by Hannah MeiselCapitol News Illinois
Illinois Supreme Court suspends Tom DeVore’s law license for 60 days over ethics violations tied to his romantic and professional relationship with a client.
SPRINGFIELD - The Illinois Supreme Court has ordered former Illinois attorney general Republican nominee Tom DeVore’s law license suspended for 60 days, following a yearslong public feud involving his client-turned-girlfriend and the state’s attorney discipline board.
The court’s order affirms a recommendation this spring by the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, which found “clear and convincing evidence” that DeVore’s actions related to Riley Craig had broken several Illinois Supreme Court ethics rules.
Photo: Capitol News Illinois/Jerry Norwicki
Craig, a Springfield salon owner, was one of the hundreds of clients DeVore represented in dozens of lawsuits after gaining notoriety for representing then-state Rep. Darren Bailey in an April 2020 lawsuit challenging Gov. JB Pritzker’s COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. Two years later, DeVore joined Bailey on an unsuccessful statewide GOP ticket to unseat Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul. DeVore, a lawyer from rural Greenville in the Metro East, began a romantic relationship with Craig after filing a pandemic-related lawsuit on her behalf in May 2020, according to ARDC documents. Though Craig’s litigation against the Pritzker administration was unsuccessful, their relationship continued for nearly three years. In mounting a defense to the ARDC’s case, DeVore claimed that his work as Riley’s attorney in her effort to get her salon reopened had ended by the time their romantic involvement began in late May or June 2020. The ARDC disputed DeVore’s timeline, pointing to continued attorney behavior in that case. But beyond that, DeVore went on to represent Riley in three other legal matters — including her divorce — that summer. That “demonstrated an unbroken continuation of his attorney-client relationship” with Craig, the ARDC ruled.
... consensual sexual activity between an attorney and a client constitutes an impermissible conflict of interest...
The disciplinary panel began looking into DeVore’s behavior in 2021, and during that initial investigation, Craig said she was not a client when their sexual relationship began. She repeated that claim on social media while DeVore was running for attorney general in 2022. But in May 2023, a few months after Craig and DeVore broke up, Craig “threatened to change her story” to the disciplinary panel so that DeVore would “lose his law license,” according to the ARDC report. The disciplinary panel also pointed out that “even consensual sexual activity between an attorney and a client constitutes an impermissible conflict of interest because the attorney’s emotional involvement with the client creates a significant risk that the attorney’s independent professional judgment will be impaired.” DeVore also got involved in Craig’s business venture to launch a hair product business, for which the pair took out $600,000 in loans in 2021. But in doing so, the ARDC found DeVore failed to provide “required safeguards” for Craig.
... email also called Craig a “petulant child” ..."
The business was failing in the spring of 2023 when Craig made her threat to expose DeVore, according to ARDC documents. Following that May 2023 meeting, Craig filed her own complaint with the ARDC and filed for personal bankruptcy to avoid responsibility for the company’s debt. But the day after Craig filed for bankruptcy, DeVore sent an email to both Craig and a vendor that the company owed $30,000, which alerted the vendor to Craig’s filing — and the fact the vendor could still come after the company for its debt. The email also called Craig a “petulant child” and apologized for her “nasty character,” according to the ARDC report. The disciplinary panel also found the email violated state ethics rules for attorneys. DeVore declined to comment on the court’s order to Capitol News Illinois. His law license will be suspended for 60 days beginning Oct. 10. But the attorney has been staying busy. Earlier this year, he formed a political action committee dubbed “Tom DeVore’s RINO Removal,” referring to the acronym for “Republicans in Name Only.” DeVore has been recruiting candidates to face GOP state legislators in primary races, including House Minority Leader Tony McCombie, R-Savana. He’s also filed several lawsuits against fellow Republicans in the last year, including one accusing McCombie of censoring him by deleting his comments and barring him from posting on her Facebook page. On Monday, a federal judge granted McCombie’s motion to dismiss the suit.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
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Will these weapons challenge our ethics and accountability thresholds? Most likely. But let’s explore a few of the considerations, moral and legal, through the prism of how people will be increasingly removed from battlefield decision-making as conflict unfolds at machine speed.
Militaries define autonomous weapons as "systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator."
So-called "intelligentized" systems that longer term will evolve to independently surveil, spot, identify, engage, and precisely target the adversary. And to do that with better ethical outcomes than when people are at the controls.
The core of these weapons’ “brain” is advanced artificial intelligence. The marrying of AI algorithms, deep machine learning, and massive data sets along with sophisticated technology will transform the world’s arsenals. The science and caution over removal of human operational control may zigzag, but the allure of intelligent, nimble, precise, fast and cheaper systems will prove irresistible.
Russia’s president Putin made no bones about this transformation, purportedly saying in a 2017 broadcast that "whoever becomes the leader in [AI] will become the ruler of the world." Hyperbole? Maybe; maybe not. Regardless, the force-multiplying intersection of artificial intelligence and weapons functionality will prove consequential.
Avoiding adversaries acquiring a monopoly on autonomous weapons will lead to the competitive leapfrogging of weapons design with which we’re historically familiar. A technological vaulting across military domains: land, ocean surface, undersea, air, and space. Nations will feel compelled not to cede ground to adversaries.
All the more reason we can’t lose sight of the ethical issues in this arena, where utilitarianism is definable as measures built into the decision loop to avoid or minimize harm to civilians’ lives and property. Yet, some people may view automated weapons as existential.
The question often asked is: Ought we trust machine autonomy to do war-fighting right, upholding our values? Maybe, however, the more pertinent question is this: Ought we continue to trust people to do war-fighting right, given the unpredictability of human decision-making and behavior?
The assumption is that humans are prone to errors exceeding those of a smart autonomous weapon. It’s more likely that a human controller will make assessments and miscues resulting in civilian casualties or attacks against hospitals, schools, homes and buildings of worship. Modern history is replete with such incidents, violating humanitarian law.
Machine precision, processing speed, analytical scope, ability to deconstruct complexity, handling of war’s chaotic nonlinearity, and ability to cut through war’s fog and friction intersect with ‘just-war doctrine’ to govern how to conduct war according to moral and legal principles — all of which matter greatly.
Human agency and accountability will transect decisions around how to design, program and deploy autonomous weapons, rather than visceral decisions by combatants on the battlefield. New grounds and precedents as to who’s responsible for outcomes.
Accountability will also be bound by the Geneva Conventions’ Martens Clause, which says this: “[C]ivilians and combatants remain under the protection and authority of . . . international law derived from established custom, from the principles of humanity and from the dictates of public conscience.”
There are no moral take-backs. Avoiding faulty calls, with unintended harm, is critical in calculating the appeal of replacing hands-on humans with the unbiased automaticity of machines. Autonomous weapons will outperform humans in regards to consistently implementing the ethical and legal imperatives whether conflicts are fought justly.
Such imperatives include discrimination to target only combatants; proportionality in line with the advantage; accountability of participants; and necessity in terms of the least-harmful military means chosen, like choice of weapons, tactics, and amount of force applied.
Treaty bans on systems’ development, deployment and use likely won’t stick, given furtive workarounds and the enticement of geostrategic advantage. Regulations, developed by multidisciplinary groups, to include ethicists along with technologists, policymakers and international institutions, are expected only spottily to slow the advance.
Ethics must be scrupulously factored into these calculations from the start — accounting for "principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience" — so that nations make policy with their moral charters intact.
