Illinois Judge Robert Adrian removed from the bench for reversing previous teen rape conviction of 18 year old man, Drew Clinton after previously ruling he had indeed raped, then 16 year old girl, Cameron Vaughn. When a judge discounts the rule of law and the pain and suffering of women at the hands of violators.
When 148 days behind bars for a venomous crime can never be enough …
An Illinois judge who caused furore after reversing a man’s rape conviction involving a 16-year-old girl has been removed from the bench after a judicial oversight body found he circumvented the law and engaged in misconduct.
The Illinois Courts Commission removed Adams County Judge Robert Adrian from the bench Friday after it held a three-day hearing in Chicago in November on a compliant filed against Adrian.
The commission stated Adrian had ‘engaged in multiple instances of misconduct’ and ‘abused his position of power to indulge his own sense of justice while circumventing the law.’
The commission could have issued a reprimand, censure or suspension without pay, but its decision said it had ‘ample grounds’ for immediately removing Adrian from the bench in western Illinois’ Adams County, ABC7Chicago reported.
In October 2021, Adrian had found then 18-year-old Drew Clinton of Taylor, Michigan, guilty of sexual assaulting a 16-year-old girl, Cameron Vaughn, during a May 2021 graduation party.
The state Judicial Inquiry Board filed a complaint against Adrian after the judge threw out Clinton’s conviction in January 2022, with the judge saying that the 148 days Clinton had spent in jail was punishment enough.
The complaint said Adrian had acknowledged he was supposed to impose the mandatory four-year sentence against Clinton, but that he would not send him to prison. ‘That is not just,’ Adrian said at the sentencing hearing, according to court transcripts. ‘I will not do that.’
Vaughan told AP in November, when she was 18, that Adrian’s reversal of Clinton’s verdict left her ‘completely shocked’ but determined to oust the judge. She attended the November commission proceedings with family, friends and supporters.
After Adrian threw out Clinton’s conviction, Vaughan said that the judge told the court ‘this is what happens whenever parents allow teenagers to drink alcohol, to swim in pools with their undergarments on,’ she recounted in an account supported by a court transcript of the January 2022 hearing.
Knowing that his decision to overturn the four year mandatory minimum sentencing would be overturned in an appeal, Adrian took the extraordinary step of stating that prosecutors had failed to show conclusive evidence that the teen girl had been raped- in essence defying his own previous finding that Vaughn had indeed been raped at the hands of Clinton.
Adrian’s move sparked outrage in Vaughn’s hometown of Quincy, Illinois, and beyond, with the prosecutor in the case saying that her ‘heart is bleeding for the victim.’
Vaughan told the Chicago Tribune following Friday’s decision removing Adrian that she was ‘very happy that the commission could see all the wrong and all the lies that he told the entire time. I’m so unbelievably happy right now. He can’t hurt anybody else. He can’t ruin anyone else’s life.’
Responding to the decision to oust him, Adrian told the Chicago Tribune the commission’s decision to remove him is ‘totally a miscarriage of justice. I did what was right. I’ve always told the truth about it.’
Adams County court records show that Clinton’s guilty verdict was overturned because prosecutors had failed to meet the burden of proof to prove Clinton guilty.
But in Friday’s decision, the commission wrote that it found Adrian’s claim that ‘he reversed his guilty finding based on his reconsideration of the evidence and his conclusion that the State had failed to prove its case to be a subterfuge – respondent’s attempt to justify the reversal post hoc.’
(subterfuge– deceit used in order to achieve one’s goal).
Clinton cannot be tried again for the same crime under the Fifth Amendment. A motion to expunge Clinton’s record was denied in February 2023.
