A former Woodstock police chief and his onetime top aide were each fined $6,000 Friday by a McHenry County judge for illegal eavesdropping on their fellow police officers, but the two were spared from being sent to prison.
Circuit Judge Conrad Floeter apparently was swayed by an argument made by the attorney for former Police Chief Herbert Pitzman and former Sgt. Randall Beu that both 20-year police veterans were punished enough by the July guilty verdict, which will cost them their pensions if it stands up on appeal.
“The statutory forfeiture of their pension (for a felony conviction) is monstrous and takes from them everything they had built up over the years, takes from them every dream they ever had,” attorney Joseph Condon told Floeter before sentencing.
“It is something these men will remember until the day they close their eyes for the last time. There is no reason to exact any further punishment,” Condon said.
Pitzman, 52, has been drawing a $34,000 annual pension since his retirement at the minimum age of 50. Beu, 44, would draw a pension of about $25,000 a year in six years.
Terry Nader and James McAuliff, assistant state’s attorneys, had asked for 30 months’ probation, a $10,000 fine and 240 hours of public service. Probation and public service are normally given when a defendant escapes a prison sentence.
“These men are not a danger to the community, so there is no need for a prison sentence, and there is no need for rehabilitation in the form of probation,” Floeter said.
Floeter, who had convicted the officers July 3 after a six-day bench trial, also reversed himself Friday and acquitted both men on three of the six counts because the taped calls were between police and fellow officers or relatives who were using privately owned cellular phones. Condon had argued that users of cellular phones “have no expectation of privacy” because they use public airwaves.
McAuliff and Nader had asked for the stiffer penalty on the grounds that Pitzman and Beu had betrayed a “public trust” by violating the state law on eavesdropping when they taped conversations of other officers in the department over an unlisted, non-emergency telephone for 14 months in 1991 and 1992.
For several years, the phone had been untaped and designated for a reasonable amount of personal phone calls to spouses, friends and union leaders by police officers. It was taped under a 1991 intergovernmental agreement that allowed taping of all calls made at the nine emergency 911 dispatch centers in the county, including Woodstock. But Pitzman and Beu were prosecuted because they never told fellow officers about the taping.
“Police officers who were entrusted with the protection of others turned around and betrayed the people they were supposed to protect,” McAuliff said.
Outside court, James Harrison, attorney for 100 Woodstock police officers and their friends and relatives who filed a $55 million federal civil rights lawsuit because of the alleged invasion of privacy, said the verdict and sentence will strengthen their case.
“This is indicative of what we anticipate happening in federal court,” Harrison said.
