What the Record Establishes
- Lake County publicly acknowledges having wrongfully prosecuted innocent people before 2020 and built a Conviction Integrity Unit around that acknowledgment.
- The office published a fifteen-rule written Brady policy in 2022 whose Rule 1 names pro se defendants expressly.
- Every demand across these six petitions is answerable with a record or a number the office already generates.
What They Have Not Produced
- How many pre-2022 convictions have been re-screened against the 2022 policy.
- How many Rule 13 written constitutional-violation reports have ever been filed.
- How many Rule 3 Brady-list notification letters have been sent to defendants, in any year.
These petitions share one method. None of them asks anyone to be declared guilty and none asks anyone to be declared innocent. Each one takes a rule the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office published about itself and asks the office to show the records that rule would have generated. An office cannot call its own policy unreasonable.
Why this works
In 2022 the office published a written policy on Brady disclosure with fifteen numbered rules and a stated penalty for breaking them: “discipline up to termination.” In 2020 it created a Conviction Integrity Unit and named it for Juan Rivera, a man it convicted three times for a murder DNA proved he did not commit.
Those two documents are the strongest arguments anyone has ever made against Lake County’s own history, and the county wrote both of them. Every petition below simply asks that they be applied.
The county-wide petitions
Petitions naming individual prosecutors
Four Assistant State’s Attorneys appear by name in the county’s own produced email record. Each petition asks the same five questions about that prosecutor’s caseload, and each links to a dossier built entirely from documents the government released.
What signing does and does not do
A petition is not a filing. It does not pause a deadline, it does not create a right, and no court is required to look at it. What it does is produce a number and a record of people willing to be counted — which is the thing a records demand, a press inquiry, or a supervisory filing can actually cite.
If you are inside an appeal window or a post-conviction window, that clock is running right now and this page will not stop it. Sign, and then read the filing guides.
How your signature is handled
Public
Your display name, your standing, your town, and your case number if you give one. Nothing else. Pick any display name you want — there is no verification step and no requirement that it be your real name.
Private
Your account of what happened and your contact details. These are never rendered on any page of this site. They exist so a demand or a filing can be written with real specifics behind it.
Not collected
No IP logging, no browser fingerprint, no third-party analytics on this form. A random token is stored in your browser so one browser holds one editable signature per petition.
What this is not
This is not a court filing and it does not toll any deadline. If you are inside an appeal window or a post-conviction window, that clock keeps running. Sign this and also talk to a lawyer.