Calvin Christian, Springfield’s most prolific traffic scofflaw, may soon be a pedestrian.
Christian, who claims in a federal lawsuit against the city that officers have ticketed him in retaliation for him filing Freedom of Information Act requests for police disciplinary files, pleaded guilty to more than 50 traffic violations last Friday. Sangamon County associate judge Brian Otwell issued a $2,500 fine and put Christian on unsupervised probation, with 150 days of jail time held in abeyance so that Christian could be incarcerated if he engages in unlawful behavior during the next two years.
Mark Wykoff, Christian’s lawyer, said that his client’s days of driving with a valid license are over, at least for awhile. He said he wasn’t sure whether Christian now has a valid license, but if he does, the secretary of state will rescind it once notified of his guilty pleas.
“Certainly, what happened today is going to trigger a (license) suspension or revocation,” Wykoff said after Friday’s hearing.
The pleas, which essentially wiped clean Christian’s considerable traffic-court slate clean, came after judges issued warrants when he failed to appear in court three times recently, twice in traffic cases and a third time on a misdemeanor charge of resisting police. Arrested by Springfield police on Jan. 5 on suspicion of driving with a suspended license, Christian spent the better part of a week in jail before entering his guilty pleas.
The offenses to which Christian pleaded guilty ran the gamut, from reckless driving to illegal turns to excessive window tinting to speeding to disregarding stop signs. State’s attorney John Milhiser said that since he became the county’s top prosecutor in 2010, no other person has compiled as many traffic offenses as Christian.
Prosecutors on Friday also dismissed a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest and another misdemeanor charge of obstructing police against Christian, which Milhiser said was appropriate given the totality of the circumstances, including Christian’s admission of guilt in the other pending cases.
“We were prepared to go to trial on all the cases,” Milhiser said.
Christian in his federal lawsuit against the city says that officers conspired to write him “baseless and contrived” tickets, including several to which he pleaded guilty last week. Christian has a history of filing FOIA requests for police internal-affairs files and in 2011 won a lawsuit against the city of Springfield for refusing to release police disciplinary records. In 2013, Christian and his attorneys won a $103,000 settlement from the city after police shredded internal-affairs records rather than turn them over to Christian, who had made a formal request for the documents.
Christian did not have sufficient funds to bail himself out of jail last week, nor could he come up with $300 after entering his guilty pleas to satisfy a body attachment filed by a collection agency working on behalf of Security Bank, which won a $1,250 judgment against Christian earlier this year for an unpaid debt. With Christian standing before him in stripes, Sangamon County associate judge Rudolph Braud last Friday set a hearing date on the body attachment and released Christian on his own recognizance.
“Show up,” Braud admonished the defendant. “Show up.”
Friday marked the second time that Christian, who has received more than 120 traffic citations since 2007, has pleaded guilty to traffic offenses that underpin his federal lawsuit. Last spring, he pleaded guilty to charges of reckless driving and eluding police that he cited in his federal lawsuit as examples of police harassment, but those pleas were vacated because Christian was given court supervision contrary to law that limits the number of court supervisions a person can have at one time. He pleaded guilty to the same charges last week.
Louis Meyer, Christian’s attorney in the federal lawsuit, said that he hasn’t had a chance to review the guilty pleas but said that he doesn’t think that they will affect the federal case. Police, he said, singled out Christian for traffic tickets that would not have been written to other motorists for the same conduct.
“Our conspiracy theory is that they’re singling him out, going after him because of all the FOIA stuff he did,” Meyer said. “If he’s going 56 in a 55, he’s getting pulled over. Technically, that’s a violation. If you, me or anyone else is doing 56, we’re not getting a ticket.”
But Daniel Noll, who is defending the federal lawsuit for the city, said he believes the guilty pleas help his case.
“While we don’t argue our cases in the media, it is clear through Mr. Christian’s actions in traffic court that the city of Springfield officers acted appropriately at all times,” Noll said.
Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2015.
