Chicago City Wire

A plaintiffs’ attorney with a history of unleashing verbal assaults at prosecutors and judges recently went off on special prosecutors in an ongoing wrongful conviction case surrounding a 27-year-old double murder.

In an email, attorney Jennifer Bonjean wrote to prosecutors Maria McCarthy and Fabio Valentini that their challenging the constitutionality of a commission - the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC) - which can refer decades-old murder cases for new evidentiary hearings based on allegations of police abuse, was little more than a delaying tactic in the case.

“You have the right to defend a conviction if you believe that it deserves defending, you have no right to file frivolous arguments to delay proceedings, line your pockets, and compound the suffering of my client,” Bonjean wrote in the March 6 email.

The email message was included in the prosecutors’ response to a Bonjean motion to have the two disqualified after they challenged TIRC’s constitutional authority to refer Bonjean’s client Devon Daniels, convicted of a 1996 double murder. Daniels alleges that the lead investigator in the case, former Detective Kriston Kato, intimidated him into confessing to the crime.

Bonjean filed the motion to disqualify just hours after the prosecutors filed their constitutional challenge.

McCarthy and Valentini responded by calling Bonjean’s threats “unprofessional and unwarranted.”

“Her e-mail,” they wrote, “combined with the timing of the filing of the motion to disqualify and the lack of citation to case law, clearly demonstrate that Ms. Bonjean filed her motion to disqualify not because she believes a conflict truly exists, but rather, because she recognized the merit in the motion to dismiss the TIRC referral and desperately seeks to prevent this Honorable Court from ruling on that motion. It is her baseless pleading which has unnecessarily delayed this case and increased the cost of litigation. The motion to disqualify must be dismissed.”

On May 30, Will County Judge Dave Carlson denied the Bonjean motion for disqualification. He also denied a separate Bonjean motion for limited discovery in the case. The case is being heard in Will County due to a conflict in Cook County.

In a separate, earlier tirade posted on YouTube, Bonjean, who has represented comedian Bill Cosby and R&B star R. Kelly, went after prosecutors in general telling them that they “suck.” And that the only reason they win is because the judge “is predisposed to rule against the defendant.”

“In the process you came to believe you were good,” Bonjean said in the video, “that you were smart. That you knew what you were doing, then you get out in the mean bad world of the capital marketplace and there you can’t get a f…ing client without some judge handing it to you. Then you’re going to bill the taxpayers a bunch of sh..load of money. You suck. You suck then, you suck now. You will forever suck.”

In yet another instance, a federal appeals court in 2017 found that Bonjean couldn’t be rewarded for inappropriate conduct after she told an 80-year-old federal judge that he was “advocating for the government” and “abdicating your job as a judge,” according to an ABA Journal report.

The ABA report: “Some trial decisions by Norgle may have been ‘puzzling,’ but they didn’t justify Bonjean’s ‘frequent and serious’ outbursts, the court said in a June 20 opinion by Judge David Hamilton. We do not reward defendants ‘for success in baiting the judge,’” he wrote, quoting from a 1983 appellate decision.”

Finally, a New York Times profile of Bonjean published last September noted that she called one woman who accused R. Kelly of sexual abuse a “pathological liar.”

“She accused another of extortion,” the article said. “She tried to pick their accounts apart, and attacked prosecutors for stripping her client, the former R&B star, of ‘every single bit of humanity that he has.’”

In February, a federal judge sentenced Kelly to 20 years in prison for child sex crimes.