RECENT HONOREES
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The Reverend Willie Baker award was established in 1984 to honor the former community
leader who served as chairman of Citizens Alert, chaplain at Mother Cabrini and Cook County Hospitals,
president of Jane Addams Concerned Citizens and as representative of ABLA Homes to the Citywide Local Advisory
Council of Chicago Housing Authority.
This award recognizes the extraordinary struggle for community justice and racial harmony by our much
loved and widely respected former chairman; it recognizes similar outstanding efforts by other "unsung heroes"
for their current struggles toward making Chicago a safer and more just communiy.
In 2005, attorney Locke Bowman, legal director of the Mac Arthur Justice Center at
the University of Chicago Law School, was the recipient of the Baker award. The Justice Center litigates
issues of systemic importance for the criminal justice system, including a federal class action suit involving
the rights of indigent criminal appellants to timely and effective representation, suits concerning the rights
of media to gain access to detention facilities, and rights of witnesses not to be unlawfully confined in
police stations, among others.
He also represented Citizens Alert and other organizations and individuals who successfully
petitoned the Circuit Court of Cook County for appointment of a Special Prosecutor to examine allegations that
former Commander Jon Burge tortured African American prisoners in police custody.
In 2003, Gregory W. O'Reilly, counsel to the Cook County Public Defenders Office,
received the Baker award, particularly recognizing his role as key lobbyist in the multiyear effort for passage
of legislation requiring electronic recording of interrogations and confessions in homicide cases and in
broader legislation to reform the death penalty system in Illinois. |
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