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CHICAGO DEFENDER

FRONT PAGE By Andre Carter

Defender Contributing Writer Videoed murders by cops are the apex of what happens to African Americans victimized by law enforcement, of course, but what happened to Stanley Stallworth is a far more common and insidious threat to Black men who are regularly pitched into the grinding gears of the criminal justice machine. Since the winter holidays of 2013, Stallworth has lived a Kafkaesque existence – “two years of hell; a nightmare for myself and my family, full of fear and outrage,” as he puts it. After more than 20 years as a prominent civic figure and real estate attorney and one of the few Black partners in the major law firm of Sidley Austin, Stallworth’s life, career and world were hijacked two years ago when Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s Office charged him and an associate with a Thanksgiving Day felony sexual assault on an 18-yearold male. The accuser claimed that he blacked out after consuming less than two drinks at the South Side home of Stallworth and when he awoke, Stallworth and his friend Therrie Miller were performing sex acts on him. Stallworth and Miller were both found not guilty of the charges last week by Cook County Circuit Court Judge Clayton Crane in a three-day bench trial, but that doesn’t erase the damage already done. “The decision does not restore my life to what it was before these charges were brought,” Stallworth said after the trial. “It does not restore what I spent a lifetime building for myself.” He contends that the charges should never have been brought and that it was a false and malicious prosecution by Alvarez’s office. “We should not live in a society where anyone for any reason can walk into a police station and ruin someone’s life,” Stallworth asserts. “And the Cook County prosecutor simply took the word of someone despite overwhelming testimonial and scientific evidence to the contrary.”

Building A Life And Reputation

Stallworth says the ordeal is something he never saw coming because “you try to do the right thing, and you’re looking at someone that did most of it right.” He says he had a mother that would kill you if you didn’t – “B’s were not an option,” Stallworth says. And he had a brilliant sister who graduated with a 99.8 average in high school, “so I had to work hard just to stay in range.” Now 52, Stallworth was born and raised on a farm in the small town of Evergreen, Alabama. His dad was a businessman, high school coach and principal; his mom a school librarian. He graduated from high school as the salutatorian and attended his dad’s alma mater, Alabama A&M University in Huntsville, on an academic scholarship. He was the student body president and graduated summa cum laude with degrees in biology and English and a 3.97 grade point average. Stallworth entered the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1987. His grades were good enough to propel him into the stratosphere of students who could get first year summer jobs, which is rare. He joined Sidley in 1990 and spent his entire career there, sharing a summer class at Sidley with Barack Obama along the way, and negotiating billion-dollar real estate deals while pulling down a high six-figure salary. Stallworth estimates that over the years, Sidley has had maybe 15 Black partners and at the time his

(ISSN: 07457014)

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Wednesday – Tuesday December 30, 2015 - January 05, 2016

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Stan Stallworth

Beware Black Man, It Can Happen To You

legal ordeal began, he was one of nine Black Sidley partners out of over 700 partners worldwide. Just as important as what Stallworth contributed to Sidley in his real estate practice and as a partner was what he did for the firm’s diversity efforts. He served as firm-wide co-chair of the firm’s Diversity Committee and also served on the firm’s Diversity Task Force and the Recruitment Committee. “I had to meet with Black, white, yellow, orange, lesbian, gay, transgender on Sidley’s behalf everyday, in addition to my practice,” Stallworth says. “I was the primary person to create the firm’s diversity committee. When I got there, there was a task force on minorities’ issues and women’s issues in the Chicago office and they dealt with things on an adhoc basis. “But I decided that diversity could not be a hodge-podge reactive kind of thing – that we needed strategy, long and short-term planning, goals, all of that. So in 2001, I made a hard push for a firmwide diversity committee to be created with firmwide chairs and chairs in each office, because I was flying around the country like a crazy man trying to put out diversity fires. So now they have a diversity committee.” Stallworth also started a program called the Sidley Pre-Law Scholars Initiative to help more Black students get into the field of law, particularly to help

02 Dec. 30, 2015 - Jan. 05, 2016 • THE CHICAGO DEFENDER

students prepare for the LSAT. That program has been around for 11 years and served about 400 young Black law students. Outside of Sidley, Stallworth sat on the national board of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund for three years with Sidley committing $100,000 a year in scholarships to support his efforts. In addition, he sat on the board of the Chicago Academy for the Arts – Chicago’s version of the performing arts high school in Fame – for 12 years and chaired it for three. Now, all of that is gone. During the course of the two-year trial and the stain on his reputation, Stallworth resigned from the boards, and depending on who you talk to, was forced to retire from Sidley. By the time he finally went to trial, he was an unemployed Black man suffering at the hands of the criminal justice system, like all other Black men do. Stallworth’s friends say the actions of having the charges brought “interrupted a major career, a major public servant, who had done nothing but serve.”

The Botched Case Against Him

Including the three-day trial, Stallworth showed up at Criminal Court on 26th and California 22 times because of delays and continuances on the prosecutor’s part “and it cost me every time,” he says. See Stallworth, Page 07

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