A top Cook County Forest Preserve District official, who has held his job despite eight convictions for drunken driving, was sentenced Tuesday to 3 years in prison by a judge who said he couldn’t ignore such a long record.
The punishment was the maximum that Robert M. Kelly, 51, the Forest Preserve District’s $61,000-a-year recreation superintendent, could have received for his latest DUI.
“I don’t ever recall a person with more DUI convictions than Mr. Kelly, although I’ve only been practicing 24 years,” Cook County Circuit Judge John J. Scotillo said. “Considering the criminal history of the defendant, I can’t justify anything less than the maximum penalty.”
Despite the sentence, top county officials gave no indication Tuesday that they planned to fire Kelly, who was appointed in 1996 by County Board President John Stroger. Stroger has close ties to Kelly’s father, Edmund, the powerful Democratic committeeman of Chicago’s Northwest Side 47th Ward.
Neither Stroger nor Forest Preserve General Supt. Joseph Nevius would comment Tuesday on Kelly’s case, which county officials have privately described as an embarrassment. But forest preserve spokesman Stephen Mayberry said Stroger and Nevius would meet “in the very near future” to decide what to do about Kelly.
The sentence capped a two-year court case that began Nov. 22, 1996, when Kelly was pulled over for drunken driving in a county car in Hoffman Estates. Police said Kelly had sideswiped another car on Higgins Road, fled and then tried to punch one of the officers who arrested him. Kelly also didn’t have a driver’s license–the result of his four previous DUI convictions in Illinois.
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In arguing for the maximum punishment for Kelly, prosecutors cited Kelly’s five Illinois DUI convictions, as well as two in Florida and one in Indiana.
And they told the judge of Kelly’s 1987 conviction in Florida for aggravated battery. That felony conviction stemmed from a bar fight in which police said Kelly bit off the tip of a man’s nose and then spat it back in the man’s face.
Cook County officials said they had known nothing of Kelly’s earlier drunken-driving cases and were shocked to learn details of the aggravated-battery incident. As a Stroger appointee, Kelly was not required to fill out a job application and was hired after submitting a resume and interviewing with Stroger and Nevius, Mayberry said.
The Forest Preserve District does not conduct criminal background checks on management hires, and it previously did not check whether they held valid driver’s licenses, Mayberry said. Because of Kelly’s case, however, the district has amended its policy to verify that managers can legally drive, Mayberry said.
Kelly, who wore a dark blue pin-striped suit, showed no emotion during the nearly five-hour sentencing hearing in the Rolling Meadows branch of Circuit Court. He read nervously from a prepared statement, taking responsibility for his actions.
After Scotillo delivered the sentence, sheriff’s deputies immediately took Kelly to jail.
While prosecutors emphasized Kelly’s criminal record, his lawyers asked the judge for leniency, based on their argument that Kelly suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his Marine Corps service in the Vietnam War.
Chicago psychiatrist Sheldon Greenberg, who interviewed Kelly earlier this month, testified that Kelly has experienced hallucinations, blackouts and fits of violence. Often, former soldiers with the disorder “self-medicate” with alcohol, he said.
Greenberg said prison would devastate Kelly. Because of his age, he might become a target of violence and probably wouldn’t receive proper treatment for his illness, he said.
“If he survives that experience, and I don’t know that he will, he will be a worse man for it,” said Kelly’s lawyer, Steven F. Molo. He said he would appeal the conviction and seek a new trial.
“We will be a worse society for having done this to him,” Molo said. “He found himself for the last 25 years as someone who could not get it right. This is not the way somebody like Bob Kelly should be treated.”
But Assistant State’s Atty. Lawrence Lykowski said Kelly didn’t deserve sympathy.
“He was using a county car. It is outrageous and infuriating that he would use a car belonging to people of this county to drink and drive,” Lykowski said. “He has repeatedly gotten behind the wheel of a car while his license was revoked. If the defendant is not dealt with appropriately, the law means nothing.”