ROCKFORD — Keenan Saulter’s journey to the glare of news conferences covered by CNN, MSNBC and FOX News started with what he thought was the lowest moment of his professional career.
The Great Recession, which devastated the housing, real estate, auto and banking industries, also hit the legal community hard. Saulter was laid off from Chicago's biggest law firm, but thatled him to starting his own practice.
Now, the Rockford native has built a reputation for taking on controversial civil rights cases that challenge police in their interactions with Black people.
The 1993 Auburn graduate had earned his bachelor’s degree from Illinois State then his law degree at the prestigious Howard University in Washington, D.C. After passing the Illinois bar exam, he worked for Barrick, Switzer, Long, Balsley & Van Evera in Rockford before moving to Chicago in 2003.
In 2006, he joined Baker & McKenzie, an international law firm headquartered in Chicago with more than 6,000 lawyers at offices in 46 countries.
“You might not have felt it in Rockford because the law firms there aren’t huge,”Saulter said. “Baker & McKenzie was the largest law firm in the world at the time, but it had huge overhead and had these massive multinational companies as clients. When the Great Recession hit, lots of large law firms started laying people off.”
Saulter was among a group of attorneys let go in 2009. Today, he says, “in hindsight, it’s the single best thing that ever happened to me.”
Saulter said after earning his degree from Illinois State that he was accepted to several law schools in Chicago, but he chose Howard, whose most famous graduate is famed civil rights lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
“I went to Howard because I wanted to make an impact as an attorney,” Saulter said. “At Baker & McKenzie, I was litigating over contracts and commercial goods and services. It paid well, but it was less personal. Now, I was free to do civil rights work.”
His interests in helping the Black community were evident in his days at Auburn. He played on the football team and was part of Auburn’s first bowling teams, but he also was involved with the African American club and Knights Brothers club.
Today, Saulter is the owner and principal of Saulter Law in Chicago, which employs five people, one additional lawyer and three support staff. Saulter focuses on representing individuals who have been harmed by the negligence or intentional conduct of a third party. But he also is increasingly active in cases that catch the public eye.
In 2016, Saulter was in the news in Rockford for several months. He represented a day care teacher and several children who were present at the House of Grace Day Care inside the Kingdom Authority Church in a civil case against the city of Rockford over the police shooting of Mark Anthony Barmore. Barmore had entered the church to hide from authorities before he was killed in an altercation with police.
More:Jury awards $360K to plaintiffs in Mark Barmore civil trial
Saulter argued that police needlessly put the children in the day care center at risk. A jury awarded his clients $345,000 for reckless infliction of emotional distress.
In 2018, Saulter represented Derquann Wilson, a teenager, who had been shot multiple times by a Chicago police officer while he was a passenger in a car full of other teenagers on Chicago’s west side. Saulter won a $1.2 million verdict for his client.
In 2019, Saulter filed a federal lawsuit against the village of Carpentersville after two police officers, searching for a missing female, forced their way into a home and assaulted a 14-year-old Latino juvenile in front of his brother. Carpentersville settled with the family in a private agreement.
And in December 2020, Saulter became national news after releasing footage from February 2019 when Chicago police wrongly raided the home of Anjanette Young. The video showed Young handcuffed and naked as CPD officers searched her home. Young told the 12 male officers more than 40 times that they were in the wrong home and begged them to let her get dressed.
After the video was released, Chicago’s corporation counsel resigned and each of the officers involved have been stripped of their police powers while the incident is being investigated by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability. Saulter still may face sanctions for releasing the video in violation of a court order.
“When you do civil rights work, you are usually representing people who have had interactions with police,” Saulter said. “Ms. Young’s case, I’ve found, transcends above the race, class and the political spectrum because she truly was an innocent woman. Lots of people, specifically women, can place themselves in Ms. Young’s shoes.
“Many times, though, these are cases where people are clearly taking sides and I become public enemy No. 1,” Saulter added. “In the Barmore case, I would listen to Rockford radio driving in from Chicago and the case and my role in it was all-consuming.”
Saulter said he thought the Barmore case and the one in Carpentersville would have prepared him for the media crush that came after the Young video was released. He was wrong
“It was surreal, to tell you the truth,” said Saulter, who this month testified at a congressional inquiry by Chicago Congressman Danny Davis on wrongful police raids. “I had to hire someone just to handle the press. When the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and CNN are calling, you get a quick education in media.”
In the history books, 2020 is likely to be best remembered for the coronavirus pandemic that has disrupted lives all over the world. A few paragraphs down, though, will be the death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police, which sparked protests nationwide.
In Illinoisthis month, state legislators passed a criminal justice reform bill that would, among other things, require officers across Illinois to be licensed by the state and outfitted with body cameras.It alsoeliminates cash bail.
More:Reform bill approved by Illinois legislature could remove ‘bad apples' from police forces
“These are significant changes, but they also were several years in the making,” Saulter said. “Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Anjanette Young. George Floyd was not the first, the 50th or 100th unarmed African American 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 those things, people had the time to watch a police officer essentially choke the life out of someone.
“We’ve become very desensitized to violence, but there was no desensitizing that,” Saulter said. “He struggled. He called out to his mother. There was something very human about what happened to George Floyd. And it made people angry.”
Editors note: This story has been updated to correct information on the state's criminal justice reform bill.
Alex Gary is a freelance correspondent.
