Woman hospitalized after hit-and-run in Clinton
Police said the incident happened around 9:50 p.m. At the time, the Square was barricaded and closed to traffic for the Chamber of Commerce's MayDays Festival.
UPDATE: Two dead after vehicle vs. semi-truck crash on I-57 in Neoga
The victim was brought to a local hospital but is expected to be okay.
On Saturday, Clinton Police arrested 28-year-old Damian Multine of Phoenix, AZ for leaving the scene of an accident involving personal injury. This is a class four felony. Multine was processed at the Dewitt County Jail and released on a Notice to Appear in court per the Illinois Safe-T Act.
The Clinton Police Department said on Facebook that as part of 'speculation/rumor control' there is no correlation between Multine and the MayDays Carnival/Festival. They added that all suspects are innocent until proven guilty in court.
WCIA reached out to the Clinton Police Department for more information but did not immediately receive a response back
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Chicago Tribune
7 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
Column: Quirk in SAFE-T Act muddles death of Antioch woman
It was Winston Churchill who pointed out decades ago: 'A lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its pants on.' A Lake County judge last week unfortunately found the British statesman's thoughts to be true. This after she followed the guidelines of the Illinois SAFE-T Act, which was signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker on Jan. 22, 2021. Associate Circuit Court Judge Randie Bruno was condemned in national media reports last week for releasing a Waukegan man charged with letting the corpse of an Antioch woman rot in his garbage bin for several weeks. 'Significant threats and harassment', authorities said, were forthcoming from morons who either don't know Illinois law, believed incorrect reporting or casually decided to ignore what are considered to be jailable offenses here. Authorities are investigating the threats for the judge's lawful actions in the first-appearance hearing of Jose Luis Mendoza-Gonzalez, 52, who has been charged with concealing the death, among other charges, of Megan Bos, 37. Yet, the damage was done after a U.S. Department of Homeland Security official said, 'It is absolutely repulsive this monster walked free on Illinois' streets after allegedly committing such a heinous crime.' This came after federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents picked up Mendoza-Gonzalez, an immigrant from Mexico, for being a 'criminal illegal alien.' He's scheduled to be deported, although the Lake County State's Attorney's Office is seeking to keep him in the U.S. to prosecute him for the Bos charges. While the alleged crimes are indeed gruesome and would seem to be enough to put an individual in jail until trial, they surprisingly don't fall under the guidelines of the SAFE-T Act. In this instance, the act required the judge to release the defendant until trial. Five years old, the law's effectiveness is still being debated, especially in the case of Megan Bos, whose cause of death remains under investigation. We need to remember the SAFE-T Act, pushed by the Democratic-controlled Illinois legislature, ended cash bail in the state, undercutting judicial discretion and stripping judges of the authority to determine either to jail alleged criminals before trial or set bond to allow them to roam free until their days in court. The law prohibits Illinois judges from independently initiating detention proceedings, regardless of the case or circumstances before them. That's an important consideration, obviously overlooked by detractors of Judge Bruno. In Lake County, State's Attorney Eric Rinehart campaigned heartily in favor of the act. It has seemed to work here until it doesn't due to quirks in the law. A statement issued July 22 from the office of Lake County Circuit Court Chief Judge Daniel Shanes spelled out the foibles in the SAFE-T Act. It notes that the charges in the death of Bos, which include abuse of a corpse and obstructing justice, are excluded in the law. As such, it 'forbids the court from holding an individual charged with the offenses against this defendant in jail prior to trial.' The legal community agrees that the SAFE-T Act created one of the most restrictive procedures in the nation for determining whether a person charged with a crime can be detained in jail before trial. Instead, according to the judicial statement, the act requires criminal defendants be released before trial unless a state's attorney's office charges them with certain detainable offenses specified by the statute, and a petition is filed seeking to detain defendants. In December 2024, the Illinois Judges Association issued a statement clarifying aspects of the SAFE-T Act: 'Judges must make detention decisions within the framework of the law.' In the case of Mendoza-Gonzalez, the State's Attorney's Office did not file a petition seeking to jail him because the charges weren't detainable. Bruno, an experienced jurist and former assistant state's attorney, placed him on pretrial release with conditions, including reporting to pretrial services and not leaving Illinois. 'Disinformation undermines our Republic,' the judicial statement from the chief judge's office said. 'Threats of violence and intimidation against judges weaken our democracy. Knowing what happens in court and understanding the law are essential to public trust.' So true. It's a sad America when judges receive threats for doing their jobs as quacks ignore what the law spells out. Wonder how many of these online threats come from Illinois residents? If they are Illinoisans, who should be familiar with the SAFE-T Act, they are targeting the wrong public official. They need to direct their ire at their legislative representatives who adopted the law.
San Francisco Chronicle
25-07-2025
- San Francisco Chronicle
FACT FOCUS: Trump claims cashless bail increases crime, but data is inconclusive
As his administration faces mounting pressure to release Justice Department files related the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, President Donald Trump is highlighting a different criminal justice issue — cashless bail. He suggested in a Truth Social post this week that eliminating cash bail as a condition of pretrial release from jail has led to rising crime in U.S. cities that have enacted these reforms. However, studies have shown no clear link. Here's a closer look at the facts. TRUMP: 'Crime in American Cities started to significantly rise when they went to CASHLESS BAIL. The WORST criminals are flooding our streets and endangering even our great law enforcement officers. It is a complete disaster, and must be ended, IMMEDIATELY!' THE FACTS: Data has not determined the impact of cashless bail on crime rates. But experts say it is incorrect to claim that there is an adverse connection. 'I don't know of any valid studies corroborating the President's claim and would love to know what the Administration offers in support,' said Kellen Funk, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies pretrial procedure and bail bonding. 'In my professional judgment I'd call the claim demonstrably false and inflammatory.' Jeff Clayton, executive director of the American Bail Coalition, the main lobbying arm of the cash bail industry, also pointed to a lack of evidence. 'Studies are inconclusive in terms of whether bail reforms have had an impact on overall crime numbers,' he said. 'This is due to pretrial crime being a small subset of overall crime. It is also difficult to categorize reforms as being 'cashless' or not, i.e., policies where preventative detention is introduced as an alternative to being held on bail.' Different jurisdictions, different laws In 2023, Illinois became the first state to completely eliminate cash bail when the state Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law abolishing it. The move was part of an expansive criminal justice overhaul adopted in 2021 known as the SAFE-T Act. Under the change, a judge decides whether to release the defendant prior to their trial, weighing factors such as their criminal charges, if they could pose any danger to others and if they are considered a flight risk. Loyola University of Chicago's Center for Criminal Justice published a 2024 report on Illinois' new cashless bail policy, one year after it went into effect. It acknowledges that there is not yet enough data to know what impact the law has had on crime, but that crime in Illinois did not increase after its implementation. Violent and property crime declined in some counties. A number of other jurisdictions, including New Jersey, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., have nearly eliminated cash bail or limited its use. Many include exceptions for high-level crimes. Proponents of eliminating cash bail describe it as a penalty on poverty, suggesting that the wealthy can pay their way out of jail to await trial while those with fewer financial resources have to sit it out behind bars. Critics have argued that bail is a time-honored way to ensure defendants released from jail show up for court proceedings. They warn that violent criminals will be released pending trial, giving them license to commit other crimes. A lack of consensus Studies have shown mixed results regarding the impact of cashless bail on crime. Many focus on the recidivism of individual defendants rather than overall crime rates. A 2024 report published by the Brennan Center for Justice saw 'no statistically significant relationship' between bail reform and crime rates. It looked at crime rate data from 2015 through 2021 for 33 cities across the U.S., 22 of which had instituted some type of bail reform. Researchers used a statistical method to determine if crime rates had diverged in those with reforms and those without. Ames Grawert, the report's co-author and senior counsel in the Brennan Center's Justice Program, said this conclusion "holds true for trends in crime overall or specifically violent crime.' Similarly, a 2023 paper published in the American Economic Journal found no evidence that cash bail helps ensure defendants will show up in court or prevents crime among those who are released while awaiting trial. The paper evaluated the impact of a 2018 policy instituted by the Philadelphia's district attorney that instructed prosecutors not to set bail for certain offenses. A 2019 court decree in Harris County, Texas, requires most people charged with a misdemeanor to be released without bail while awaiting trial. The latest report from the monitoring team responsible for tracking the impact of this decision, released in 2024, notes that the number of people arrested for misdemeanors has declined by more than 15% since 2015. The number of those rearrested within one year has similarly declined, with rearrest rates remaining stable in recent years. Asked what data Trump was using to support his claim, the White House pointed to a 2022 report from the district attorney's office in Yolo County, California, that looked at how a temporary cashless bail system implemented across the state to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks in courts and jails impacted recidivism. It found that out of 595 individuals released between April 2020 and May 2021 under this system, 70.6% were arrested again after they were released. A little more than half were rearrested more than once. A more recent paper, published in February by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, also explored the effects of California's decision to suspend most bail during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reports that implementation of this policy 'caused notable increases in both the likelihood and number of rearrests within 30 days.' However, a return to cash bail did not impact the number of rearrests for any type of offense. The paper acknowledges that other factors, such as societal disruption from the pandemic, could have contributed to the initial increase. Many contributing factors It is difficult to pinpoint specific explanations for why crime rises and falls. The American Bail Coalition's Clayton noted that other policies that have had a negative impact on crime, implemented concurrently with bail reforms, make it 'difficult to isolate or elevate one or more causes over the others.' Paul Heaton, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies criminal justice interventions, had a similar outlook. 'Certainly there are some policy levers that people look at — the size of the police force and certain policies around sentencing,' he said. 'But there's a lot of variation in crime that I think even criminologists don't necessarily fully understand.'
Hamilton Spectator
25-07-2025
- Hamilton Spectator
FACT FOCUS: Trump claims cashless bail increases crime, but data is inconclusive
As his administration faces mounting pressure to release Justice Department files related the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, President Donald Trump is highlighting a different criminal justice issue — cashless bail. He suggested in a Truth Social post this week that eliminating cash bail as a condition of pretrial release from jail has led to rising crime in U.S. cities that have enacted these reforms. However, studies have shown no clear link. Here's a closer look at the facts. TRUMP: 'Crime in American Cities started to significantly rise when they went to CASHLESS BAIL. The WORST criminals are flooding our streets and endangering even our great law enforcement officers. It is a complete disaster, and must be ended, IMMEDIATELY!' THE FACTS: Data has not determined the impact of cashless bail on crime rates. But experts say it is incorrect to claim that there is an adverse connection. 'I don't know of any valid studies corroborating the President's claim and would love to know what the Administration offers in support,' said Kellen Funk, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies pretrial procedure and bail bonding. 'In my professional judgment I'd call the claim demonstrably false and inflammatory.' Jeff Clayton, executive director of the American Bail Coalition, the main lobbying arm of the cash bail industry, also pointed to a lack of evidence. 'Studies are inconclusive in terms of whether bail reforms have had an impact on overall crime numbers,' he said. 'This is due to pretrial crime being a small subset of overall crime. It is also difficult to categorize reforms as being 'cashless' or not, i.e., policies where preventative detention is introduced as an alternative to being held on bail.' Different jurisdictions, different laws In 2023, Illinois became the first state to completely eliminate cash bail when the state Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law abolishing it. The move was part of an expansive criminal justice overhaul adopted in 2021 known as the SAFE-T Act . Under the change, a judge decides whether to release the defendant prior to their trial, weighing factors such as their criminal charges, if they could pose any danger to others and if they are considered a flight risk. Loyola University of Chicago's Center for Criminal Justice published a 2024 report on Illinois' new cashless bail policy, one year after it went into effect. It acknowledges that there is not yet enough data to know what impact the law has had on crime, but that crime in Illinois did not increase after its implementation. Violent and property crime declined in some counties. A number of other jurisdictions , including New Jersey, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., have nearly eliminated cash bail or limited its use. Many include exceptions for high-level crimes. Proponents of eliminating cash bail describe it as a penalty on poverty , suggesting that the wealthy can pay their way out of jail to await trial while those with fewer financial resources have to sit it out behind bars. Critics have argued that bail is a time-honored way to ensure defendants released from jail show up for court proceedings. They warn that violent criminals will be released pending trial, giving them license to commit other crimes. A lack of consensus Studies have shown mixed results regarding the impact of cashless bail on crime. Many focus on the recidivism of individual defendants rather than overall crime rates. A 2024 report published by the Brennan Center for Justice saw 'no statistically significant relationship' between bail reform and crime rates. It looked at crime rate data from 2015 through 2021 for 33 cities across the U.S., 22 of which had instituted some type of bail reform. Researchers used a statistical method to determine if crime rates had diverged in those with reforms and those without. Ames Grawert, the report's co-author and senior counsel in the Brennan Center's Justice Program, said this conclusion 'holds true for trends in crime overall or specifically violent crime.' Similarly, a 2023 paper published in the American Economic Journal found no evidence that cash bail helps ensure defendants will show up in court or prevents crime among those who are released while awaiting trial. The paper evaluated the impact of a 2018 policy instituted by the Philadelphia's district attorney that instructed prosecutors not to set bail for certain offenses. A 2019 court decree in Harris County, Texas, requires most people charged with a misdemeanor to be released without bail while awaiting trial. The latest report from the monitoring team responsible for tracking the impact of this decision, released in 2024, notes that the number of people arrested for misdemeanors has declined by more than 15% since 2015. The number of those rearrested within one year has similarly declined, with rearrest rates remaining stable in recent years. Asked what data Trump was using to support his claim, the White House pointed to a 2022 report from the district attorney's office in Yolo County, California, that looked at how a temporary cashless bail system implemented across the state to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks in courts and jails impacted recidivism. It found that out of 595 individuals released between April 2020 and May 2021 under this system, 70.6% were arrested again after they were released. A little more than half were rearrested more than once. A more recent paper, published in February by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, also explored the effects of California's decision to suspend most bail during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reports that implementation of this policy 'caused notable increases in both the likelihood and number of rearrests within 30 days.' However, a return to cash bail did not impact the number of rearrests for any type of offense. The paper acknowledges that other factors, such as societal disruption from the pandemic, could have contributed to the initial increase. Many contributing factors It is difficult to pinpoint specific explanations for why crime rises and falls. The American Bail Coalition's Clayton noted that other policies that have had a negative impact on crime, implemented concurrently with bail reforms, make it 'difficult to isolate or elevate one or more causes over the others.' Paul Heaton, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies criminal justice interventions, had a similar outlook. 'Certainly there are some policy levers that people look at — the size of the police force and certain policies around sentencing,' he said. 'But there's a lot of variation in crime that I think even criminologists don't necessarily fully understand.' ___ Find AP Fact Checks here: . Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
