SPRINGFIELD – Ron Duebbert, who lost a job as judge due to testimony from two law enforcement officers, challenges their conduct in proceedings before an agency that aims to take away his law license.
He accused officers Patrick McGuire and Timothy Lawrence on June 16, in his answer to a complaint from the Attorney Registration and Discipline Commission.
Duebbert wrote that when they questioned him about a murder, they concealed their purpose of treating him as a suspect.
He claims the reason they didn’t ask certain questions “was expressly to make baseless allegations against the respondent of a process crime or ‘lying’ at a later date, both of which actions occurred.”
Illinois court commissioners who heard testimony from McGuire and Lawrence found them credible and removed Duebbert in January.
McGuire works for Illinois State Police and Lawrence works for Madison County Sheriff John Lakin.
On Dec. 30, 2016, they took temporary duty with a major case squad investigating the murder of Carl Silas at a Belleville address outside the city.
Duebbert states in his answer that Lawrence had never investigated a murder.
By the time McGuire and Lawrence arrived at Duebbert’s home, murder suspect David Fields had turned himself in at St. Clair County jail.
Duebbert admits in his answer that he and Fields formed a friendship but denied any implication of physical or romantic relationship.
His answer also states that he was aware that McGuire and Lawrence were present to obtain evidence that his firearm had been used to murder Silas. He learned that fact in calls from news reporters.
McGuire and Lawrence carefully concealed the fact that he was an actual suspect in the murder of Silas in derogation of Illinois law, he states, and the source of that information was the Judicial Inquiry Board.
McGuire and Lawrence interrogated him four times for about three hours in all and purposely didn’t record most of the interrogation, he states.
They examined air rifles he stored in a safe for about 20 minutes.
“Officer Lawrence continuously exposed his firearm to respondent by pulling his sport coat away from his weapon,” Duebbert states.
Duebbert states that he told them Fields said a Belleville officer in a prior contact put a gun to his head and said they’d shoot him if they arrested him again.
He states that he told them he had already told Fields to “turn himself in to the police authorities because alive is better than dead.”
He states he cooperated with them in every manner possible, offered his cell phone records, and allowed them absent a warrant to examine his firearms.
“Officer Lawrence asked respondent the questions, and respondent answered them to the best of his ability,” he states.
“That officers Lawrence and McGuire did not ask many questions surely is not the fault of respondent.”
They “got all of the information which respondent possessed about the Silas murder, virtually nothing, and about Fields and his whereabouts, which was also virtually nothing,” he states.
Duebbert’s statements on that day about a cell phone he provided to Fields didn’t match up, and prosecutors brought the discrepancies to grand jurors.
Duebbert testified and they returned no indictment.
The Judicial Inquiry Board charged that he lied to McGuire and Lawrence and lied to the board in its investigation.
When the board brought him before the court commissioners, he testified he didn’t think clearly because he was petrified.
After the commissioners removed Duebbert, the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission filed its complaint alleging the same conduct.
In his current answer he denies that he testified falsely to the inquiry board and denies that he didn’t provide all relevant information to McGuire and Lawrence.
No person other than himself and Fields was ever an active suspect in Silas’s murder, “although at least one eye witness said that two black men were Carl Silas’s murderers,” he states.
Although the major case squad’s investigation of Duebbert succeeded, its investigation of the murder did not.
Fields spent two years in jail. In December 2018, St. Clair County jurors found him not guilty, after hearing an evidence technician with little evidence, a firearm expert with no firearm, and a fingerprint expert with no prints.
He could have received leniency if he had implicated Duebbert in the murder, according to a brief that Duebbert’s attorney Mary Robinson filed in the Judicial Inquiry Board case.
“Fields declined the offer because what he was asked to say was not true,” Robinson wrote.