On March 22, 2013, Raymond G. Wigell and Huma Rashid were at the Cook County Courthouse in Markham, Illinois, to handle a preliminary hearing.
Our client is charged with three counts of unlawfully acquiring/obtaining possession of a controlled substance by misrepresentation, fraud, forgery, deception, or subterfuge (720 ILCS 570/406(b)(3)). He has not been indicted yet, and we finally received a copy of the pertinent police reports about five minutes before the preliminary hearing.
The State put on one witness, the responding police officer. The officer testified during the direct examination as to how he came to be called to the scene and his interrogation of the person he briefly detained (who was not our client). On cross, Raymond established that there was little evidence to connect our client to that particular fraudulent transaction.
Ultimately, the Judge made a finding of probable cause. This was expected, as the defense rarely wins at preliminary hearing because the threshold of proof is so low. Additionally, it is quite possible that the Judge ruled the way he did for the sake of expediency; had he ruled that there was no probable cause, the State would have taken the case to a grand jury, secured an indictment, and all four of us would have been in front of the same judge in couple months.
The case was pushed through to assignment and we made a demand for trial, and now we await the State's discovery so that we may better analyze our client's position.
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