The Lake County state's attorney is Mike Nerheim, who took office about a year ago. (Stacey Wescott, Chicago Tribune / November 20, 2013)

By Dan Hinkel, Chicago Tribune reporter
December 9, 2013

During last year's race for Lake County state's attorney, Mike Nerheim talked about the kind of prosecutor he wouldn't be if voters elected him.
He promised he wouldn't lengthen the county's parade of the wrongfully convicted, and he wouldn't disregard forensic evidence indicating the office had imprisoned the innocent — a practice that bruised his predecessor's reputation. His pledges foretold a break with outgoing prosecutor Michael Waller.
At the end of his first year as prosecutor, Nerheim helms an office that operates differently than it once did, though his decisions have also drawn detractors.
Nerheim dropped a controversial prosecution that flew in the face of forensic evidence, set up a panel to identify wrongful convictions and agreed to DNA tests for inmates challenging convictions.
But activists have criticized him for not charging the North Chicago police who beat and used a Taser on a man who later died. Nerheim also hasn't charged a former Lake County sheriff's lieutenant despite a young man's allegation that he was underage when he had sex with the officer. Others have complained that Nerheim didn't replace Waller's top deputy, who prosecuted several men later cleared by DNA.
Nerheim said the employees he inherited knew the office's reputation was tattered. He said he thinks he has engineered a "change in philosophy," noting his agreement to DNA analysis in old cases, something the past administration sometimes resisted.
"If the truth is — God forbid — we have the wrong person, we want to know it," Nerheim said.
Some who castigated Waller praised Nerheim. He's been "reasonable" about reviewing innocence claims, said Rob Warden, executive director of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions.
"It's not just replacing a malignancy with a benign do-nothing," Warden said. "He's head and shoulders above that."
But Ralph Peterson believes the North Chicago police who arrested his cousin, Darrin Hanna, before he died two years ago have gotten a pass. Peterson noted the county lieutenant also hasn't been charged.
"I feel that when it comes to (prosecuting) police officers … he's very slow to move," Peterson said.
Both cases remain under investigation, Nerheim said, insisting police get no special treatment.
In his courthouse office overlooking Lake Michigan, Nerheim, 40, joked about having bags below his eyes. He loves the job, he said, although he has yet to have an easy day.
Along with trying to prevent further wrongful convictions, Nerheim helped found an anti-opiate abuse group.
He's separated his office into specialized groups, including a gang unit charged with going after the county's estimated 8,000 to 10,000 gang members, Nerheim said.
Nerheim accepted innocence claims he could put before his panel of lawyers, and he now awaits DNA results in a high-profile murder case, Jason Strong's. Strong was convicted of murder in 2000, before his victim had been identified, and his attorneys argue her identification in 2006 raised doubts about his guilt.
Nerheim called a wrongful conviction "the worst thing we can do." His predecessor did it repeatedly, and the last years of that prosecutor's service were marked by the collapse of four major felony cases.
Several of those were prosecuted at least in part by Jeffrey Pavletic, Waller's top deputy and now Nerheim's. Waukegan attorney Jed Stone, a frequent critic of Waller, complimented Nerheim as accessible and reasonable but said Pavletic disgraced the county and should have been removed.
Pavletic said he has worked on thousands of cases and added that ultimate authority over the office's actions rests with the state's attorney.
"What the office's position has been is to do justice and ... my charge as a prosecutor is to do justice," he said.
Nerheim said he trusted Pavletic and it's "really unfair" to blame prosecutorial decisions on anyone other than the state's attorney.
While Waller attracted criticism for decisions to prosecute, the failure to prosecute certain people has fueled controversy around Nerheim.
Early this year, Lake County Coroner Thomas Rudd reclassified Hanna's death in November 2011 as a homicide after the manner had been declared "undetermined." Hanna, 45, died after a confrontation with police responding to a domestic incident, and the coroner's office said cocaine use and poor health factored into his death. But Rudd said baton strikes set off his deadly medical crisis.
"That was (Nerheim's) cue to act, and he sat idle," said Peterson, Hanna's cousin.
Waller declined to charge the officers. Nerheim said his office is now involved in an investigation into Hanna's death, though he noted that homicide can be legally justifiable.
An investigation into a former sheriff's lieutenant also remains open, Nerheim said. A man told investigators he was 15 or 16 when he had sex with Rick White, who specialized in netting online predators in the years before he retired in 2012, prosecutors said. Nerheim's office also has not charged the officer with using a police database to research the boy, though they say they have evidence he did, and misuse of the database can constitute official misconduct.
Nerheim said "the conspiracy theorists are going to have their theories" about favoritism for police, but he noted his office has charged some police under his leadership and did under Waller as well. Prosecutors have said they believe they can't prove a sex crime because the alleged sex partner told investigators he lied to White and said he was of age.
On White's alleged database use, Nerheim said, "When I'm satisfied we have all the evidence we're ever going to have, we'll look at everything and make an ultimate decision on what we're going to charge."