Judge’s ‘people like you’ tirade on Chicago violence didn’t cross the line, appeals court rules
U.S. District Judge John Kness, a Trump appointee, told a man he was sentencing” “I feel in danger every single day when I drive on the expressway ... because of people like you who have absolutely no respect for the law.”
By Frank Main
Jun 30, 2023, 5:30am CDT
U.S. District Judge John Kness is pictured at his 2020 swearing-in at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.
A federal judge in Chicago had had enough and wasn’t about to give Elvin Saldana-Gonzalez a break.
So, as U.S. District Judge John Kness was about to sentence Saldana-Gonzalez in a gun-possession case last year, he unleashed a heated and lengthy commentary on violence in Chicago, where about 700 people were killed and 2,000 carjacked in 2022.
Kness, who said he was speaking as the “voice of the community,” told Saldana-Gonzalez that “people like you” are to blame.
“I feel in danger every single day when I drive on the expressway,” the judge, a former prosecutor who then-President Donald Trump appointed to the bench in 2020, told Saldana-Gonzalez. “I do. And I’m sorry, sir, it’s because of people like you. It really is. It’s because of people like you who have absolutely no respect for the law.”
Kness’s comments take up more than 20 pages of a transcript of the February 2022 hearing in which he cited a “lack of will” on the part of judges, lawyers and society at large in holding criminals accountable for their actions.
“It’s as bad as it has been for as far back as I can remember, and I’ve lived here my entire life,” Kness said. “We have shootings going on everywhere. There was a shooting last week a mile from where I grew up in a fairly lower-middle class but otherwise quiet southwest suburb. We never had shootings when I grew up — ever — and yet a pregnant woman was shot on Route 83 in the middle of the day.”
Elvin Saldana-Gonzalez
Kness appears to have been referring to a woman who was shot and wounded in the back on Jan. 28, 2022, on Route 83 in Willowbrook, after she drove away from a man with whom she’d argued in a parking lot — who police said shot her in her car. Her baby was delivered while she was in surgery, and both survived, according to news reports.
Saldana-Gonzalez had pleaded guilty in an unrelated case to possession of a firearm by a felon.
After Kness wrapped up his commentary on crime and violence, he handed Saldana-Gonzalez a sentence of six and a half years in prison — far longer than the prosecutor had sought.
Saldana-Gonzalez appealed the long sentence, citing Kness’s comments, which his lawyer said were inflammatory.
On June 14, the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — the federal appeals court in Chicago — upheld Saldana-Gonzalez’s sentence. It said the judge had “walked a fine line” with his comments but that the length of the prison term was reasonable.
“Though the court was entitled to discuss Saldana-Gonzalez’s offense in the broad context of gun violence in Chicago, the remark is questionable because it implies that the court partly blamed Saldana-Gonzalez for issues that ‘only tangentially relate to his underlying conduct,’” the appeals court ruling said.
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Saldana-Gonzalez previously had been convicted of killing a rival gang member in 1999 in Waukegan when he was 19. He served 18 years in prison before being paroled.
In 2019, a year and a half after Saldana-Gonzalez’s release, while he was still on parole, Chicago police officers stopped a car he was driving. He ran away, tossing a loaded, stolen .40-caliber Glock handgun into a Dumpster in an alley in the 4800 block of North Pulaski Road in Albany Park, authorities said.
Kness told Saldana-Gonzalez he couldn’t think “of anything that’s a whole lot more concerning than a previously convicted murderer running from the police with a gun in his hand.”
Saldana-Gonzalez’s lawyer Jack Corfman asked the judge to sentence him at the low end of the sentencing guidelines — about three years in prison. Corfman told Kness that Saldana-Gonzalez had a traumatic childhood, that he would have support from his wife and daughter after he was released and that he’d believed he needed the gun to protect himself.
But Kness told Saldana-Gonzalez, “If you felt afraid, you should look in the mirror. It’s because of people who behave the way you do.”
Still, the judge said he didn’t think Saldana-Gonzalez was irredeemable and told him he averted being handed an even longer sentence by accepting responsibility for his crime.
“I have given you a significant sentence here, and I don’t do it lightly,” Kness told him. “It does not make me happy. I meant what I said earlier about believing that you have worth as a human being. And I sincerely hope that you dig deep and take a look at that worth and make something of your life. Otherwise, you are headed to a very, very bad remainder of your life.”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, Saldana-Gonzalez is due to be released from a federal penitentiary in Minnesota in April 2025.
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