6,840,000 pageviews


Friday, October 20, 2023

The Un-Great Escape

     On May 12, 2002 34-year-old Steven L. Robbins got into a fight at a party in Indianapolis with a man from Kentucky. During the altercation Mr. Robbins shot 24-year-old Richard Melton to death. Eighteen months later the Gary, Indiana native was found guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to sixty years in prison. (Robbins wasn't eligible for parole until 2029.)

     On Tuesday, January 29, 2013 Steven Robbins, now 44, was transported from the state prison in Michigan City, an Indiana town 50 miles east of Chicago, to the Cook County Jail. Robbins had a court hearing the next day pertaining to a 1992 Illinois felony charge.

     On Wednesday, after the judge informed Robbins that the old charge against him had been dismissed in 2007 (why did they summon him to Illinois to tell him that?) the prisoner was returned to the Cook County Jail.

     Corrections officers responsible for hauling Robbins back to Indiana, on Thursday, January 31 called the Cook County Jail to alert officials that they would pick up Robbins for his trip back to prison. That's when the Indiana authorities learned that Robbins had been released from custody the previous evening at seven o'clock. Because no one at the Cook County Jail knew that Robbins was serving a sentence in Indiana for murder he simply walked out of the massive lock-up through the main door.

     The fact that Steven Robbins had been transported to Chicago to face charges that were dismissed five years earlier suggested there was something profoundly wrong with the corrections bureaucracy in both states. It went without saying that a major bureaucratic SNAFU led to Robbins' easy escape from the Cook County Jail.

     On February 1, 2013 police in the northern Illinois town of Kankakee arrested Robbins at the home of a friend. He was watching TV. The Cook County Sheriff, in an unusual move, took responsibility for the foul-up. "We let people down, no mistake about it." Fortunately, while loose, Robbins did not commit any serious crimes. For Robbins, the easy part was getting out of the Cook County Jail. Staying out proved more difficult. 

1 comment:

  1. Small correction... Kankakee isn't in southern Illinois; it's in the northern part of the state.

    ReplyDelete