...home of Al Capone, the Chicago Black Sox, a succession of Daleys, Barak Obama, and Rahm Emmanuel...
now is like Dodge City before Marshal Dillon arrived: a fatal shootout on its streets is no crime because both sides were shooting. The Windy City already is world-famous for shootouts on its streets, with an astounding 3,625 shootings so far this year, 623 of them fatal. (That corpse count would be higher save for the city’s superb medical care for gunshot victims, made possible by all the practice its trauma surgeons receive.) But how many more shooting matches will start now that the word is going out that you can escape charges in a gang shootout -- even if someone is killed -- if both sides are shooting? An escalating number of shootouts is the inescapable implication of the decision of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office to release all five suspects arrested in a fatal shootout between rival gangs in the city’s Southside Austin neighborhood, not too far from the Obama Monument. The head of that office, Kim Foxx, was elected with considerable financial support from George Soros
...either Ernst Stavro Blofeld or Auric Goldfinger come true..., who has helped elect many soft-on-crime prosecutors across the US. Tom Schuba writes in the Chicago Sun-Times:
Five men linked to a deadly gang-related shootout Friday in Austin were released from custody after prosecutors declined to charge each of them with a pair of felonies, including first-degree murder, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.
The brazen mid-morning shootout, which left one shooter dead and two of the suspects maimed, stemmed from an internal dispute between two factions of the Four Corner Hustlers street gang, according to an internal police report and a law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation.
The source said police sought to charge all five suspects with murder and aggravated battery. By Sunday morning, a Chicago police spokeswoman acknowledged the suspects had "been released without charges."
In a statement later Sunday, Cristina Villareal, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, explained that prosecutors had "determined that the evidence was insufficient to meet our burden of proof to approve felony charges." Police officials agreed with the decision, Villareal added.
While she wouldn’t specify what other evidence prosecutors needed to file charges, the police report acknowledged that victims of the shootout weren’t cooperating with Sherlocks.
But the report also framed the state’s attorney’s office’s decision to decline charges in a different light: "Mutual combatants was cited as the reason for the rejection." Mutual combat is a legal term used to define a fight or struggle that two parties willingly engage in.