Mike Eyer has a beautiful spread in Jacksonville at the intersection of Poor Farm and Sugar Hollow Roads. A little dirt road off of Sugar Hollow leads to Eyer’s cute little farmhouse, replete with a trailer and mini-excavator, swirling gnats, a massive pasture out back and a backhoe parked off to the side of the house.
“This is God’s country right here,” Eyer says to a visitor, and immediately offers a spray pump of special DEET insect repellent to keep the relentless gnats at bay.
That backhoe? It’s the second one he’s owned, with the first a central character to a crazy story that has made some of the last nine years “a living hell” for the 60-year-old Eyer.
It goes something like this: In 2017, as detailed in an Illinois Times story two years later, Eyer was convicted of driving his backhoe on city roads with a revoked driver’s license, the result of three previous DUI convictions. Eyer, who owns a construction company, was not intoxicated while driving his backhoe, but police charged him with driving with a revoked license. While it is not illegal to drive a backhoe on town roads without a driver’s license, Morgan County threw the book at him anyway, with the DUIs as an aggravating factor.
Eyer did 45 days in jail and had his $65,000 backhoe taken from him by Morgan County under state forfeiture of property laws. For nearly a decade, Eyer has run through four attorneys at a cost he pegs “close to $100,000” not only to reverse the revoked license conviction on appeal, but to get his original backhoe back. So far, the answer from every judge has been: no on the backhoe.
“In open court, the judge would belittle me, always accusing me of lying. I was the only honest person there,” Eyer says. “I had a local state trooper write a letter on my behalf to give me a work release so I could work at his house, but the judge refused. I served my time, for a charge that really was never actually breaking a law.”
About three years ago, Eyer was finally given some good news. A Sangamon County Seventh Circuit Court judge, Robin Schmidt, vacated the revoked-license charge, saying Eyer had been given “ineffective assistance of trial counsel.” Partially, this was because his lawyers had “screwed up” on his appeals, including one time where Eyer had to miss a hearing because of a shoulder surgery, but the attorney hadn’t bothered to notify the court. Eyer said he’d been told, falsely, by the attorney that it had been done.
To Eyer, who said he wept with joy on the courthouse steps after Schmidt’s March 16, 2023, ruling, he was fully vindicated of the revoked-license charge, and that, he believed, would provide solid grounds to get the backhoe back.
But, after more than $20,000 Eyer said he spent on a new attorney in the Fourth Circuit appellate case of The People of the State of Illinois vs. John Deere 410G Backhoe Loader, the people prevailed. The court ruled that “claimants had not established any error with respect to the trial court’s denial of their motion to vacate after an evidentiary hearing” in a Dec. 29, 2025, decision.
The backhoe would stay in the possession of Morgan County, where it remains today. Eyer said he has had to drive past it many times over the years. “I get riled up every time,” he said.
While Eyer believes the 2023 vacate motion on the revoked-license conviction exonerated him, Morgan County State’s Attorney Chad Turner told Illinois Times it isn’t so. Not technically, anyway.
“He was not exonerated in any way, shape or form, on appeal,” Turner said. “I’m not sure he would know what he would have meant by ‘exoneration.’ But there was no situation where he was found innocent or that he didn’t do the crime. He was convicted, served his sentence and later claimed he received ineffective assistance of counsel. The judge, based on what I think was a mistaken ruling on the procedures that were used, vacated his conviction.”
Turner said he had the option to try Eyer again on the revoked-license case, but “he had already served his time for that” and another attempted prosecution would be a “waste of time and taxpayer money.”
Turner does admit the state civil forfeiture laws are a mixed bag.
“Listen, there are a lot of things about the state civil forfeiture laws that are good and there are some that are bad,” he said. “I’ve seen cases where a $100,000 late-model Cadillac Escalade gets taken away. Is that a disproportionate penalty? I mean, there’s a lot of arguments for that.”
Jacksonville Police Chief Doug Thompson told Illinois Times, “The courts ruled that the backhoe was to be seized, with us. Once the court rules, we don’t mess with anything. It’s not up to us to interpret.”
Eyer said his construction business was greatly harmed by the rulings, which he acknowledges were not helped by his DUI convictions. Eyer said he has been sober for “several years” now, however, and just wants back what he believes what was taken by a “Fahrenheit 451”-style of state oppression.
“I was convicted of driving a backhoe harmlessly for a few miles, when the law says you don’t need a license to do that,” Eyer said. “I wasn’t drinking at the time. But I got pretty much my whole livelihood and reputation taken away from me.”
Eyer paused for a couple of seconds and said:
“It’s bullshit.”
This article appears in May 28-June 3, 2026.
Definitely Illinois.