“I can’t keep everybody in jail because the State’s Attorney wants me to.”
Those 13 words may linger in the mind of Cook County Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez for a long, long time. Because that’s what she told a Cook County assistant state’s attorney on August 22 when the prosecutor objected to the judge releasing Lawrence Reed, the man accused of setting a woman on fire aboard a Blue Line train this week, on an ankle monitor, a court transcript shows.
She released Reed on the ankle monitor after a prosecutor, hauntingly, in retrospect, warned that electronic monitoring “could not protect the victim or the community from another vicious, random, and spontaneous attack.”…