stated his office has enacted “substantial root-cause reforms” as part of a “remediation plan” focused on grand jury procedures and transcripts.

But in a recent filing, defense attorneys argued the case was “poisoned from the start” and that Boutros’ office has sought to “draw a curtain around this unfortunate episode.”

“The self-evident truth is that the government is still contorting itself to avoid the very transparency that it claims to embrace while opposing any further judicial inquiry into what transpired here,” defense attorneys wrote last week. “The government shattered the presumption of regularity and engaged deceitfully with the Court and the defendants. In so doing, it demonstrated an inability to police itself or adhere to due process norms with liberty on the line.”

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