Did the prosecutor say trial would lead to a prison request?

Yes. The produced June 12, 2025 email states the plea offer would be revoked and prison requested if the State prevailed at trial, while also acknowledging the right to trial and the judge’s sentencing authority.

Is that statement automatically illegal?

No. Plea bargaining law permits prosecutors to withdraw offers and seek lawful sentences. The constitutional question turns on context — the strength of the case, the disclosure history, and what followed the plea.

What is the trial penalty?

The trial penalty is the documented sentencing gap between defendants who plead guilty and otherwise-similar defendants who exercise the right to trial. It is the principal reason the overwhelming majority of criminal cases never reach a jury.

A Lake County Prosecutor Put the Trial Penalty in Writing: Go to Trial, and I Ask for Prison.

A produced June 12, 2025 email from Assistant State’s Attorney Francis DeRosa states that a trial would revoke the plea offer and bring a prison request if the State won. The county produced the email itself.

plea bargainingtrial penaltyFrancis DeRosainternal email

What the Record Establishes

A sworn officer of the court described a materially harsher sentencing request as the direct consequence of exercising the right to trial — in writing.
The email was circulated inside a thread the county later produced under FOIA. It is the government’s own document.
Three months later the defendant pleaded rather than tried the case.

What They Have Not Produced

Every other communication in the plea-negotiation window, in native form with headers intact.
Whether the detective’s 2022 assessment that DUI-drug proof would be difficult was disclosed before that offer was made.
What the file contained on the bodily-harm element at the time the offer was pressed.

The leverage did not have to be inferred from tone or reconstructed from memory. A prosecutor typed it. In a June 12, 2025 email, Assistant State’s Attorney Francis DeRosa wrote that if the case went to trial he would revoke the offer and, if the State prevailed, ask for prison. The same passage nods to the defendant’s right to trial and to the judge’s sentencing authority — the qualifying language is reproduced here in full, because the sentence around it does not need help.

This is the trial penalty, stated plainly

Ninety-seven percent of federal convictions and the overwhelming majority of state convictions arrive by plea. The mechanism is rarely visible: defendants are told, usually orally and usually through counsel, that the price of a trial is years. Here it is in a produced government email, from a named prosecutor, in a case where the investigating detective had already told that same office the drug evidence was thin. Read what the detective wrote in 2022 and then read this email again.

The legal defense, stated fairly and then measured

Prosecutors may lawfully withdraw offers and may seek lawful sentences after trial. Bordenkircher v. Hayes permits hard bargaining. So this page does not assert that the email is, standing alone, an adjudicated act of vindictive prosecution. What it asserts is narrower and harder to escape: the State of Illinois, through a named attorney, put in writing that the cost of a constitutional right was prison. Whether that crossed the line depends on the strength of the case being leveraged, the disclosure history behind it, and what happened after the plea was taken — and every one of those is documented elsewhere in this archive.

Why the exact words matter

Public power reads differently when the paraphrase is stripped away. The office spent three years describing its handling of this case in institutional language. Its own outbox describes it in one sentence.

Open the full dossier on Assistant State’s Attorney Francis DeRosa.