This rogues’ gallery of flagged officers includes William Wichern, a veteran Illinois Department of Natural Resources officer who repeatedly made racist, homophobic, and sexist statements to other officers; Crestwood police officer Arthur Roman, who was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison for assaulting two teens; and Emilio Marquez and Owen McGuinness, a pair of Rockford police officers who allegedly beat a man and fractured his rib while he lay facedown on the ground in handcuffs.

Prosecutors can, of course, act in bad faith and withhold Brady evidence from defendants simply because it helps them. Examples abound in Illinois. In Cook County, prosecutions have hinged on a state trooper whose allegedly copy-and-paste DUI arrest reports earned him recognition as the state’s top DUI cop, and then accusations of “fabricating evidence.” In DuPage County, three prosecutors were charged and later acquitted of conspiring to cook up evidence in a case that produced a wrongful conviction and landed three men on death row. And in Chicago, prosecutions based on false drug arrests carried out by a gang of Chicago cops led by convicted felon Ronald Watts led to mass exonerations and more than $126 million in settlement paid by taxpayers as of last year. Since 1989, the National Registry of Exonerations reports 116 exonerations in Illinois in which prosecutorial misconduct was a contributing factor.