What the Record Establishes
- The January 21, 2026 Lake County grand jury bulletin names 24 people with their charges and case numbers and contains no presumption-of-innocence disclaimer.
- An indictment is a charging decision made by a grand jury hearing only the State. It carries no finding of guilt.
- These bulletins are published to a public government distribution service and are indexed by search engines.
What They Have Not Produced
- Why the office publishes charge announcements but no corresponding notice when a case is dismissed, reduced, or acquitted.
- Whether the office has any written policy governing the retention or de-indexing of bulletins naming people whose charges were later dropped.
- Who inside the office approves bulletin content, and against what standard.
Search a Lake County defendant’s name and the top result is often not a news article. It is a press release from the office that charged him — his name, his case number, and the charges against him, published on government letterhead, permanently indexed, with nothing on the page saying he has not been convicted of anything.
What the bulletins actually contain
The Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office distributes grand jury indictment bulletins through a public government bulletin service. The January 21, 2026 edition is representative. It is a table. Five columns: case number, defendant’s name, charges, department, and judge with bond status and arraignment date. Twenty-four people are named on it. Several appear more than once.
Every person on that list had been indicted. Not one had been tried. An indictment in Illinois is returned by a grand jury that has heard only the State’s presentation — no defense lawyer is present, no witness is cross-examined, and no judge weighs the evidence. It is a charging decision. It establishes nothing about guilt.
The bulletin contains no sentence saying so. There is no line reading “a charge is not evidence of guilt” and no line reading “all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” That language is standard practice in prosecutor press offices across the country. It is absent here.
What that omission does
A bulletin like this outlives the case inside it. Charges get dismissed. Counts get reduced. People get acquitted. Grand jury bulletins are not retracted when any of that happens, because the office publishes an announcement when it charges someone and publishes nothing when the charge fails.
The result is a public record that is permanently one-sided by construction. An employer, a landlord, or a licensing board searching a name finds the accusation on a government domain and finds no disposition. The person carries the charge in search results for years after a court disposed of it — sometimes after the State itself dismissed it.
This is not an allegation of bad faith. It is a description of what an asymmetric publication practice produces. The fix is small and the office can implement it without any change in law.
What this petition asks for
Four changes to a press practice. No legislation, no litigation, no admission of fault.
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Put the presumption on every bulletin
Add a standing notice to every bulletin naming a charged person: that a charge is an accusation, that the person is presumed innocent, and that the grand jury heard only the State. One sentence, at the top, not the bottom.
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Publish dispositions with the same reach
When a case named in a bulletin ends in dismissal, acquittal, or reduction, publish that outcome through the same channel, with the same distribution, referencing the original bulletin.
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Write a correction and de-indexing policy
Adopt and publish a written policy stating how a person named in a bulletin whose case was dismissed or who was acquitted can obtain an update or removal, and how long that takes.
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Add a disposition column
Bulletins already carry a case number. Make the archived version carry the current disposition of that case number, updated from the office’s own system. The office already publishes a data dashboard; the disposition data exists.
If your name is in one of these bulletins
Two things are worth doing, and neither one requires this petition to succeed first.
Ask the office directly. A written request to the State’s Attorney’s public information function, citing the specific bulletin and the disposition of your case, creates a record whether or not it is granted. If your case was dismissed or you were acquitted, say so and attach the order.
Ask the search engines separately. Search engines operate outdated-content and personal-information removal processes that are independent of the publisher. Removing a result from an index does not remove the page, but it changes what a search for your name returns.
Sign below and add the bulletin date and your case number if you are willing. A count of affected people is the single most useful thing this page can produce.
Sign this petition
Add your name to the demand that Lake County put a presumption-of-innocence notice on every bulletin and publish dispositions through the same channel.
Who has signed
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.
Related petitions
This page is about what the county publishes. The county-wide Brady petition is about what it does not disclose. The petition index lists all of them.