Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx on Friday announced that her office will begin a resentencing initiative to win the early release of inmates who “have been rehabilitated and pose little threat to public safety.” The movement is possible under a law that Gov. JB Pritzker signed last summer.
Of all the inmates who might be in line for early release, Foxx’s office has settled on a convicted home invader, a convicted armed robber, and a convicted burglar. They all have lengthy criminal records, and two of them are violent records.
Two men are already scheduled to be paroled next year, while the third is slated for parole in six weeks.
In a strange turn of events, Foxx’s office will pursue the early release of felons just one year after she ended the state’s attorney’s traditional role of providing input on routine parole decisions, because prosecutors “aren’t in the best position to judge inmates’ fitness for parole,” the Sun-Times reported in 2021.
Corporate media outlets have not published many details about the three men who will be up for early release next week. So, CWB went digging. Here’s what we found.
Larry Frazier, 63
Frazier was convicted of a string of violent crimes stretching across 14 years. He didn’t spend much time out of custody between cases, court records show:
- January 1978 – Armed robbery and aggravated battery. 6 years each.
- August 1983 – Theft. 2 years.
- November 1987 – Robbery. 5 years.
- August 1992 – Robbery. 7 years.
- August 1992 – Another robbery. 7 years.
- August 1992 – A third robbery. 7 years.
In September 1995, “just days after his release from prison,” according to a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling, Larry Frazier committed his most recent crime: armed home invasion. He received a 60-year sentence. He later filed appeals, and details of the home invasion are contained in state and federal court records:
A 63-year-old woman was moving items from her car to her Calumet City apartment when Frazier confronted her at the apartment with a coat over his hand.
“Give me your money. I’m gonna kill you,” he allegedly ordered as he entered the apartment and walked toward the woman.
“I can’t, Mister, I got arthritis,” she replied. She also didn’t have any money.
The woman tried to stall by pretending to look for valuables. Frazier opened her nightstand drawer and found her handgun. He pointed it at her and threatened to shoot her if she didn’t give him money.
She gave him a cookie tin full of pennies. He dumped it on the floor.
The woman ran at Frazier and grabbed the gun with both hands, fearing for her life. The gun fired. She was not injured. Frazier maintained control of the weapon.
“I’m gon’ kill you now,” he said as he put the gun to her head.
She begged for a chance to find money. He agreed. He demanded her car keys. She tossed them to him.
Then, she noticed a spot of blood on Frazier and realized he had been shot during the struggle for the gun. The woman bolted from the house and found two police officers in a nearby alley.
She “just ran up to [th]em and fell in their arms.”
The cops found Frazier slumped in a chair in the woman’s apartment, holding a jacket to his chest. The gun was under his chair. His fingerprints were found on the cookie tin and testing revealed that a gun was fired from within 12 inches of the coat he was wearing.
He claimed that he heard a woman scream as he walked past the apartment and the woman shot him when he went inside to investigate. Frazier claimed the gunshot residue was falsified and his fingerprints were on the cookie tin because he threw it in anger after being shot. He said he was found inside the apartment because, after the woman shot him, he sat down and told her to take him to a hospital.
According to the federal records, the maximum sentence for a home invasion at the time was 30 years, but Frazier was given an enhanced sentence because the victim was over 60-years-old.
Frazier’s appeals failed. He is currently scheduled to be paroled on November 16, 2023.
If the victim is still alive, she would be about 89-years-old.
Charles Miles, 55
Miles received a 12-year sentence for burglarizing a downtown apartment in 2011 while the victim and her child were home. The sentencing judge called him “kind of a friendly burglar.”
Like Frazier, Miles appealed his sentence and lost. According to state appellate court records:
In late August 2011, a woman and her 13-year-old daughter were in their fourth-floor apartment on the 1000 block of North Dearborn. The woman’s husband had left earlier in the evening and the only door was locked.
Just before midnight, the woman heard a creaking noise and heard her bedroom door close. She went to investigate and encountered Miles, who is listed as 6’4″ tall and weighed “close to 300 pounds” at the time.
“No harm, no harm, ma’am I’m not going to do anything,” Miles said. He thought he was in his girlfriend’s apartment, he said as he headed toward the front door, adding that he didn’t steal anything.
The woman inspected her home and found her bedroom window, which leads to a fire escape, had been lowered, and its screen was all the way up and there was a backpack on the fire escape. The TV in her daughter’s room was on the bed. Her phone was missing and her jewelry box had been rifled. A laptop had been moved to the bed.
Officers stopped Miles near LaSalle and Division because he matched the burglar’s description. Other cops went through the backpack on the fire escape and found documents bearing Miles’ name. The woman identified him as the burglar.
He had no burglary tools or proceeds with him. Cops searched a four-block area and did not find any of the victims’ missing items. Evidence technicians found no fingerprints at the scene.
Miles denied being in the residence until a detective told him that they found his backpack on the fire escape.
“I have to think about that for a moment,” Miles replied. He pointed out that the bag was technically outside the apartment. Then he stopped speaking with detectives.
At trial, his story changed. Miles said he was homeless and went into the building’s courtyard to drink a beer. While sitting on the fire escape, he thought he spotted a vacant apartment, so he went inside to catch some sleep. That’s when the woman confronted him. The jury convicted him.
“You’re what I would pretty much describe as a congenital [sic] burglar,” Judge Stanley Sacks said at sentencing. “You break into places, either take stuff or try to take stuff that doesn’t belong to you. It happened twice before in other thefts that don’t belong to you either, and now you break into someone’s apartment that actually is home at the time, yikes. And then obviously you don’t take any responsibility at all. This ridiculous story, just wandered in, I wanted to sleep in the place, and then turns out cell phones are missing, two TVs moved from one room to the other, put on a bed.”
Like Frazier, Miles qualified for a sentencing enhancement because he had two prior burglary convictions and a 1992 conviction for aggravated battery causing great bodily harm.
Before the sentencing hearing, Sacks made Miles an offer in private. If Miles pleaded guilty to three other pending burglaries, Sacks would sentence him to three concurrent six-year terms in those cases. Then, Sacks would give Miles a consecutive nine years for the Dearborn burglary. Miles declined the offer and Sacks gave him 12 years for the burglary on Dearborn.
After hearing that, Miles changed his mind in court, saying he would “like to take the deal.” No dice.
Records show he continued to fight the other three burglaries and he eventually received three concurrent six-year sentences anyway in 2014.
He is currently scheduled to be paroled on May 30, 2023.
Roland Reyes, 57
CWB could not locate specific information about the 2008 aggravated robbery that resulted in a 30-year sentence for Reyes. Illinois Department of Corrections records show he previously received sometimes-lengthy sentences for other crimes:
- 20 years for armed robbery in 1992
- 5 years for being a felon in possession of a firearm in 1992
- 6 years for armed robbery in 1989
- 6 years for another armed robbery in 1989
- 6 years for burglary in 1989
- 2 years for theft in 1984
- Four two-year sentences for narcotics in 1984
The Sun-Times reported Friday that the victim in the robbery that Reyes is serving time for “suffered an injury to his hand and arm, according to prosecutors.” The paper also reported that prosecutors said “aggravated robbery was a Class 1 felony with a sentencing range of 4-15 years in prison. Reyes, though, was sentenced as a Class X offender.”
That suggests that, like Miles and Frazier, Reyes received a Class X sentencing enhancement based on his criminal background.
In 2019, inmates participating in the Illinois River Correctional Center re-entry program voted to give Reyes that year’s “Embodiment Award” as “the participant who is the complete embodiment of what the re-entry program is truly about.”
Reyes is already scheduled to be paroled on May 6.
