Todd Fort’s most recent sex offender registry mug
SALINE CO.—A mid-December ruling by the Appellate Court in Mt. Vernon has remanded the appeal of former Saline County chief deputy Todd Fort back to Saline County, and mainstream media in the area is busy spinning that to make it sound like a good thing for Fort.
But in actuality, the situation is largely under control as it regards a court case…and it’s not as complicated as Fort’s attorney, Darrell Dunham of Carbondale, is making it out to be in that same mainstream media.
The obvious bias Saline County media is displaying toward the subject of Fort’s lawsuit, Mike Henshaw, is only thinly disguised in coverage of the matter, including ignoring the reality of evidence that was presented in the court hearing held December 3, 2013, that Fort and Dunham took to the appeals court and lost the argument of having the case heard there.
This isn’t stopping either one of them, though, apparently, and both have issued to the media that’s covering the case from their fantasy-land angle that they’re hopeful to prevail in Saline County court on a re-hearing, despite the fact that a judge from the Second Circuit, brought in on a conflict with those in the First Circuit, has already determined that the case has no merit on the face of it.
Bizarre case
The case developed when Fort sought out Disclosure in early 2013 after returning from his sentence in the 2010 Criminal Sexual Assault case that ended his decades-long career in law enforcement.
Questioning Disclosure staff about Henshaw and what occurred during the investigation of his case—which landed him on the sex offender registry for life after it was proven that he had an affair with a then-17-year-old female intern at the sheriff’s department—Fort twisted information he elicited from staff to suit his own agenda, which was this: He was enraged that Disclosure had placed on their website recorded conversations between himself and numerous individuals in February of 2012, recordings which are still available at the site. In June of 2013, on the eve of his victim’s wedding, he marched into the courthouse, followed by lapdog television news outlets, and filed suit against, not Disclosure, but Saline County State’s Attorney Mike Henshaw, for turning the recordings over to Disclosure, this after Fort’s plea was over in October of 2011 and he had already been sent to prison.
To hear mainstream media tell it, it appeared Henshaw just gleefully handed said recordings over to the paper, unprompted.
However, this same mainstream media wasn’t present in the courtroom at the White County courthouse Dec. 3, 2013, when Judge Mark Stanley heard the evidence presented: Disclosure, interested in the calls for valid reasons (in particular, evidentiary value in the sex assault case, as well as identification of anyone who was actually backing Fort, as the majority of the calls regarded who among his friends and colleagues were busy donating to his bond and defense), first contacted the facility where Fort was held, Jackson County Detention Center in Murphysboro, seeking to submit a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request.
Chased down the records
Jackson County advised that the Illinois State Police was the custodial agency for evidence (which is what the recorded calls were considered, as in any phone call made from a jail facility, which each inmate is told by an automated message at the time the call is placed), so Disclosure contacted Stacy Kinter, the lead agent in the case.
Kinter advised that all evidence had been turned over to the Saline County State’s Attorney’s office upon conclusion of the case, so Disclosure contacted that office to inquire if the material would be made available were a FOIA to be submitted.
The paper was told that the recordings would be, and at that point, the FOIA was submitted and answered within a few days, as everything that had to do with the Fort case hadn’t been archived yet and was sitting available.
Delay in release; problems with sound file; flaky Dunham
The material wasn’t released immediately because it was submitted to the public as a joint presentation online and in print, in February 2012.
Problems, however, with the application the website used to post sound files developed, and that problem couldn’t be overcome on the particular platform the website used, and so no further calls were posted except for about 41 minutes of them, once. The print version continued to carry the transcript of the calls for several months, until the public in general decided there was no more interest in the case, and the calls, presented by transcript, were discontinued.
Much of those simple facts were already public knowledge (either in print or at the website) or were brought out in the court setting Dec. 3, 2013. Mainstream media has chosen to overlook the obvious, however, and continues to aver to the very flaky Dunham’s assertion that:
Henshaw did something surreptitious by submitting the recordings to Disclosure;
Disclosure did something wrong by presenting the calls, which are public record;
Fort was harmed in some way by all of it (as if the conviction wasn’t harm enough.)
Among Dunham’s flakier gripes at the hearing in late 2013 was that the FOIA was somehow fudged, and demanded of the judge that Disclosure turn over—more than two years after the fact—the original FOIA submitted to Henshaw so that it could be “tested and analyzed and the ink analyzed for authenticity and dating (age).”
Harassment
Why Fort, with these facts available to him at the time of his June 2013 filing, chose to follow through with the case anyway is one of those mysteries that remain unsolved.
It would appear that the suit is little but a method of harassment for Henshaw, whom Fort has stated he never liked, and who has somehow come to be of the belief that Henshaw doesn’t like him (the fact that Henshaw made the decision to prosecute the case instead of calling someone else in to do it on a conflict notwithstanding), especially in light of the fact that Stanley has already ruled that Henshaw was within his rights to have answered the FOIA submitted to his office. Dunham, at that hearing, tried to argue that the Supreme Court had ruled that state’s attorneys weren’t subject to FOIA, and that Henshaw didn’t have to answer the request, but he did, which in Dunham’s argument showed that he was “targeting” Henshaw. Only one problem remained with that: The Supreme Court’s ruling was made in May of 2013, a year and a half after Henshaw had been FOIA’d by this paper. Henshaw’s attorney, Karen McNaught, pointed that out, leaving Dunham sputtering on the courtroom floor…and leaving those in the courtroom to wonder when the last time was he had actually cracked open a law book (the SC, by the way, has since reversed their decision and has determined that state’s attorneys are indeed subject to FOIA.)
Missteps and mistakes
The case has been remanded back to Saline County, with the Appellate Court refusing to hear any more on it, and not issuing a ruling at all except that in their opinion, Dunham’s base argument—that of “sovereign immunity,” only a facet of his overall complaint, which basically states that state’s attorneys can’t be sued for doing their job, which is what Henshaw was doing both when he charged and prosecuted Fort, as well as answered a FOIA—is one for the state courts to decide, not the appeals courts.
That Stanley had already dismissed the Fort case out of hand in late December 2013 apparently matters not to Dunham or to Fort.
Dunham has been blustering in mainstream media that Fort’s case “still has life” mainly because “Henshaw is very unpopular in Saline County”…another mistaken impression Dunham has, and one of many missteps made in a long line of ridiculous assertions and actions that has cost either him, or his client, a lot of wasted time and money.
There has been no court date set for Stanley to hear any more of Fort’s flawed reasonings in the case.
Todd Fort put in a personal appearance at the White County Courthouse in Carmi on December 3, 2013, where the case he’d filed in June of that year had been transferred on a venue change due to no judge in the First Circuit (where Saline County sits) being able to hear the case because of conflicts with either the petitioner (Fort) or defendant (Mike Henshaw, a former chief judge) and a past working relationship with both. Judge Mark Stanley heard the case on that day, and tossed it out, ruling that Fort didn’t have a valid pleading against Henshaw for various reasons, one of them being sovereign immunity, but another being that he was duly FOIA’d...a point mainstream media seems determined to carefully and consistently overlook.