From the SJ-R (Editorial):
Our Opinion: $1 million mistake should be investigated
Published Thursday, April 17, 2008
THE "COINCIDENCES" involving a state grant to a Chicago private school and the criminal pardon of its administrator are simply too much to swallow.
So far, we have received excuses that a “bureaucratic error” mistakenly sent $1 million in state funds to the Loop Lab School, and that administrator Chandra Gill’s pardon came in the normal course of business for the Illinois Prisoner Review Board.
A new wrinkle came this week when an Associated Press review of a Loop Lab School financial report filed with the state showed that the school was in dire financial straits before receiving the grant. So while the grant was misplaced, it was timely.
Rather than more explanations about coincidences, we’d much prefer an independent investigation of this whole mess.
FOR STARTERS, we’re curious how Gill managed to fast-track it to the head of the line to have her pardon application reviewed and approved. Right now, there is a backlog of nearly 1,600 cases waiting for the governor’s attention. Some people in that backlog have been waiting years for resolution. Yet Gill applied in August 2006 and had a pardon in January 2007.
By contrast, we note that Randy Steidl, who was freed from prison in 2004 after spending 17 years behind bars (much of that time on death row) for a murder he did not commit, is still waiting for his record to be cleared. Herb Whitlock, wrongfully convicted in the same Paris murder case as Steidl, was freed in January after 20 years in prison.
Gill needed the pardon because her conviction, which stemmed from altercation at a high school basketball game in Urbana in 2002, would disqualify her from serving as a full-time administrator at Loop Lab School.
Seven months before Gill applied for her pardon, the historic Pilgrim Baptist Church on Chicago’s South Side burned to the ground. Three days after the fire, Gov. Rod Blagojevich promised the church $1 million in state funding to rebuild.
The church never received that money. Oddly enough, however, Loop Lab School — which had been housed in the church — did.
It was during the processing of that $1 million grant that the wheels got turning on Gill’s pardon. The school, with Gill as administrator, used the money to buy building space in the Loop. Pilgrim Baptist Church, meanwhile, got nothing.
Still, we are supposed to believe that this was just a bureaucratic error. Some misplaced paper shuffling.
And the fact that the errant grant landed with an organization run by the woman whose criminal pardon had sailed through the system at warp speed? Merely a coincidence.
LET'S BE CLEAR here that we see nothing wrong with Gill’s pardon per se. Hers is typical of cases in which pardons should be granted: a one-time mistake, especially a minor one like Gill’s, on an otherwise good record should not rob someone of her potential to fully contribute to society.
The problem is that she somehow managed to get to the head of a very slow-moving line at a time when a $1 million bureaucratic mistake was in the process of being made to her organization. And the organization was desperately in need of that money for its survival.
That’s not a mere coincidence, though we’re not exactly sure what to call it. No one will know until an independent investigator is called upon to untangle the concurrent tales of $1 million mistakes and red tape shortcuts.