Please speak louder into my lapel
Cop quits after recording surfaces
LAW ENFORCEMENT | Bruce Rushton
A local police officer has learned firsthand that it pays to watch what you say now that the state’s antiquated eavesdropping statute has been ruled unconstitutional.
Sgt. Sam Gool of the Buffalo- Mechanisburg Police Department resigned last summer, Illinois Times has learned, after he told a woman that a driving under the influence case against her husband would likely be dismissed. The woman surreptitiously recorded the conversation and gave the recording to her husband’s attorney, who then turned it over to prosecutors.
“It’ll get dismissed because I lost the video (memoralizing the DUI arrest),” Gool tells the woman, according to a transcript of the recording prepared by the Sangamon County state’s attorney’s office.
“Oh,” the woman responds. “Ha, ha, ha,…deleted it by ACCident,” says Gool, who later assured the woman that he would get the case dismissed.
The circumstances behind the recording aren’t clear from the transcript, but it appears to memorialize a face-to-face conversation. The transcript shows that Gool and the woman knew each other prior to her husband’s arrest, but the relationship between the two isn’t clear. When the woman tells Gool that she’s angry, apparently because her husband was arrested, the sergeant responds by saying that her husband’s last name had sounded familiar, but he didn’t know who he was arresting.
“He didn’t say who he was,” says Gool, who told the woman that he didn’t learn that the person he’d arrested was her husband until he was en route to the jail. “I even told him, ‘Why didn’t you say something to me when I first stopped you?’” Gool told prosecutors in April that he had accidentally deleted video of the February arrest. That same month, an attorney for the woman and her husband presented prosecutors with the audiotape, which was made in March, one week after the Illinois Supreme Court declared that the state’s eavesdropping law enacted in 1961 was unconstitutional.
The law that made it a felony to record a conversation without the consent of both parties had been under judicial fire prior to the March ruling, with a federal court in 2012 declaring unconstitutional a provision in the statute that prohibited people from videotaping police officers performing their duties without consent from officers. The court decision last spring involved a woman who spent 20 months in jail on felony charges after she recorded telephone conversations with a Cook County court official, then posted the recordings on the Internet in the belief that the official might be engaged in wrongdoing. The 53-year-old law deemed all conversations to be private, no matter where they occurred, and the Supreme Court tossed the law on the grounds that it was so broad that someone who recorded fans yelling at an athletic event could be prosecuted.
For now, at least, experts agree that it is legal for a person who participates in a conversation to record that conversation anywhere in the state without informing anyone, but that might change. The General Assembly is expected to consider a new eavesdropping statute, but lawmakers haven’t arrived at a way to prohibit surreptitious recording while allowing citizens to record police regardless of whether officers give permission or are even aware that they are being recorded.
In Sangamon County, state’s attorney John Milhiser said that he considered charging Gool with a crime.
“I was concerned about possible destruction of evidence and obstructing justice and possible official misconduct,” Milhiser said.
Milhiser said that he consulted with Illinois State Police before deciding that no charges would be filed. Ultimately, Milhiser said that he decided prosecutors would not be able to prove that Gool had intentionally destroyed evidence.
After deciding not to charge Gool, Milhiser said that his office contacted Bryon Honea, chief of the Buffalo- Mechanisburg Police Department, and shared details of the probe into possible criminal charges. Honea said that Gool resigned.
Gool, who could not be reached for comment, had previously worked for the Illinois Department of Corrections and police departments in Southern View and Leroy.
Contact Bruce Rushton at [email protected].
