ROCKFORD – Keenan Sauler’s journey to the shine of CNN, MSNBC and FOX News press conferences began with what he believed to be the deepest moment of his professional career.
The great recession that devastated the real estate, property, auto, and banking industries also hit the legal community hard. Saulter was fired from Chicago’s largest law firm, but that led him to start his own practice.
Now the Rockford native has built a reputation for tackling controversial civil rights cases that challenge the police to deal with blacks.
The 1993 graduate of Auburn received his bachelor’s degree from Illinois State and then his law degree from the prestigious Howard University in Washington, DC. After passing the Illinois bar exam, he worked for Barrick, Switzer, Long, Balsley and Van Evera in Rockford before moving to Rockford Chicago in 2003.
In 2006, he joined Baker & McKenzie, an international law firm headquartered in Chicago with more than 6,000 lawyers in offices in 46 countries.
“You might not have felt it in Rockford because the law firms aren’t huge there,” Saulter said. “Baker & McKenzie was the largest law firm in the world at the time, but it had huge overheads and these massive multinationals as clients. When the Great Recession hit, many large law firms started laying off people. “
Saulter was part of a group of lawyers who were fired in 2009. Today he says: “In retrospect, it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
Saulter said after graduating from Illinois that he was accepted into several Chicago law schools, but he deliberately chose Howard, whose most famous graduate is the famous civil rights attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
“I went to Howard because I wanted to make a difference as a lawyer,” Saulter said. “At Baker & McKenzie, I argued about contracts and commercial goods and services. It paid off well, but it was less personal. Now I was free to do civil rights work. “
His interest in helping the black community was evident in his days in Auburn. He played on the soccer team and was part of Auburn’s first bowling teams, but he was also involved in the African American Club and the Knights Brothers Club.
Today Saulter owns and works for Saulter Law in Chicago, which has five employees, an additional attorney and three support staff. Saulter focuses on representing people who have been harmed by the negligence or willful behavior of third parties. But he is also increasingly active in cases that draw the public’s attention.
In 2016, Saulter was on the news in Rockford for several months. He represented a daytime teacher and several children present at the House of Grace Day Care at Kingdom Authority Church in a civil case against the City of Rockford for the police shooting of Mark Anthony Barmore. Barmore had entered the church to hide from authorities before he was killed in an altercation with the police.
More:The jury awards $ 360,000 to plaintiffs in the civil case against Mark Barmore
Saulter argued that the police were unnecessarily endangering the children in the daycare. A jury awarded its customers $ 345,000 for recklessly inflicting emotional stress.
In 2018, Saulter represented Derquann Wilson, a teenager who was shot and killed multiple times by a Chicago police officer while he was a passenger in a car full of other teenagers on the west side of Chicago. Saulter won a $ 1.2 million judgment for his client.
In 2019, Saulter filed a federal lawsuit against the village of Carpentersville after two police officers forced their way into a home looking for a missing woman and attacked a 14-year-old African American youth in front of his brother. Carpentersville settled in a private arrangement with the family.
And in December 2020, Saulter became national news after posting footage from February 2019 when Chicago police mistakenly raided Anjanette Young’s home. The video showed Young handcuffed and naked as CPD officers ransacked her home. Young told the 12 male officers more than 40 times that they were in the wrong home and asked them to get dressed.
After the video was released, the company’s Chicago attorney resigned and each of the officers involved were stripped of their police powers while the incident is being investigated by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability. Saulter can still face sanctions for posting the video in violation of a court order.
“When you do civil rights work, you usually represent people who have interacted with the police,” Saulter said. “Ms. I’ve found that Young’s case goes beyond race, class, and political spectrum because she was truly an innocent woman. Lots of people, especially women, can be in Ms. Young’s shoes.”
“Often, however, these are cases where the people clearly take sides and I become public enemy No. 1,” added Saulter. “On the Barmore case, I was listening to Rockford Radio from Chicago, and the case and my role in it were very complex.”
Saulter said he thought the Barmore and Carpentersville cases prepared him for the swarm of media that occurred after the Young video was released. He was wrong
“It was surreal to tell the truth,” said Saulter, who testified this month at a Congressional investigation by Chicago Congressman Danny Davis about illegal police raids. “I had to hire someone who was only responsible for the press. Get quick media education with the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and CNN calling. “
In the history books, 2020 will probably be best remembered for the coronavirus pandemic that has disrupted life around the world. A few paragraphs further, however, will be the death of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, which sparked protests across the country.
In Illinois, Illinois lawmakers passed a criminal justice reform bill this month that, among other things, requires officials across Illinois to be licensed by the state and equipped with body cameras to prevent police unions from negotiating officer discipline and the cash deposit is removed.
More:The Illinois legislature-approved reform bill could remove “bad apples” from the police force
“These are significant changes, but they were also several years in development,” Saulter said. “Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Anjanette Young. George Floyd wasn’t the first, 50th or 100th unarmed African American to be killed by police. This time there was a confluence of timing. People were home because of a pandemic. Floyd was killed on Memorial Day. Because of these things, people had time to watch a police officer swallow someone’s life.
“We have become very desensitized to violence, but there was no desensitization,” Saulter said. “He was having trouble. He called to his mother. There was something very human about what happened to George Floyd. And it made people angry.”
Alex Gary is a freelance correspondent.
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